A sacrifice zone: the end-point of extractivism.
Photo: D. Hardesty
When we talk about worldbuilding, there are certain premises that many writers tend to start from—that the author is the one doing the worldbuilding, that they can mine certain times or places or languages or cultures for elements to use in their imagined geography, that those elements can be separated from the contexts in which they developed, and that a world can, indeed, be built.
There are also many other writers—particularly those marginalized by colonialism, racism, cisheterosexism, and other structures of power—who know that their experience of engaging a speculative world doesn’t feel like that, doesn’t work like that, doesn’t fit that model. Here, I’m hoping to put a language to those feelings, give them a framework—to make coherent a problem in the dominant assumptions of worldbuilding that many of us already recognize.
The problem is: the above assumptions all stem from colonial logics.[1]
When we think about our task as “building” a world as writers, it sets us up to relate to the world in certain ways: to think of ourselves as the only beings with any power or agency, putting together a world from scratch however we desire, and moving around the people, places, and things of that world like playpieces on a gameboard to suit our own needs. This way of thinking draws from the same logics that allow for colonial erasure of Indigenous presence and personhood, and flattening of land into property that can be parceled, owned, and extracted from, instead of something to relate to as kin. That is, what we understand worldbuilding to be in speculative fiction spaces dominated by Western publishing is guided by the same problematic assumptions that underlie Western societies in general. When we’re not careful, worldbuilding turns anything other than the author into objects to be used for their benefit.
Please don’t misunderstand me: this is not an invective against lush and marvelous fictive worlds, but rather against the ways such worlds are typically thought to be formed—and how we imagine ourselves as writers in relation. Much of my scholarly work examines how colonialism structures not only geographies and economies, but epistemologies—the very way we think about the world and each other,[2] what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o famously refers to as the colonization of the mind.[3] When colonial frameworks structure thinking, they not only destroy and undervalue the world of the colonized—opening it to extraction—but simultaneously encourage relating to other people and the world along axes of mastery and domination, extraction and objectification, and epistemic erasure. It’s this understanding, from the position of the colonizer, that provides the rationale for extractive actions. For this reason, Sabelo J. Ndlovu Gatsheni says the “the epistemic line is simultaneously the ontological line”[4]—that is, how we think about things directly impacts how we treat them. When we understand ourselves as masters of a fictive universe, it primes us to treat the worlds we’re writing, and the characters in them, in colonial ways.
If adrienne maree brown is right that the relations we practice on a small scale spiral outward to create the larger political frameworks of our lives,[5] practicing writing in a colonial manner should give us pause. As I’ve written elsewhere, colonialism is a rot that “affects not only the colonized but also the colonizer, albeit differentially. It poisons senses of ethics and politics, it leaves paternalism or hate where there should be care, it predicates development on domination.”[6] Though it is easier for those of us who are white and raised in the West to slip into colonial mindsets, the pressures to relate to people and places through logics of domination and mastery have the potential to impact us all. Even colonized folks have to resist the systemic pressure to internalize colonial frameworks, and the ways they encourage understandings of and relations to one another.[7] Each time we practice relating in a colonial manner, we take in a little more of its poison.
What, exactly, then are the mindsets of worldbuilding that we should root out? I walk us through three aspects of worldbuilding that inculcate colonial ways of relating—mastery, extraction, and dehumanization—and the harms they can cause, not only to the worlds themselves, but to us as writers as well. To ground this discussion, I turn to Prospect (2018), a film where the poison of colonial relations is made visible through the toxic spores filling the atmosphere of the planet where the film takes place, threatening the characters more and more the longer they continue to relate to the planet through colonial means of extraction. Prospect helps us to see the damage inflicted by claiming the right to a world, to both the context at large and our very selves.
But if not as worldbuilders, how can we understand our relation to the worlds-in-formation that emerge through our writing? Many writers, particularly from marginalized worldviews, already engage with other processes of writing that understand fictive worlds themselves as having agency in the process of their own formation. Some may conceptualize this as ancestors or spirit writing through you, or as characters and contexts that you meet rather than create. Our mindsets matter; the way we engage our fictive worlds affects the ways we engage material ones, as well. In the remainder of the essay, I look to African and Indigenous writers who think through processes of worlding rather than worldbuilding, and how worlding asks us to relate to our imagined worlds differently: not as master, but as kin.
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Colonial thinking doesn’t always take the forms we’d initially expect. Like many of us writers, the characters of Prospect are not having an easy go at material survival. In Prospect, we follow a young girl, Cee, and her father, Damon, as they land on a planet on the outskirts of the economic channels of space. They, like others on this planet, are disenfranchised workers; the girl and her father are looking to “mine” for “gems” in order to strike it rich and be able to return to more centralized areas of space and buy out their indentured servitude. Damon has a map to the Queen’s Lair, a deposit that could solve all their problems. Meanwhile, the atmosphere of this planet is filled with poisonous spores, emitted by fleshy openings in the ground, that linger in the light of every scene in the film, making the reminder of the world’s toxicity unavoidably evident. It may not initially seem like the characters consider themselves masters of their domains. But the way that they engage with the world of the Green Moon is to arrive without invitation, lay claim to living things as property, and use them as resources for personal gain, rather than meeting the world with reciprocity and respect. In this tiny, far-flung corner of the galaxy, they wield the little power they have as domination.
This is not so different from the mindset behind worldbuilding. As Vanessa Angélica Villareal explains in her essay collection Magical/Realism, when worldbuilding, “the writer plays god”:
World-building is an inherently colonial narrative position, which gives the author full omnipotence and control, not only as a god who creates the world in his image but as the single source of the story, the mind of the universe, and therefore the arbiter of what is “universal.” Fantasy, sci-fi, and speculative fiction satisfy the imperial urge for full control of a world narrative and its interpretation.[8]
It may be tempting to view the spaces of our writing as places where we can wield power and control, but as Oji-nêhiyaw writer Joshua Whitehead says in his book Making Love with the Land:
to think one is a master—while running a ‘master’ class, for example, or even desiring to ‘master’ craft—is wholly violent. Stories are oratory, even when written on the page, for they require animations in order to live—and such animations, in nêhiyaw fashion, make story an animate being, living vocabulary, kin we are accountable to.[9]
When we engage in worldbuilding as attempts at individualistic control over the magnitude of a world, we’re not treating our stories as the animate creatures they are: things that breathe in histories and ancestries beyond what our conscious mind can hold, and breathe out beyond the limits of our own imagination as they spiral away from us.
When we think of ourselves as the sole builder of worlds, our relationship to context becomes extractive.[10] The elements of our stories are flattened into objects to be used instead of kin to whom we’re beholden, objects that can then be taken from one context and plopped into another in order to make the story work in the way we desire. One way Sameem Siddiqui has described this to me is through the lens of “mining” history or cultures in order to tell stories. After attending a panel on this topic at CapClave, he described the use of the word mining as “alarming,” contrasting the ethic of mining history with that of being in conversation with the past. One is extractive; the other brings you into deeper relation.[11]
In part, the idea of mining places and cultures is alarming because of the way it decontextualizes parts of a world without regard to the beings occupying it. For instance, Kemi Cole gives the example of how Lake Bunyonyi in southwestern Uganda, a space with a painful history of femicide, was used as the backdrop for Wakanda in Black Panther (2018).[12] Cole makes it clear throughout her article that pieces of cultures cannot simply be taken out of context without harm. The process of “borrow[ing] our landscapes for aspirational fiction while remaining oblivious to embedded historical pain” is one that attempts to “override community autonomy” for the entertainment of an audience that is not perceived as including them.
Lake Bunyonyi
More deeply, “mining” for aspects of worldbuilding encourages us to think of those aspects as objects rather than subjects with their own agency in interaction, deserving of our care and respect. Although the film never speaks of it, we see throughout Prospect that the "mining" that brought the prospectors to this planet is a process of cutting open living beings called aurelacs to remove a crystalline object—the “gem”—from their bodies. The act of mining here is one of cutting into flesh to take a part of a breathing body. Not just any part of their bodies, either. There is a cord that must be cut, resembling an umbilical cord, and an object that looks suspiciously like an egg-sack that must be sliced open to retrieve the precious gems. The process is not quick. The prospectors know what they’re doing. It requires steady hands to prepare the flesh of the creatures and slice into it carefully, or else the aurelacs will release acid—their only defense against the theft of a piece of themselves. Or, perhaps, their children. We’re never told. The prospectors never stop to ask what, exactly, the gem is. Each gem is worth too much to know: 10,000, in their unspecified currency, to be exact. The spores float in the background as we wonder how far the rot has crept into their souls. In their desperation for survival, the characters never stop to ask themselves if there were ways to relate to these beings other than killing and extracting from them. The aurelacs are turned into commodities that can be claimed, instead of living things to be related to in respectful ways.
As many Indigenous scholars remind us, the objectification of land and the dehumanization of its people are deeply intertwined.[13] The same attitudes that allow for colonial settlement and land extraction underlie the way that people are also turned into commodities to be owned, extracted from, and sold. The film demonstrates this relation through a slow process of desensitization to violence, as becoming accustomed to mining affects how the characters become accustomed to violence against humans, as well. After the death of Cee’s father, she travels with a rogue bandit named Ezra (played by Pedro Pascal, if you need a bonus reason to watch the movie…). Ezra’s biosuit is torn, giving the spores, which they call “dust,” an opening to infect his body. The sickness creeps up his arm, until the only option for survival is to cut it off. Of course, Ezra cannot cut off his own arm. The task falls to young Cee.
In a talk before a showing of the film for Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, I described how it shows that dehumanization creeps, slowly poisoning like the dust in the air:
We see the ways the miners navigate around the violence of their acts. The ways they have to desensitize themselves to what they’re doing in order to continue doing it.
There’s an important moment in the film that I see as connecting the alien creatures being “mined” to the ways that other humans are treated. One of the characters, I won’t say who, is gravely injured and must have a limb removed in order to survive, an arm that has a sickness creeping up it. The child is the one who performs this limb removal, without so much as a flinch. Steady handed, unfazed by the violence. Unfazed by the literal rot creeping up an arm that she deftly cuts off.
Afterwards she is asked, “How are you so calm? You done this before?” She answers, “Once, when I was 12 we spent a season processing Jata Bhalu. Once they were done with all the big meat cuts they had me climb inside the body cavity to clip the organs because I could get the eggs out without mangling them. It took an hour to wash the blood out of my hair every night. This is pretty straight compared to that.”
Dehumanization creeps. From stealing and killing children that seem too different from us to be considered people to cutting off limbs without a flinch.[14]
So, too, does the objectification of worldbuilding elements creep into the way we relate to living beings. In order to take a site of deep trauma like Lake Bunyonyi and turn it into a futuristic paradise, you have to be inured to any damage that does to the Ugandan people who live there. Similarly, as Tanvir Ahmed has written about in these pages, in order to take Muslim-coded figures and designs as shorthand for villainy, you have to be able to live with the way that decades of these shorthands have paved the way for horrific violences in Palestine, Iran, and Afghanistan.[15] The more we engage with worldbuilding as a practice of individualized creation, the more we allow ourselves to become accustomed to treating other people and places with less respect than they deserve.
In short, when we as writers believe ourselves to hold singular control over the worlds we’re building, we are refusing to listen to the stories those worlds already hold. Colonial logics fervently insist upon control over worlds because they never actually have it—there are always aspects that escape the grasp of power. Turning towards those aspects asks us to understand and narrate our relation to the world in different ways, ways that forefront depth of engagement and mutual respect.
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When someone else is attempting to single-handedly control the world that you live in, in ways that erase your very being, you’re left with no option but to break that world. In his monograph, Breaking the World, Justin L. Mann looks at the way Black speculative fiction must break normative worlds in order to create space for Black life. Rather than worldbuilding, which Villareal relates to the colonial narrative of “discover[ing] the New World” when it has long existed on its own terms, worldbreaking is the story told by “the world invaded by violence.”[16] For Mann, the frame of worldbreaking “makes diffuse and inarticulable forms of power recognizable and legible by expressing the desire to tear power apart.”[17] We need to break our worldbuilding habits in order to learn to relate differently, in ways that support life rather than preclude it.
What might it look like to relate to the worlds we’re writing not as things we’ve built from scratch and thus hold control over, but as agents in their own right with whom we’re in conversation? As kin? Something to which we hold a responsibility to engage curiously, listen to deeply, and treat with reciprocity? What if we conceptualize our authorship as meeting our written worlds in the process of unfurling?
We might think of ourselves as worlding.
Joseph M. Pierce writes about why he uses the term “worlding” rather than “world-making” in his book Speculative Relations:
worlding is a term that I use in lieu of world-making, which has garnered some popularity in recent years. It seems to me, however, that ‘making’ a world is not what the cultural and artistic works that I study here actually do or aim to accomplish. There is something about the English term to make that gives me pause, as if the world could be (re)forged without always carrying with it traces of previous or future worlds. Rather, I think that by dwelling in the active potential of the noun-verb form (to world, and thus worlding), we come closer to the ongoing temporalities of Indigenous cultures. In other words, rather than world-making, which can imply a leaving behind of a previous place, I prefer worlding as an ongoing, iterative, and, thus, nonlinear form of signaling the creative potential of Indigenous artistic and cultural expression.”[18]
In the same way that “to make” gives Pierce pause, so too does “to build” give me pause, as it often comes with the assumptions we’ve discussed above. Both carry connotations of being able to separate the worlds we’re writing from the ones they’re emerging from. Instead, worlding calls us into deeper relation with those worlds—with their nuances and histories, flows and transformations, possibilities and potentials. Much of which is not of our own creation, but things we meet as they are unfolding.
The key difference here is that instead of mastering craft, “worlding is relating” to it.[19] “I world,” Pierce says, “and I am never alone.”[20] This requires a fundamental shift in what we think our worlds are. Instead of objectified contexts, even fictive worlds here are active—alive, with a will of their own. In many Indigenous epistemologies, something is alive when it is animated by relation. That means that anything we relate to is living because it is relations that give us all life. In this way of thinking, our story worlds are living beings with whom we interact. Our worlds deserve our respect. Worlding, then, centers intimate and attentive relation to the text as an active participant rather than a passive recipient of our idea generation. In doing so, this anti-colonial epistemology releases the individual pressure of god-like creation that leads to extraction and dehumanization, and instead encourages engaging with SFF writing as a collaborative process with the world itself.
In this manner, worlding produces a deep intimacy that does not allow for us to “mine” worlds, but instead asks us to see aspects of the world as animated by their relations and part of kinship networks. Cole writes about this as “deep engagement, honest acknowledgment, and the recognition [of] histories.”[21] Marginalized writers often already engage their worlds in this way, conscious of the damage done by the colonial decontextualization of cultural elements, sometimes even turning those cultural elements back against the colonial structure itself.[22] Here, I specifically look to how African and Indigenous writers have provided a variety of examples for how to engage with the deep relation with worlds that an ethic of worlding calls us toward through forest imaginaries, liquid organizing, and sintering.
In her book Forest Imaginaries, Ainehi Edoro describes how “places are protagonists” in African fiction. Forests, specifically, challenge the colonial idea of mastery over land, as “the world is not here for humans to fulfill their desires. It is a being in its own right.” Given this, Edoro advocates for the importance of “rethinking space in such a way that enlivens it.”[23] Ayo Adeduntan supports this engagement with the forest as interlocutor and teacher, in his writing on Yoruba hunter stories: “The forest is not a simple landscape only waiting in order that the hunter might colonize it. The forest is instead a realm of uncertainty that the hunter explores in order that mankind may have knowledge.”[24] It’s only by engaging the forest as a fellow being that we can learn from it. As Edoro explains, forests are “co-architects of the lives of characters.”[25] Engaging the forest as a co-architect of worlding helps us to explore mysteries of imagined worlds that we might not otherwise be able to access.
Worlding is thus a process that is constantly unfolding in nonlinear and unpredictable ways, outside of authorial control. Another way it can be thought of is as a form of what qualitative researchers Joëlle M. Cruz and Chigozirim Utah Sodeke call “liquid organizing.”[26] Liquid organizing is a means of relating in fluid and emergent ways, dependent upon deep attention to how you are relating with others in the moment and what surprising opportunities those relations might provide. As I’ve previously written, liquid organizing is a means of relating to context that denies colonial logics of separability underlying extraction:
Colonial thinking locates power in individuals, imagined to be separate from their contexts. If colonialism “is about severing relationships—to each other, to our lands, to hope and to our futures,” then one task of resistance is “to recover the continuities.” Water is all about connection.[27]
Thinking liquidly also calls us toward the deep contextualization of worlding, paying attention to the intimate textures of relations as the world unfolds. It’s through deeper attention, rather than tighter control, that opportunities are found for emerging developments in character and plot.
A final means of engaging worlding is through the lens of sintering. Sintering is the process by which individual snowflakes join together to form a firm snowpack surface. Importantly, there is no phase change involved, but rather a process of bonding that retains the uniqueness of each snowflake at the same time as it is fundamentally transformed through its bonds with the context in which it lands. In her book Theory of Water, Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes sintering as “a joining. It is a communal transformation that creates a fabric of former snowflakes bonded to each other.”[28] Simpson explores sintering as a means of meeting a world-in-formation in a way that connects to it rather than extracts from it: “the first thing a snowflake does when it lands from the skyworld is to join bonds, actual physical bonds, with its neighbours. It weaves itself into its environment, and it does so in a way that doesn’t destroy its neighbours.”[29] This process of weaving into a world implies that there is already a fullness there, if we only have the capacity to see it.
Villareal describes how our understanding of artistry in writing is often traced back to the Greek word poiesis, which is translated as “‘to make’ or ‘to create,’ but as a concept it is closer to ‘to bring forth,’ or ‘to reveal.’” “To create is to reveal what was already there,” she says.[30] When we think of relation to our written worlds as worlding, the process becomes one of unfolding what is already there as it weaves into—and transforms in relation to—what we bring into the space.
In worlding, we are part of the world, not its maker.
[1] Although there is another essay titled, “Against Worldbuilding,” that advocates for “worldconjuring” instead of “worldbuilding,” it leaves many of these base assumptions of authorial control in place, while also recognizing that such control can never be coherent or final, and turning to the reader as participant (rather than world itself, as the perspectives I draw from here do). Lincoln Michel, “Against Worldbuilding,” Electric Literature, April 6, 2017, https://electricliterature.com/against-worldbuilding/.
[2] For instance, in my first monograph, I examine how U.S. medical volunteers in Tanzania understand who they are and what they are doing there in ways that encourage them to treat the translators they work with as tools to get a job done rather than people with whom they are collaborating. This not only makes work more difficult for the Tanzanian translators, but also leads to inadequate treatment of the Tanzanian patients. Jenna N. Hanchey, The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO (Duke University Press, 2023), 25-57.
[3] Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Heinemann, 1986).
[4] Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (Routledge, 2018), 3.
[5] adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (AK Press, 2017).
[6] Jenna N. Hanchey, The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO (Duke University Press, 2023), 6.
[7] For a classic text on this: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Heinemann, 1986). I also really love the way that Shingai Njeri Kagunda pushes back against accepting colonial structures: “We must understand that if we do not completely overthrow systems that have equated our value to our labor, systems that remove us from our personhood and reduce us to our object functions, then we are still resigning ourselves to the limited imagination of the white fathers of society, and, in essence, we will always be caught up in a game of responding to the white patriarchal capitalist desire.” Shingai Njeri Kagunda, “Black-Futurisms Vs. Systems of Domination,” Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction, ed. Eugen Bacon (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), 91.
[8] Vanessa Angélica Villareal, Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders (Tiny Reparations Books, 2024),
[9] Joshua Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), 74.
[10] For more work on extractive mindsets and their problems, see the Strange Horizons issue on extractavism, as well as an essay I later published continuing the conversation: Strange Horizons, September 26, 2022, https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/issue/26-september-2022/; Jenna Hanchey, “Securing Neocolonialism: Reverse Extractavism in Tade Thompso’s The Wormwood Trilogy,” Strange Horizons, January 23, 2023, https://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/securing-neocolonialism-reverse-extractivism-in-tade-thompsons-the-wormwood-trilogy/.
[11] Sameem Siddiqui, personal communication. We discussed the idea of being in conversation and relation with the past with Tanvir Ahmed, Nick Bright, and Shingai Njeri Kagunda on Just Keep Writing: “Episode 183 – Community Chat with Tanvir Ahmed,” Just Keep Writing, November 14, 2025. https://www.justkeepwriting.org/podcast/episode/82daae54/episode-183-community-chat-with-tanvir-ahmed
[12] Kemi Cole, “Beyond the Beauty: A Research Guide for Responsible SFF Worldbuilding,” SFWA, January 6, 2026. https://sfwa.org/2026/01/06/beyond-the-beauty-a-research-guide-for-responsible-sff-worldbuilding/
[13] For instance, Whitehead, Making Love with the Land; Brian Burkhart, Indigenizing Philosophy Through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures (Michigan State University Press, 2019); Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke University Press, 2025); Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead (Haymarket Books, 2025).
[14] Jenna N. Hanchey, “On Prospect,” Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University, November 8, 2023, https://csi.asu.edu/calendar/events/the-history-of-the-future-prospect/
[15] For an overview of the long history of coding Arabs and Muslims as villains, see Jack Shaheen’s documentary, “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People Documentary,” Youtube, January 29, 2019, https://youtu.be/TPxak6lFd-I?si=_1S20XWEVXUsB34o. For the way speculative fiction representations of Muslims are deeply connected to contemporary violences, see Tanvir Ahmed, “Photon Torpedoes Break the Space Muqarnas: SFF Audiovisuals and Anti-Muslim Violence,” Strange Horizons, November 24, 2025, https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/photon-torpedoes-break-the-space-muqarnas-sff-audiovisuals-and-anti-muslim-violence/.
[16] Villareal, Magical/Realism, 288
[17] Justin L. Mann, Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2026), 6.
[18] Pierce, Speculative Relations, 8-9. Specifically, “world-making” is popular in queer theoretical spaces as a means of cultivating worlds that sustain and enable queer life.
[19] Pierce, Speculative Relations, 10.
[20] Pierce, Speculative Relations, 10.
[21] Cole, “Beyond the Beauty.”
[22] Here I’m thinking about the way that the characters of Tade Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy take the colonial infrastructure, but engage it with different epistemologies, in order to use it against the colonizers. The important point both in that work, and here, is that the way we understand our relations makes all the difference in how we approach our engagement with them. Jenna N. Hanchey and Godfried Asante, “‘How to Save the World from Alien, Yet Keep Their Infrastructure’: Repurposing the ‘Master’s House’ in the Wormwood Trilogy,” Feminist Africa 2, no. 2 (2021): 11-28.
[23] Ainehi Edoro, Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think (Columbia University Press, 2026), 222.
[24] Ayo Adeduntan, What the Forest Told Me: Yoruba Hunter, Culture and Narrative Performance (Unisa Press, 2014), 61.
[25] Edoro, Forest Imaginaries, 1.
[26] Joëlle M. Cruz and Chigozirim Utah Sodeke, “Debunking Eurocentrism in Organizational Communication Theory: Marginality and Liquidities in Postcolonial Contexts,” Communication Theory 31 (2021): 528-548.
[27] The internal quotes here are from, respectively: Simpson, Theory of Water, 179; Candace Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai’i (Duke University Press, 2021), 44. The essay itself is: Jenna Hanchey, “Learning from Water in Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, ASAP/Review, September 30, 2025, https://asapjournal.com/node/liquid-resistance-learning-from-water-in-sofia-samatars-the-practice-the-horizon-and-the-chain/
[28] Simpson, Theory of Water, 18.
[29] Simpson, Theory of Water, 18.
[30] Villareal, Magical/Realism, 288.
Editor: Gautam Bhatia.
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