Are the distant worlds that writers invent simply dark mirrors of our own shared actuality? Or are they tickets to elsewhere, reminders that things can be far different from what surrounds us now? Each of these books ventures into an uncertain beyond. Some writers do find a way back from these mysterious other worlds. Seeta Chaganti sees in the “endless knot” of Gawain and the Green Knight’s allegorical pentangle a conception of shame that still resonates today. Kate Marshall proposes that the planetary vitality of Solaris (“the ocean lived, thought, and acted”) means more in the present Anthropocene-aware era than it did when Lem first put pen to paper. And Ivan Kreilkamp praises Lolly Willowe’s tale of witchery because Sylvia Townsend Warner “pulls off the difficult feat of making English respectability seem dangerously revolutionary.”
Other writers, though, keep gazing outward, letting readers feel alien all the way down. Namwali Serpell rescues William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderlands from more than a century of near-oblivion because Hodgson reminds readers “just how uneasily we sit within the endless spinning of time.” In the strange journey that the protagonist of Other Leopards takes back through millennia to meet the “Queen of Time,” Emily Hyde sees Dennis William staging “not an identification with the past as a basis for future development, [but] a repudiation of historical time.” The religious historian Katie Lofton recalls the sublime displacements of childhood when she discovered in Edith Hamilton’s myths “cockeyed desires [that] strung together risk and longing, manipulation and capture. Part of the thrill was not knowing what role I wanted for myself in the story.” And Paul Saint-Amour finds that Russell Hoban’s language-coining Riddley Walker “mak[es] us feel spectral in the midst of life; it confronts us with a posterity that looks back at us blankly as we peer at it.”