In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Aisha and Dan discuss genre boundaries in texts and criticism: how they’re used, where they fall ... and what, if anything, they’re good for. Is science fiction is more of a technique than a genre? Might it help to think about all texts as sitting across modes and categories? In the course of the conversation, Dan and Aisha return on several occasions to ⁠⁠a recent episode of the New Yorker podcast Critics At Large⁠⁠.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 11

[Musical Sting]

Aishwarya Subramanian: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF Criticism Podcast. I’m Aisha Subramanian.

Dan Hartland: And I’m Dan Hartland. In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be discussing SFF Reviewing. What it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

Aishwarya Subramanian: In this episode, we discuss genre boundaries in texts and criticism. How they’re used, where they fall, what, if anything, they’re good for.

Dan Hartland: We think about whether science fiction is more of a technique than a genre, and about how it might help to think about all texts as sitting across modes and categories.

Aishwarya Subramanian: We also: pick on The New Yorker for no good reason, shamelessly promote a book by a friend, and spend a good ten minutes on books that aren’t even SF.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Okay, so we thought that we could talk a little bit about genre boundaries, and specifically where science fiction starts, where it ends, where different types of people reach science fiction and what they assume to be science fiction, because people, it seems to me, often bring priors to the genre, and assume that one thing is and one thing is not SF, when in fact, the genre might be a lot broader than all of that.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, and I think this is something that can be quite—it becomes particularly notable, particularly noticeable when you find two people coming from maybe different sets of assumptions about the genre, having a conversation, and then you suddenly realize that these are—that we’re not talking about the same thing.

Dan Hartland: Well, let’s try and be, let’s try and break that down. So what sort of text might two readers approach and just kind of bounce off each other in that way?

Aishwarya Subramanian: I’m thinking about this partly because I saw someone doing this recently, but any sort of work of social science fiction, where the way that society works is the technology, is something, I think, for a lot of people who don’t necessarily read a lot in the genre, if you were coming to that, for the first time.

Dan Hartland: Right, which is the long tail of Gernsbackian SF, right, where the gadget is always the thing, where science fiction is about like a new tool, or, uh, yeah, a widget, a whatsit, a novum, and the novum is material. It’s a thing that does something in the world, rather than a set of behaviors, which of course is also a form of technology.

So one of the things that this makes me think, and I know we’ve both listened to it, is a recent-ish podcast from The New Yorker, which focused on science fiction, and in particular its relationship, or otherwise, to realism. So the podcast is called Critics at Large. It’s a regular podcast in which some critics get together to talk about texts and themes in text. Sounds like, yeah, format’s never gonna work. And in this particular episode, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alex Schwartz get together to talk about mostly Dune II. So they’ve just seen Dune II, but they are also aware that science fiction is very visible in the culture right now. Which, you know, I feel like has been true for some years. But nevertheless, they want to try and pick this apart as people that come from the genre from outside. And it really struck me, from what you were saying before we recorded the episode about people coming to Science Fictional texts with different expectations, that that podcast is almost a case study in the form.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I think so, and I think part of the issue for me—well, I don’t like generalizations and I also don’t like people sounding certain about anything ever. Part of the problem for me is sort of the shift between or the gap between, criticism that applies to a single text, criticism that applies to Dune as a text or specifically to Dune II, the film, and criticism that applies to the genre as a whole.

Dan Hartland: Mm hmm.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And how far you can extrapolate about one based on the other. And it just felt to me that on the one hand, there was a set of ideas about what science fiction is, or why it might be important to come to terms with science fiction as a genre. And on the other hand, there was this, actual individual film that they’d all watched and that they all had some interesting things to say about.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, so part of me likes the discussion that they have because it is three people from outside the genre looking in, noticing that the genre has become dominant or pervasive, and thinking, what does this mean? And I enjoy that element of it, but you’re absolutely right, that they draw conclusions from a fairly limited selection of texts, and that Dune II is central to the discussion, for obvious reasons, you know, topicality and all of that. And at one point, Vinson Cunningham (whose novel, by the way, this year’s Great Expectations, is really super, not science fictional) says that, for him, science fiction is kind of defined by its relationship to lore, to backstory, what, you know, we might call worldbuilding, which is definitely true of Dune. They have Josh Rothman come on later, who sort of does know about science fiction. He introduces them to the millennia-long chronology that Herbert eventually developed behind Dune, and Dune is definitely a kind of novel of worldbuilding, and then obviously the series goes off to the races as a whole. But it’s not true necessarily of science fiction in general. Not all science fiction is embedded in the idea of worldbuilding, whatever that may be. So yeah, again, it felt to me that they were approaching SF as it’s always about spaceships. It’s always about alien races. And they also talk about Three Body Problem, which doesn’t disabuse them of that notion.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And it’s also—that’s a particularly funny example, in some ways, to me, because there are so many people that we both know who would see that they needed lore to get into a book and immediately go, “oh, that’s fantasy. That’s epic fantasy. I’m sorry, you’ve given me a millennia-long chronology at the back: that’s epic fantasy.”

Dan Hartland: That’s really interesting because in this discussion—in The New Yorker, that is—the difference between those two things is never really even noted, let alone gone into. I think they would be aware that, for instance, Lord of the Rings isn’t quite like Dune, but at the same time I think they might yoke them together in some way.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, and I think in some ways that was quite refreshing. If you are an SF fan, or particularly if you’re a speculative fiction person more broadly, and you like both science fiction and fantasy, you are probably used to people being very, very rigid about where the boundaries between them are. “Well, that, that doesn’t count as this, as part of this genre, that definitely belongs over there.” And so, for someone completely outside of both of those genres to just sort of lump them together a little bit, it’s quite nice, in many ways.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I think that’s true. Bear with me here. I’ve been watching, at the exhortation of my friends and erstwhile Strange Horizons reviewers Graham Sleight and Tim Phipps, a Doctor Who serial from 1968. And the particular serial is called The Mind Robber, and it’s from the Patrick Troughton era. And it is—I can see why they told me to watch it. Because it is interesting and intertextual. In the sense that the Doctor and his companions, find themselves in another dimension outside of time, which we learn eventually is the land of fiction. Where every story that humanity has ever thought up exists together. So they come across superheroes and Lemuel Gulliver, they come across unicorns and robots. So every fictionality that has ever been invented exists in this place. And the episode therefore kind of embeds Doctor Who, which is itself, a kind of generic edge case. Is it science fiction or is it fantasy? Well, it’s kind of both at the same time in the sense that, you know, the Doctor is a wizard with a spaceship.

Aishwarya Subramanian: It’s national myth. It’s the twentieth century’s response to the Arthur mythos in that this is the story of Britain.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, absolutely. And therefore, uh, what’s so fascinating about this serial is that it embeds the Doctor in myths, in other attempts to, like, Gulliver, create, you know, sort of, fictions for the ages. But, the reason I mention it is because there are a set of, there’s like a six-volume series of critiques of Doctor Who, called About Time, I think, by, Miles and Wood, and in the volume about The Mind Robber, they try to say what the difference between science fiction and fantasy [is], and they say, and it’s quite an interesting definition, they say that science fiction is about man’s relationship with tools, and obviously I’m quoting here because I wouldn’t say man’s, but fantasy is about humanity’s relationship with symbols. Now, I don’t know how far that sort of goes, but what really interests me is that even, even critics that are writing about a show which itself mixes genres feel the need to demarcate genres. And I just wonder, you know, in exactly the same way that the New Yorker discussion is seeking to, oh, separate science fiction and realism, or find out the ways in which they overlap, why are we not more open to the idea that perhaps these generic boundaries are, aren’t as fixed as we may prefer?

[Musical sting]

Aishwarya Subramanian: So I think when I think specifically about the, about genre boundaries in general, I tend towards the idea that actually I would like them to be as blurred as possible. So I think someone who’s very useful on this, with regard to fantasy, but also with regard to thinking about genre more broadly for me, is Brian Attebery, who thinks about the genre in terms of sort of resemblances between texts, and overlaps, and fuzzy sets rather than “here is the hard line between this and this.” And I like the idea of focusing our attention, not on the boundary, but on the centre. So when I’m talking about science fiction for the purposes of a particular conversation, what is a text that exemplifies what I’m talking about? What is an example that does all the things that I’m attributing to [the genre]. And then just work outwards from there. Like, obviously for a lot of epic fantasy, Lord of the Rings is that kind of taproot text, right? Where it is, it exemplifies a certain understanding of the genre. And so we, when we talk about books in the context of epic fantasy, we’re in some ways talking about them.

Dan Hartland: Yes, yeah. Which of course is something that both powered and bedevilled epic fantasy for years and probably still does, but, but people in particularly the late ’90s, early 2000s around the New Weird thing, people like Miéville really started to chafe against, right? They thought that fantasy could be wider and yeah, weirder than that. So there’s an example of like a, a touchstone text also being something that a genre can drift away from, right?

Aishwarya Subramanian: Absolutely, and I think why I find that a more useful way of thinking about genre is because there’s the possibility of drifting away from it. Because you can say okay. I’m not doing that I’m doing this other thing and there may be some overlaps. But in a way you’re sort of starting with the text and then you’re thinking about what kinds of categories apply or don’t apply to it rather than starting with the genre and then trying to, um, sort of hammer every text into it.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, very early on in that New Yorker conversation, Alex Schwartz says something for me crucial, but then they kind of walk past it, which is that, that they’re saying that SF is more noticeable in the mainstream than, than ever before. I don’t know whether that’s true, but, um, that’s what they say. But she says that those mainstream texts, she doesn’t say they are SF, she says they use SF tropes, which I think is a good way of thinking about texts. In other words, they may use many techniques. They may draw from several traditions and that’s kind of okay. In fact, one might almost say it’s where the art is.

Aishwarya Subramanian: You’d hope!

Dan Hartland: I mean, I suppose on one level, you know, this probably goes without saying, but I guess I hope that’s where we sit in the reviews department at Strange Horizons, where we aren’t always reviewing core SF, what you might call core SF, you know, we are interested in kind of the breadth and sometimes texts, which can be quite, not difficult to justify, but you, you need to demonstrate the ways in which they, they are related to SF and fantasy, very broadly defined. I’m thinking of, one of our recent reviews was by Aran Ward Sell of You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue. Now this really is a sort of historical novel. It has elements of magical realism, it has elements of fantasy, um, but nevertheless, it feels a novel that is drawing upon the traditions in which we’re interested, and therefore is as relevant as the next book that we reviewed in that issue, which was Forge of the High Mage, which is as sort of core epic fantasy as I think is probably being written right now.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, and I think—I’m very quickly trying to remember if I’ve said this on the podcast before because I feel like it’s something I say a lot, and I’d hate to be repetitive to people who aren’t already my close friends who have had to hear this several times. Um. But: Genre is a lens. Genre is: “here’s a framework. Here’s a text that I’m going to read through this framework. What possibilities, what critical possibilities does this give me as a framework? Um, does reading this text as science fiction allow me to come to new insights about it?” If yes, great. If no, then, you know, find another lens.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, that’s really interesting. It makes me think again of that discussion of the Three Body Problem in that New Yorker podcast, where they mention that they experienced the scene of the struggle session in, I think, the first episode of the most recent dramatization, um, as sort of science fictional. And I found that both quite an odd reading, which kind of perhaps spoke of other maybe problems with how they were approaching that particular text, but also really interesting. I’ve just been reading the Women’s Prize, the UK Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, and there are a couple of quasi-historical novels on that shortlist, which—particularly Brotherless Night, a book by V. V. Ganeshananthan, which can be enhanced, I think the reading of the novels can be enhanced, by applying the lens of SF and fantasy and all of that. The text itself isn’t SF in any way, in fact it’s viscerally about the Sri Lankan Civil War of the 1980s, but there are techniques and ways of reading which I think can nevertheless reward a novel which would otherwise not seem to be, quote unquote, core genre, or even genre at all.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I’m also sort of: this is making me think about Hild—

Dan Hartland: Yeah.

Aishwarya Subramanian:—by Nicola Griffith and how Griffith basically said, um, that she used the techniques developed from writing in genre to write essentially a historical novel and to flesh out the world. And it also just makes me think—so on the one hand, there’s something to be said about the history of certain strains of science fiction and fantasy with real world historical encounters with the other and that sense of how do you make, how do you come to terms with and make sense of what is alien and new to you?

Dan Hartland: That’s right.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Um, which then it almost sounds like one of the things that you’re suggesting is that that kind of feeds back into realist fiction again.

Dan Hartland: I think so particularly realist fiction and Brotherless Night isn’t the only book on the shortlist to do this; so there’s also the remarkable Enter Ghost [by Isabella Hammad], which—

Aishwarya Subramanian: Which I have read. And with Enter Ghost I can absolutely see this!

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Right? So Enter Ghost is a fictionalization of the Freedom Theater, which is, which was is a theater on the West Bank, the founder of which was assassinated in 2011. It’s very famous for its Shakespeare renditions, and Enter Ghost is explicitly a novel which is trying to introduce the variety and depth and breadth and life of Palestinian experience to people for whom that experience is flattened by their limited exposure, often limited by design. And in order to do so, you’re absolutely right. It draws on sort of worldbuilding techniques that you or I would be familiar with from science fiction, that sort of immersive aspect of the novel felt to me really familiar and Brotherless Night does the same thing. It is again explicitly, it has a frame narrative where the protagonist, much like the protagonist of Enter Ghost, explains the events from outside of them. So the protagonist of Enter Ghost is an English actor with Palestinian heritage, who kind of almost cultivates a distance from that heritage until she’s encouraged no longer to do so.

And Brotherless Night is narrated from outside of Sri Lanka. So, both of these novels are trying to introduce, I think, to a wider audience, these kind of often hidden narratives, and yeah, I think you’re right, does so by adopting these techniques.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And on the one hand, you’ve got that sort of inside, outside, across the border, not across the border, um, perspective, which is in some ways very deliberate. And which I think does sort of then reward the use of these techniques. And then on the other hand, of course, when you think about this in a larger publishing industry and book prizing context, then, of course, the cynic in me is like, ultimately then, is it also, are these texts also in some ways reducible to horrifying things happening elsewhere?

Dan Hartland: I do worry about that, and to that extent, I actually don’t think that Enter Ghost is entirely successful. Ooh. Um I think it’s in many ways like a really vivid, remarkable novel, but I’m not sure it is entirely kind of, yeah, I don’t know. Um, but I think you’re right to be wary of that sort of approach. And I was thinking while I was reading, uh, Brotherless Night, um, of a Booker-nominated book called, uh, A Passage North [by Anuk Arudpragasam], which is a similar novel in the sense that it is about the Sri Lankan Civil War, but which doesn’t really make the same concessions to an imagined reader. It is much more kind of obscure, in terms of the, particularly the narrative. Brotherless Night often pauses to explain, oh, by the way, this is the historical background to this thing that is happening to this character. Um, and I think you’re right that there is, there comes a point where, yeah, there is perhaps an unavoidable consequence of giving the novel a kind of outsider’s point of view.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And again, I’m sort of—having raised the cynical point. I then want to defend—

Dan Hartland: We get back to never wanting to be certain about anything, right?

Aishwarya Subramanian: [mutters] “Taking stances.” Disgusting.

[Musical sting]

Aishwarya Subramanian: There is obviously value in that outside perspective there is also value in making something legible to an audience in ways that it needs to be made legible. I mean, again, when we think, um, when you described Enter Ghost, um, that was a big part of why that novel feels important. The idea of making a particular set of horrors legible.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, yeah.

Aishwarya Subramanian: In, in the face of, um, a system that is very invested in not making those horrors legible.

Dan Hartland: Indeed, yes.

Aishwarya Subramanian: So, I mean, I don’t want to dismiss two books, one of which I really liked and another which I haven’t read yet, um, on the basis of this. But I also sort of, on the one hand, I can see a value in reading these from a genre perspective and with the tools that we have developed as genre readers. And on the other hand, those are precisely the things that make me suspicious.

Dan Hartland: And this might be a part, a point where the writer is tempted to, you know, we’re talking about drifting away from core texts. Might be a point at which they’re tempted to drift back towards them. I’m thinking again of the New Yorker conversation, where Rothman says that, um, science fiction helps make the future into something you can imagine. Which is again a kind of empathetic project, but maybe by putting stuff into the future, you avoid some of these, I was gonna say traps, but they’re not traps, just some of these difficulties, some of these knots that using the lens in a more contemporary setting sets up for you.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I think so. It sort of, it makes things hypothetical in ways that reduce responsibility, which in some ways is true of the entire genre. So, um, I guess once again, we’re coming to the conclusion that actually Science Fiction is bad and we should, we just should stop.

Dan Hartland: Yeah I’ll just, yeah, yeah, fine. And that was the episode of Critical Friends …

Would it be unwise to mention Vajra’s book now, The Saint of Bright Doors, if for no other reason than it is exactly that, right? It is a fantastical hypothecating of some of the experiences that Brotherless Night does, talks about. So they are, they are dealing with some of the same historical events, but one is choosing to narrate them as they happen, but through a particular lens. The other one is adopting kind of more of an estranging generic lens, right?

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, which then forces you to sort of, to think of it as fiction, but also to, to, to be a little more cynical of its realism?

Dan Hartland: In other words, to sort of be either enabled or more ready to question the Author?

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, or to question this reality, to question what’s being presented to you, um, because I think that is, that is one of the issues that we have, obviously, with, um, when we say that a particular author or a particular text makes something legible, um, there is always that possibility of oversimplifying, of, okay, this is, uh, nice, palatable, or not nice, because these are often awful realities that are being depicted or emotionally quite upsetting. But here is a, here’s a version of events that I feel I can parse in its totality.

Dan Hartland: Here is the world built for me.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah.

Dan Hartland: Mm, yeah. And it strikes me that—and I feel like I’m saying this a lot recently—it strikes me that this is one of the great things about The Saint of Bright Doors, um, which is that (people are going to get bored of me saying this),which is that it more or less sets out to be misread. It really wants to wrong-foot you, to make you expect one thing but then it does another, to introduce plotlines that you think might do this but then they do that. It is misread—really interested, not so much in that kind of classical or anglophone tradition of, you know, worldbuilt SF, so much as kind of, yeah, as you say, world questioning, reality-undermining SF, right?

Aishwarya Subramanian: I also wonder how much the presence of that strain in, um, Western SF is also kind of a myth that, that poor reading has built up. Because, again, I think a lot of the time, the example that everyone goes to for this is Tolkien. Tolkien is this strange person who builds an entire world and an entire history and an entire everything and then writes texts set in it. We have complete chronologies and we have so much about language, um, that we, that many of us maybe don’t necessarily want. But I always feel like it’s—The Silmarillion is very clearly told from a particular perspective within that world. There’s always this sense of the texts being written by people in this world and therefore not telling the whole story or being, if not inaccurate (and in some cases inaccurate as well), but of having massive gaps in what is accessible to you as an audience. I don’t think that Tolkien necessarily does that, but I do feel that a lot of his imitators do.

Dan Hartland: There is, in the kind of Tolkien legendarium, there are lots of, um, inconsistencies. And it always interests me that the urge is to, in some quarters, is to explain those away, to force some sort of uniformity onto, oh well, at one point, um, Tolkien tells this story about this particular elf, but then he tells this other story about this particular elf, and are they the same elf or different elves, and how do we … But for me, you’re right. Part of the texture of the world is that both of those stories exist in that world.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And I think there’s like two responses to that, right? One of them is to chalk them up to mistake. The author got this wrong, or the author forgot what he’d said earlier. And then the other thing is to try and sort of retcon them both into a world where they both make sense alongside each other. Like, obviously this person thought this is what happened, but actually this other thing happened. And I’m, and I think in some ways both are limiting. I think that the one that tries to, that accepts that there can be contradictory stories is perhaps a bit more charitable to Tolkien in accepting that he was capable of more nuance, but they’re still both limited. They’re still both trying to create this very total sense of the world.

Dan Hartland: It strikes me that this links to the discussion we had in our last episode, which sort of jumped off Casella Brookins essay about the complicity of science fiction in some of the contemporary world’s worst injustices. And in other words, we spoke then a little bit about the effects or the characteristics of bad reading. And we seem to have returned to that here, that if one of the priors that you bring to science fiction is that science fictional texts offer a fully built consistent world in which it is possible to inhabit totally, I think that you’re bringing an imperfect reading of the form to a particular text.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And that you risk missing when a text that you’re reading isn’t doing that. You risk missing something very fundamental about a text, which doesn’t conform to that.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: There are other examples of authors that do similar things to Tolkien, you know, like we’ve mentioned Frank Herbert’s kind of future history. Asimov is another person that the New Yorker gang mention, who does exactly the same sort of thing, you know, literally a future history in Foundation. Um, but another of the writers that they, they mention as a sort of canonical science fictional author, whom Vinson Cunningham says was one of his favorites as a young reader, is Ray Bradbury, who I don’t, I think I’m right in saying, never really saw himself as a science fiction writer. He saw himself as a writer that happened sometimes to write these science fictional texts, and I guess that circles us back to the idea of science fiction as technique rather than genre, a sort of, you know, this old view of it as a mode, like a mood, almost, of a text.

Aishwarya Subramanian: In some ways I find that again, much more useful as a way of thinking about it. Um, but it also then sort of makes me wonder if authors are then locked in to the genre. Okay. If Kim Stanley Robinson decides to write a romance novel, are we all going to just read it as science fiction?

Dan Hartland: I think we might. And in the same way, you know, if Richard Powers writes an obviously science fictional novel, are we going to read it as literary fiction? Yeah!

Aishwarya Subramanian: I feel like we’ve done that one.

Dan Hartland: Right! So I think to some extent it, you know, critics, such as us and critics such as, uh, at the New Yorker (and of course Strange Horizons and the New Yorker are [Aishwarya Subramanian: very similar!] They are organs of similar record.) think of these things in a particular way, but science fiction also exists as a shelving mechanism in bookstores. And I think that matters too.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Well I think it’s something that critics should pay attention to in the sense that we should be thinking about the material realities by which certain books end up being brought to our attention. And we should be thinking about the material realities that allow certain books to be produced or not produced. I was thinking, again, going back to the New Yorker podcast, where they bring up that question of, um, the presence of science fiction in the mainstream, and whether it’s particularly prominent right now, and if so, what the reasons for that might be. And this is, this is one place where I found their reasoning a little dubious, which to be fair, they also seemed to think it was a little dubious. Um, just the idea that we are living in a world where science fictional things keep happening to us and that’s why we’re interested in the, the implications of those things; which is an argument for the centrality of science fiction that you could make from the end of the nineteenth century to the present at any moment. So it’s, it’s not the best argument. Whereas, when I try to answer that question, and I’m not sure if I agree, firstly, that science fiction has an unprecedented presence in the world. But if I, if I accept that premise and I try to think about the reasons why it might, why that might be, all of the reasons are material and economic. There are reasons why it’s marketable. There are reasons why, um, it is filmable right now in ways that it hasn’t been previously. Why those films are being financed in particular ways and who’s financing them. All of the things that we already have discussed in the past, including the last episode.

Dan Hartland: I think ultimately where I land on all of this is really where we began. So I’m happy to say that I’ve just confirmed my own biases, which is that the best type of text is one that can’t be entirely pinned down to one or other genre or approach.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And the best kind of criticism is one that isn’t going to try and force that text into that one genre or approach.

Dan Hartland: Which of course is a good moment to mention that it’s the Strange Horizons fund drive, and criticism like that doesn’t pay for itself.

Aishwarya Subramanian: So in case you thought this entire podcast was an ad for the Saint of Bright Doors, it turns out, no, it’s an ad for Strange Horizons as a concept.

[Musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF Criticism Podcast. Our theme music is “Dial Up” by Grande Valise. To listen to more of their music, visit grandevalise.bandcamp.com. The Strange Horizons Kickstarter and Patreon can be reached via links at strangehorizons.com. See you next time.