theoretical approach is complemented by the fifteen-page bibliography, as well

as the accompanying footnotes to each chapter, which draws upon more than a
century of criticism to provide a breathtaking overview of the genre.
If we compare the book to other recent histories, we find some similarities
and a few differences. The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (2011)
by Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint provides a chronological approach, clearly
incorporating decades in the titles of the chapters. It avoids titles like the ‘Golden
Age’ and the ‘New Wave’ although it devotes two chapters to the discussion
of sf produced in the 1960s and ’70s. The History of Science Fiction (2006)
by Adam Roberts analyses the genre by century or historical period before
considering more recent developments in film and television. All three take the
problem of definition and generic boundaries as their starting point, but differ in
the organization of their materials. Although The Cambridge History affirms the
inclusive principle that there can be many histories of a genre, its size and price
makes it an exclusive addition to research libraries. Nonetheless, the editors
are humble in their acknowledgement that their ‘symphonic’ history only makes
‘the most hesitant opening note’. In anticipation of new discoveries, the book
makes a significant contribution to the field.

Rivers Solomon, The Deep (Hodder, 2020,

176pp, £8.99)
​Reviewed by Jeremy Brett (Texas A&M University)

As the Roman poet Ovid said so long ago, ‘Of

bodies changed to various forms I sing’. Likewise
does the Lambda Award-winning writer Rivers
Solomon in their new novella The Deep. The idea of
metamorphosis – not only of bodies, but of memories
into a new people’s history and legend, and of the
worst darkness of which humans are capable into a
new light of survival – is the thread that guides the
reader through this story’s dark waters. The novella
participates in what Kodwo Eshun terms the ‘war of
countermemory’, the contestation of dominant historical narratives. In the case
of The Deep, we see a hidden civilization that has survived outside the spaces
of colonial history, and the eventual overturning of that history.
Both the narrative of The Deep and its development as a novella constitute a
series of retellings. Its initial inspiration stems from the history of the transatlantic
slave trade: the tossing overboard from slave ships of sick, crippled, mutinous,
or otherwise unsaleable enslaved people. One of the most notorious incidents

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occurred during the 1781 Middle Passage voyage of the British ship Zong when
the crew threw around 130–140 innocent people into the Atlantic in order to
claim them as reimbursable losses for insurance purposes.
The second inspiration is the Afrofuturist work of Drexciya, the duo of Detroit
techno musicians James Stinson and Gerald Donald, who between 1992 and
2002 based a series of albums around the idea of an underwater realm populated
by the descendants of pregnant African women tossed overboard from slave
ships; their children evolved to breathe underwater as merpeople. While
musicians like Sun Ra, for example, were busy looking to the stars for artistic
and thematic inspiration, Drexciya sought a triumphant pan-African narrative
beneath the waves, borne from the cultural effects of historical trauma. And
whereas the Wakanda of Black Panther (2018) is a prosperous, technologically
advanced society because it made the deliberate choice to conceal itself from
the outside world and avoid confrontation with European colonialism, Drexciya’s
society is deeply scarred by the slave trade, a legacy also explored by Solomon.
The third inspiration comes from the experimental rap collective, clipping
(rapper Daveed Diggs and producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes),
who were commissioned by the podcast This American Life to produce a
track entitled ‘The Deep’ (2017). The song, nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award
for Best Dramatic Presentation, relates an attack by ‘two-legs’ (the surface
dwellers and common kin of the Drexciyans) on Drexciya in an attempt to drill
for oil. It envelops disparate elements such as warnings about climate change,
Lovecraftian references and snatches from Jay-Z songs into a narrative of
resistance and, even more so, of remembrance.
Editor Navah Wolfe was so enamoured of ‘The Deep’ that, with clipping’s
permission, she approached Rivers Solomon, author of the Afrofuturist space
opera An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), to develop its premise into a novella.
In Solomon’s retelling, the ‘wajinru’ live pleasant lives beneath the waves, but
always remain at the mercy of the historical trauma that gave birth to their
civilization – the brutal deaths of their enslaved foremothers. The pain of recall
is so intense that the duty of remembrance is placed in the custody of chosen
‘historians’. Solomon’s protagonist, Yetu, is one of these historians, tasked with
bearing the psychic burden for her entire culture:

Given her sensitivity, no one should have been surprised that the
rememberings affected Yetu more deeply than previous historians, but
then everything surprised wajinru. Their memories faded after weeks or
months – if not through wajinru biological predisposition for forgetfulness,
then through sheer force of will. Those cursed with more intact long-
term recollection learned how to forget, how to throw themselves into
the moment. Only the historian was allowed to remember.

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 There is a cost to remembering: ‘History was everything. Yetu knew that. But
it wasn’t kind’. Yetu becomes more and more oppressed by the psychological cost
of bearing the history for her people, to the point where she faces total mental
and physical collapse. In their afterword to the novella, clipping acknowledge
that Solomon has ‘shown us something that our song elided: the immediate
and visceral pain inherent in passing down past trauma’. What are the costs to
remembrance? It is the central question that Solomon is asking, and it makes
The Deep an incredibly thoughtful, psychologically and historically nuanced work.
The word ‘deep’ has multiple meanings in the novella. There is the geographical
significance in that the wajinru reside in some of the deepest reaches of the
Atlantic Ocean. The novella also explores the deepness of history – the layers of
centuries beneath which lie the suffering of real human beings, suffering so deeply
buried that it now straddles a line between true history and foundational myth. But
there is also a psychological deepness at play here. Memory is no simple thing –
among the wajinru there exists a constant tension between the mental safety and
security of forgetfulness and the deep-seated need to remember what and who
came before us. The former is a necessary technique to cope with the stresses
of life, the latter a means of discovering and rediscovering the things that define
our fundamental natures. Solomon expertly captures this tension in the person of
Yetu, but Yetu’s problem is not hers alone. She shares it with every reader whose
life, culture or history is or has been under the threat of historical violence. How
do we cope? How deep must we go?

Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth (Tor, 2019,

444 pp, £11.99)
Reviewed by Nick Hubble (Brunel University
London)

The iconoclastic tone of Gideon the Ninth is set by its

opening sentence: ‘IN THE MYRIADIC YEAR OF OUR
LORD – the ten thousandth year of the King Undying,
the kindly Prince of Death! – Gideon Nav packed her
sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she
escaped from the House of the Ninth’. However, while
Tamsyn Muir’s debut novel might fairly be described
as irreverent pulp with good swordfights, it is not as
schlocky as its ‘lesbian necromancers in space’ tagline
suggests; in fact, beneath the thick layers of cunningly plotted genre mashup, it’s a
rather fine planetary romance with an emotional punch that will remain with readers
long after they have completed their compulsive consumption of the text. For all that

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 Reproduced with permission of copyright owner.
Further reproduction prohibited without permission.