bonnyCD Gadsby

Phorms Phantasic and Phorms Reviled:

Alison Gadsby's Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive

Reviewed by bonnyCD

(Guernica Editions, 2026)

Although he is not necessarily my favourite sci-fi writer, Ray Bradbury does have certain skills that cement his status in my mind as a foundational figure in so-called ‘genre writing.’ My second-favourite collection of his is The Martian Chronicles (1950), a “fix-up novel”* or what might be called a “novel-in-stories,” or “interrelated short stories.” The stories in The Martian Chronicles are collected from individual publications largely between 1945 and 1950, and Bradbury wrote so many other stories in the same thematic territory from that time & the years following the publication that an entire extra book’s worth of material, The Other Martian Stories, was rolled into later editions of the work starting in 2009. There was a LOT of Martian thinking, tinkering, revising, and it was the kind of work where each story stood on its own, and likewise each story enriched its kin when gathered up as a litter.

*Stories collected to act as a cohesive story with new and reworked material to better express the thematic questions at hand.

My favourite work by Bradbury is I Sing The Body Electric. Bradbury wrote of child-rearing robots—and wrote children as well—believably. If you read his nonfiction, he claimed to remember his circumcision at four days old, which seems ridiculous until you see how well he inhabits the wants and needs and fears and lessons of childhood in his fiction. Building a grandma who is a robot in the title-story* of the collection is about as absurd as it sounds. The language of a sales pitch is everywhere: “Inside was the perfect gift for any child from seven to seventy-seven.” There are also many moments of pure wonder: “We knew we had, in a way, slapped her alive. She was born, she was born. Her head swiveled all about. She gaped. She mouthed. And the first thing she said was: Laughter.” For the electric grandmother, laughter is the foundation of speech. Exhortation! It’s a beautiful story about grief and coming of age.

*I’m going to start on these notes early to try and help buffer the many big-swath conclusions I’m making about literature / genre / and short stories. What is worth noting here is Bradbury borrows his title from a Whitman poem, drawing from another writer outside of the mode he’s working in to take what he needs and leave the rest. I cannot help but feel Gadsby does not love things in genre, or worst-case scenario, perhaps resents them. Bradbury longed to do work as strong as the work he loved, not to poach bits and pieces but to make work of similar excellence. From his acceptance speech from the 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: “I read Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson when I was 24 and I said to myself, ‘Oh God, wouldn’t it be wonderful if someday I could write a book as good as this but put it on the planet Mars.’” Good work doesn’t happen in a vacuum of literariness; it happens in a continuum of the things you cherish.

By contrast, Alison Gadsby’s debut short-fiction collection, Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive, is comprised of much glummer speculations on robot life, time travel, and undue pressure from stage-parent equivalents for youth swim-meets. It is a collection fixated foremost on violence, loneliness, and fear-mongering.

Reading Breathing, I find myself asking if most literary-first sci-fi & spec-fic is simply lesser sci-fi, genre as catalyst for wish-fulfillment and what-about-ism, the stuff of rebuttals dreamt up in the shower after an argument that took you by surprise instead of the terroir of true imagination.

On paper, Breathing is exactly what I should want from a new short fiction collection coming out in Canada in 2026. Summarizing the book through back matter might prove instructive: short stories about rights, personhood, and existential threats posed by robot lifeforms (and what their deployment and fracture tell us about the world around them,), time-travel lite (just 1.25 stories in the collection but really good stuff in them), and women and children surviving the horrors of sharing domestic space with men (one of the men is dead, even, but still causing trouble).

Let’s take it even further, lift the back cover copy: “A woman learns to swim. A girl falls in love with her teacher. A man hires a humanoid nanny. A woman is abducted by her trash collector. A dying mother recycles time.” And let’s look at the genre claims: “Connected stories that blur the lines between horror, speculative fiction and psychological realism…” I’m not sure where the horror is in the book. Anuja Varghese’s blurb characterizes the linkages as “these subtly linked stories.” Subtle is a generous read, simultaneously heavy-handed and superficial as they are.

What are the most thrilling elements of the back cover pitch? Recycling time leaps out at us in a huge way, and I want to know more about what that even is. A new-hire humanoid nanny? Not the best pitch, but it gives an idea of the territory, a more licentious take on The Jetsons maybe. Trash collector abduction? Could be interesting, I guess? But learns to swim? Falls in love with teacher? Do these lustreless claims not tell us something about the unevenness of the work within?

Breathing doesn’t quite fulfill its blurb. I think there’s a few strong stories that interlink, and then the rest simply doesn’t work in book form, particularly not with its gestures toward (but failure to truly approach) the promises of short fiction (explosive compression) and speculative fiction (the freedom to make different assumptions and torque language into new positions to tell us new things about our own world).

Let’s look at some of the writing itself.

Take this passage: “After the art world became oversaturated with Picasso prints and the writers’ unions won their global class action against ChatBot International, the government legislated a ban on the production of art by artificial intelligence. The current Prime Minister (rumoured to have Category 1, Generation 3 kids) was chomping at the bit to throw it all out. Category 1, Generation 3 had the ability to grow hair, teeth and store memories”.

What are the problems here? The misrepresentation of what LLMs do (they don’t make anything, they’re fancy multiplication tables, not that I’m endorsing them or their extremely fukd ecological impact), the conflation of that with meaningful, lifeform AI sentience (what a reader assumes the “Phorms” discussed are, or are close to), and (here’s some capital WF Wish Fulfillment) the idea that the government could even meaningfully legislate bans against any kind of AI development (including data centres); laughable soft liberal drivel, daydreaming that the government is going to step in and ‘protect the arts, keep humanity first,’ all while letting the ultra-rich have designer babies, super-intelligent teachers, sex dolls, &c.. Cognitive dissonance, and not a choate sense of world-building.

This passage from Breathing is the closest scrape we have with the political ramifications of intelligent nonhuman lifeforms existing in both adult and child bodies. Is AI a nightmare? Yes. Does that mean we should write so naively about it? That it is an obvious target does not mitigate its appeal to a great number of other folks. It is a problem, a centralizing live-wire node, that should be thought and written through meaningfully, exactingly, and the untidy blending of our IRL LLM present with an entire tradition of philosophical questioning of nonhuman sentience within genre writing is a misstep. An easy target is not automatically the stuff of great literature, not in such smug dismissal.

In that vein: almost no man in this book is a fully rounded character.* I love a misandrist streak, and appreciate a good evil male caricature as much as the next, but these are cartoonish: ghosts of abusive husbands keeping elderly shut-ins from making it to the yard to receive necessary medical assistance, impotent male robot companions that watch porn and agree to deadly traps with a thirst for the possibility of genital hardware plus fuck-proficiency software—who are, in case we weren’t preaching enough to the choir, cop robots, decommissioned, more aggressive and unkind than the ‘normal,’ more expensive new-gen robots. Exaggeration, in its best application, is a means of illuminating something otherwise unseen, to make visible a problem or bring it into dialogue with other problems to illustrate an even more fundamental, elusive truth.

*The chief exception is a teenage hitchhiker who is picked up and sexually assaulted by a recurring character when she is daydreaming of her worthlessness compared to her sister while running errands. There are a couple other guys and kids who aren’t evil incarnate, of course, but they’re very much peripheral.

On so many fronts I understand, sympathize, and agree with the basic political premises put forth in Breathing, however shallow and redundant they can be at their worst deployment, but I find myself wondering why the flattening, why the absolute diminishment, the strict adherence to the most obvious, redundant targets available? Is there no conviction to Gadsby’s speculations? Could a more developed version of these stories teach us new things about the world? Between MFA training and Guernica’s self-ascribed essentiality, surely someone should have encouraged Gadsby to plumb deeper depths.

A universe where boy robots are cop rapists with no genitalia and girl robots “washed dishes at the sink. It felt natural she said, like she was born to clean the dishes”. Is the gendered inflection of the robot so tidy? Of the human, too?*

*The best stories in the collection, like the one quoted right here, ask these sociologically-motivated questions (Delany would wholly disagree with me on the “sociological” merit of criticism, but that’s fine; it was a different discipline when he was writing about all that, or at least I’ll tell myself that).

Thinking of the best sci-fi, I always imagine it as sci-fi to-the-left. It’s not a deep telescopic puncture into the future, but a constellation of the present exaggerated, or the present laid bare, pretenses stripped by the solvent of genre. A cop would be a bad husband? Shocker. That’s not speculation, that’s 1:1 observation of the world in front of us. Breathing’s husbands all engage in what Nick Cave cruelly croons about, “a little consensual rape in the afternoon / and maybe a bit more in the evening.”*

*Grinderman, “Go Tell The Women.”

If you look at a recalled Dangerfield-esque routine from a recent comedy show, delivered during Angela’s psychotic break (in the form of police interview transcript) in “What’s So Funny,” it’s not far off from the intense entitlement and misogyny of her own husband’s actual held values in “Swimming”:

AM stands, spins, mimes holding a microphone, smoking a cigar?

AM: My wife. Ha, let me tell you about my wife. Every night she asks me to massage her feet, and I gotta say yes, fellas, amiright, we have to say yes. I just wanna watch the game, but she’s got her feet on my lap, and I rub those feet for hours and when I ask if I can massage her pussy with my dick for five minutes, two minutes tops, if she covers her face, she gets up and leaves like it’s my dick with bunions and cracked heels. (Pause)

It’s not funny. Why are you laughing?

From “Swimming”:

Too tired to fight about condoms, unwilling to start the pill again because of the migraines, we had sex whenever he wanted, and I lived between two worlds: one filled with the anxiety of his sexual drive, his mouth on my bared shoulder in the morning, his fingers on the back of my neck on the couch and those gloriously free days after we fucked, when I didn’t exist to him beyond being the cook, the child minder and the laundry folder. It didn’t take long to get pregnant again.

Angela Mortimer’s two-story sequence is heartbreaking. It is heavy and real, and adroitly characterizes the worst husbands and fathers-in-law for the reprehensible assailants they can be. And the police sergeant (who also recurs across stories) who can’t help but laugh at the comedy routine, well, who among us (those preached to, those of us in the choir, those of us reading this book) is surprised by a police officer unable or unwilling to hide a horrid sense of humor while taking the testimony of a woman who has been so abused that running down her pervy leering father-in-law became a seeming inevitability?

Do we learn different things from these two different stories in their different deliveries? I don’t think so. Could this territory have been completely covered in a single story? Maybe. Probably not with the formal structural choices, but I think the arc could have, absolutely. The reason the stories are broken up is that, like almost all of the repeating characters in Breathing, Angela in one story does not seem so much to develop into herself in another, as be another character with the same name.

But bonny, you protest, Angela in story 2 has had a psychotic event, has killed a man, of course she sounds different. The woman who is too exhausted or timid or unsure of herself to argue with her physician “when asked if we were planning on having more children,” and thus cannot get her IUD installed, is obviously different from the one who has murdered her father-in-law; that character development can absolutely happen, but if short fiction is your medium, let that happen on-screen. Yeah, the woman being interviewed by a police officer has much more of a voice, is literally voicing her thoughts, in a way that the beleaguered baby-deliverer of the earlier story isn’t. But the moment of apotheosis should be obvious, the combustive effect provided by the compression of the short story should make it evident; breaking the narrative across two stories, linked stories, lets different things happen at different paces, but it shouldn’t be an excuse to omit the crunchy good stuff of the short form. This is work that has not been given the opportunity to resonate with itself.

So why bill this book as interlinked stories? As speculative, science-fiction-y stuff, at all? What facet of these sentences is “razor sharp” in these didactic, somewhat obvious “speculations” that don’t work as singular stories, and certainly don’t enrich one another in their forced entanglement, instead delaying necessary exposition, retroactively justifying or complicating an earlier tale without meaningfully connecting them, or flickering in a weak, brief cameo?

Good genre fiction wouldn’t look at Covid and think, oh how hard, jeez I wonder if I should stab my husband in the stomach for getting back out into the world.* It might instead ask sincere sociological questions about a pandemic and what follows: about long Covid, mass debilitation, the extreme recurrence of measles in so-called developed countries, the dismantling of WFH programs and healthcare, why billionaires attend events with comprehensive air-filtering while denouncing calls for aid and moving to equate continued Covid caution with paranoid unwellness.

*This story is “Between Living and Dying.” Technically the wife nearly stabs the husband, and he chooses to walk further into the scissors until they break the skin, trying to, I guess, goad the wife into not being Covid-cautious anymore?

Genre constellates problems so they can be felt, thought through, and withstood, so that scale and history can find even footing with character and drama. Pop-psych “realism” that dominates literary fiction like this is anathema to sincere forays in genre. For the literary writer who doesn’t appreciate genre and instead sees it as a vehicle for their literariness, genre is flat and does not offer the opportunity to tackle more complex, elusive targets; all that genre offers someone who doesn’t believe in it is the obvious.

And let’s evaluate the briefly touched-upon formal element that is interrelated stories. What are the ligaments and tendons tying these things together? Are there further developments of a theme from one to the next? Are the themes developed laterally, between separate characters instead of from one self? Can a character recur and go on an entirely new second journey? All questions germane to a project like this. But the characters herein are never distinct enough, never embodied or given a voice vivid enough to justify their placement. The ligature should serve to animate the work, not make visible its fracture.

I suspect you could replace* Calypso from “Twirling” and “Payment For the Ride” with Rebecca from “Everything Was Fine Before Lisa Got Here” and “Between Living and Dying” with little to no alteration to the action, and still discover as much or as little as you did about the character in its original form. The strongest three stories in the collection, “The Beginning of Sadness,” "Irreplaceable," and the ultimate “The Going Rate for Grief,” do not have this same modular, arbitrary unfinishedness to them.

*I’m picking these two characters as they both appear as children and then again later as adults. But you could swap out the adults with one another, too.

We learn as much about who Calypso was as a child (and what that might possibly say about her character now) in a paragraph of unhelpful conspicuous exposition* in “Payment For the Ride” as we did in the whole childhood saga of “Twirling” (which is only really two pages of writing, an easy cut in a discipline where we as writers are the only ones truly responsible for what we put out into the world).

*“But she could take him down. When Rick McMahon cornered her in the playground after school in Grade 5, she thought about running, but she didn’t. Instead, she grabbed him by the throat and squeezed so hard he fell to his knees and Mr. Cull had to drag her off him”.

One finds themself flipping back and forth to confirm the nametags and attempt to decipher some reason for the reintroduction of a character, the so-what of it all. Calypso serves as a metaphor for the book’s often arbitrary feeling: “Calypso hated that Candy enjoyed a life inside which she happily lived. Calypso could only breathe when she lived outside her life, when she pretended to be someone else”. Too, “She changed her story depending on the audience”, truths of her insecurity, but also of an unsettled, unchallenged set of stories that deserved much stronger editing.

When Calypso details the origin of her name (bodice rippers), she explains her “father was probably too drunk to argue for something more fitting like Ashley or Amanda”; here, like many other places in the collection, I see a missed opportunity. Why not write a story of an Amanda, or Ashley, who felt like a cutting-floor figure in their own life, who felt some vast material consequence for the meddling with time in the stronger time-recycling stories? Who goes through an eerily similar story? To show us what it means to be one of the people who don’t get to change time, victim and not beneficiary of circumstance?

Or a speaker who has an uncanny, surreal overlay with Calypso? Jayden in “The Beginning of Sadness” and “The Going Rate for Grief,” called Jay by Bea, recalls the nickname for Jeremy in “A Better Parent” (a father-bestowed nickname Jeremy’s mother, Niki, hates), and the unsettling echo is stronger than a cameo or a reoccurrence here. In a collection where some mothers can recycle time and lightly alter trajectories, why not generate some errant timeline consequence, jam them together? Why not meaningfully sow repetition together instead of arbitrarily dotting names and thin themes* throughout?

*Swimming is the most obvious thin theme; other times it’s someone telling a child no man could love her (Mirabel gifted Roger as proxy husband by her father; Calypso told as a 4-year-old her dead father was the “‘only man who’ll ever love her’”). Too, carbonara recurs, Angela banging her head against a wall during an argument with husband JJ who wants a grocery list for the ingredients, and Miss Richards making the dish for Amelia (which Darren chokes on, startled by a peek at Richards’ “mound of perfectly groomed pubic hair”)

[Additionally, Angela’s obstetrician refers to her “most impressive mound of pubic hair”, which I think is not a linkage implying she is Richards’ Phorm model inspiration through repetition, but rather an uninspired recycling of descriptions of pubic hair as impressive/perfectly groomed mounds, which is to say, these mons pubis/pubic mounds are impressive for their hairiness and not mounds made just of hair, right? Fussing over the metonymic fuzziness brought up because of the conspicuous repetition.]

And even Angela’s head injury, from “screws sticking out of the wall” which “used to hold coat hooks”, is tied to Maureen being abused by her living husband (and his not-living ghost): “It was only when her head hit the coat hooks on the wall that Maureen knew she’d spoken the thoughts aloud”. Emergent themes that should build on one another, but don’t, feel instead plucked twice from a hat on a whim. Not variations on a theme but ugly wallpaper on a wall of nothing but empty coat hooks to hang arbitrary plot on.

These are the questions my own reading brain, primed by enjoyment of and familiarity with genre, finds itself asking.

My literary brain does draw the connection between small child Calypso (grade one, so, 6 years old?) running away and dreaming of gymnastics as resonant with the hitch-hiking 16-year-old “Bob” —Calypso asserts he has given a fake name—who Calypso, now very much an adult, picks up and eventually sexually assaults. “Bob” guesses Calypso is 25, and has left home (I believe running away from his abusive father? It is not made explicit) to go live with his older brother.

But what does Calypso in the first story tell us about Calypso in the second story? What does one thwarted instance of running away as a little girl tell us about a successful (but traumatic) instance of running away as a 16-year-old boy? The resonances are superficial. Circumstantial. They have not been woven together. Calypso does not recall her own experience while harassing Bob; it is left in the residue of plot which should have been reactivated through intentional patterning. This is the primary heartbreak of the collection: it does not fulfill its ambitions, and leaves many nodes of potential untouched, instead substituting arbitrary, cliche conflicts for what could be cultivated themes of resonance via meaningful revision.

Writing from Samuel R. Delany helps me sort through some of my feelings about an absence of the thing that is missing from Breathing, since it is quite difficult to articulate criticism on the absence of a necessary (absent) thing. Delany argues that the “illusion of reality, the sense of veracity in all fiction, is controlled by the author’s sensitivity to…distinctions” of subjunctive quality; that is, mood and tone career to an inevitable end through iteration, succession, consecution, whatever you might call it (The Jewel-Hinged Jaw), one word-image revised 59,999 times by those that follow it: “The process as we move our eyes from word to word is corrective and revisionary rather than progressive. Each new word revises the complex picture we had a moment before.”

Delany goes on to conclude:

…any serious discussion of speculative fiction must first get away from the distracting concept of SF content and examine precisely what sort of word-beast sits before us. We must explore both the level of subjunctivity at which speculative fiction takes place and the particular intensity and range of images this level affords. Readers must do this if they want to fully understand what has already been written. Writers must do this if the field is to mature to the potential so frequently cited for it.

Breathing lacks a sense not just of plot or character subjunctivity from story to story, but genre-historical subjunctivity as well; it draws from itself but does not reach to its betters (the title from its own dialogue, badly and opaquely tagged throughout the collection), and is, in its text-hermetic, vacuumy composition, interested in the trappings of genre (robots and time-travel) but not the effects or affective potential of those elements worked to their expressive terminus—that ideal language-y realm which is a formal reflection of the content and vice-versa; “another area altogether: in all the brouhaha clanging about these unreal worlds, chords are sounded in total sympathy with the real” (Delany).

As a reader and a writer, I do not believe we should abide by book-length projects that are not infused with book-length preoccupations. That Gadsby’s collection utilizes conspicuously visible wayposts of a coherent project, but maddeningly does not coalesce, indicates to me a lack of the subjunctive revision necessary to establish not a uniform text, but rather one whelmed and in total sympathy with even itself.

These stories are likely less disagreeable on their own, having been placed in: Blank Spaces, (this very venue) The Temz Review, Synchronized Chaos, Ex-Puritan, Blue Lake Review, Sledgehammer, Dreamers Creative Writing, Fleas on the Dog, antilang, Coastal Shelf, and The Writing Disorder. 11 mags previewing earlier versions of the 19 total stories. That’s over half the total stories. I’m not interested in hunting these earlier drafts to compare and contrast, to break out a yardstick to measure just how much revision did or didn’t happen. What I am interested in is the cruel reality that once our work comes together, to a book-form, writers ourselves are the only ones accountable for it.

This is a lot of acid-bath for a collection of short fiction, I know. It is especially frustrating as this sort of thing is, on paper, exactly up my alley, and because I think a very worthy, exciting and rich book could have emerged from the strongest elements of the collection if a stronger editor had pulled on threads and shouldered out worse workshop-y ideas, if the potent thematic genre elements (time recycling and lifePhorms) had undergirded the entire book, if the stories had meaningfully grown together as a litter instead of a haphazardly filled egg-carton of MFA-fodder. When writing a book, the obsessions we draw upon to write need enough mass to sustain a book-length meditation.

Some stories, particularly on the shorter side, ought to have been outright cut. Others should have been massaged to react to and reinforce the mainline pieces of strength: “The Beginning Of Sadness,” “Irreplacable” (which is the sequel to the much weaker title-story of the collection), and “The Going Rate For Grief.” Those three alone* could have formed a strong novella/novellete/noveletta, whatever “shorter than avg. trade” page count designation you need.

*Note that TWO of the THREE stories I find great merit in were not published in a literary magazine. This is an observation I’m making extremely late in the writing of this review, and short of calling up Gadsby to say “I’m really holding the feet of your first bookchild to the fire, so tell me, did you write story Y and story Z at the same time as the rest and simply fail to place them in a magazine before your contract was signed? Or did Guernica demand you write some new stuff, or tuck in old unpublished stuff, for a certain in-house ratio they abide by,” I can't know how these stories were written. But perhaps they didn’t find an easy CanLit home specifically because of their merit? My unsolicited advice for Gadsby would thus be this: instead of thanking “the editors and publishers of literary magazines everywhere” for offering “emerging writers the glimmer of hope we need to persevere, and…[giving] avid readers of short fiction – like me – a place to find inspiring writing”, perhaps you need to tack your huge craft ambitions (a short story collection of interrelated genre writing with a prestigious press is ambitious, a huge swing) to some of the all-time greats, to look back and above and wide and far, not just at the small (and generally unread, even by the people published by them) magazines with their own mire of nepotism and biases and funding commitments and insecurities and ineptitudes, but to the generally agreed-upon heavy-hitters that your work will more immensely benefit from; being a good literary citizen is a good thing, being a good person is even better, but neither of them strictly translates to being a good writer.

A collection of interrelated stories should enrich backward and forward, not just offer an attempt at a simple addition-based haymaker that is the final story. Let’s look at an opportunity to transform opaqueness from that final story to rich, multifaceted writing:

To complicate the final story of the collection, to sow doubt as to whether or not dickhead gay realtor Sugar—who plans to take our protagonist’s house after his Phorm children are killed—is only sweet in his namesake, tie him to the strong earlier story “Irreplaceable” to show a disregard for lifePhorms: “The man who’d saved Amelia shouted after his husband, declaring to the world she was just a Phorm and that the beach trawlers would get her later”. This moment could easily have been written with Sugar and Cecil, our ‘villains’ from our final story, at the beach, a real-deal double appearance across stories, As it is, that named husband, Ricky, is set-dressing, a necessary but unremarkable cog in the telling of the tale, someone who could’ve been revised and entangled in the wider thematic pulse of the book but was left unremarkable to deliver exposition.

In our ultimate tale we know to distrust Sugar only from Diana’s perspective, her vicious suburban defensiveness: “After Fern* died, Sugar popped his head into the house and, instead of bringing a casserole dish of food, he had fabric swatches and paint samples and an offer to redecorate Fern’s house, to make it Czarea and Diana’s home”; “‘If we go with Phantastic Phorms, a lawsuit will cost you more than a three-bedroom house on Fairview. This hurts,’ Sugar said, holding his hand over his heart, dabbing his eyes with a silk handkerchief he pulled from his jacket pocket. He’d already lifted his laptop and laser measure from a red leather satchel bag”.

*Fern is Diana’s sister and the protagonist of the excellent “The Beginning of Sadness.”

But what if we’d seen Sugar and Cecil at the lakeshore in the earlier story instead? And one of them had mourned for Miss Richards’ lifeless form? Both of them? Neither of them? Or if they’d had their own “fake kids” with them, had pulled them close at the time?* Perhaps a touch of doubt could have taken this final story in the collection (already one of the strong triumvirate) into the realm of great literature, particularly as Diana makes a wager, digs in, despite knowing her adoptive daughter (originally her niece) has committed a great evil; the inclusion of doubt, or the complication of Sugar and Cecil by an appearance in an earlier story with actual opportunity and means to convey their true feelings about Phorms, doubling down on their cartoonish designer-baby evil gay bullshit, or unsettling Diana’s surety, her conviction, by showing they did care about their nonhuman children, that they do mourn them in their own way, and are not just caricaturistic opportunists; just as valid, one could care more than the other, or some other permutation, both care deeply, neither care and we know that for sure, neither care and we’ve seen it in one story but it is hidden from a protagonist in another and the reader processes the dramatic irony of our knowledge, etcetera.

*The gay men technically owned one of the children and co-parented with a pair of lesbians.

Why does Breathing force some cameos, but not take advantage of obvious opportunities for others? Why not compress, condense, and pressurize the collection with its connections, why not deepen and trouble the questions at hand? A reader should not be left with questions of how to have made a book dynamic, readable, and stronger. A reader should be left asking questions about their own circumstances (would I be horny for a robot nanny?* would I risk dementia to get things just-so with time travel? do I still float real easy, or even easier now than as a child, what with my barrel chest and all?), not questions of construction.

*This is a little cheeky, but even this is a generative question, considering it’s the literal question Gadsby’s character asks himself in one of the best stories in the book.

I can imagine that having a time-traveling mother and an awareness of her meddling to give you ten tenth birthdays so she wouldn’t die without loving you enough, I can see how that might make you a bit of a psycho who dismembers other humanoid creatures of murkier legal and social status by age 12. I cannot imagine Bea can’t “go back and change things”, that she wouldn’t time travel to fix things with the power of her own choice, when she is clearly an impulsive little psycho, or that, for any reason other than plot convenience (still less convenient, I think, than writing about it with her powers intact, honoring the established premises) her power didn’t mature.

I can imagine skilled swimmer Amelia feigning drowning to force Miss Richards to die by immersing her hydro-vulnerable body in the lake. I cannot imagine why real-deal sentient superpowers multimillion-dollar robots are so fragile that they fall apart when they hit a rock, when they get a little wet; same problem with the Cybertruck, it can’t handle a car wash, right? But these are life forms, these aren’t Musk’s dreams of polygonal ugly cars.*

* I can’t possibly spend a fair amount of time on the lack of visual signification of the world(s) here, but there is simply no dazzle to any of the images, no patterning, and no aesthetic push in the work to signify things. As Delany says in Of Solids and Surds, there are immense linguistic and imagistic possibilities granted to you in working with genre instead of against it: “You can say things like ‘The door dilated’ and it’s not just a poetic metaphor. When you say, ‘Her world exploded,’ you are not just giving a muzzy metaphor for a female character’s mental state. You reserve the margin for the words to mean that a planet belonged to a woman and it blew up.” The prose has almost no imaginative pulse, which I am keen to blame on MFA poisoning, but for decorum’s sake should let rest there.

If they are stupidly produced, then write about that! And take the opportunity to mix elements, complicate and enrich them. When Marcus recalls “a woman who came into the hospital with her child after a car accident…they called the company who sent a guy to pick it up. ‘For parts’”, why not contrast that with the very real practice of donating organs as humans? These characters are standing around in a room unpacking the luring and killing of two “fake children” by a gang of teenagers, and none of them thinks nor says that?

Why are we not exploring not just how fragile the Phorms were, but also how susceptible to head injury and death humans can be? “When Andrew pinned Hamlet down and removed his eyeball” (to find a shutdown switch and document it, to humiliate the kids), “Haley freaked out. She tried to run, but Bea caught her, they both tripped, and Haley’s head landed on a rock. ‘It was gross and there was even blood. I could see her brain’”. No ontological blending of human and robot even though it’s obvious they are not so easy to distinguish at a glance. I’m not demanding a specific political view from Gadsby, but I can’t leave the conscious omissions and missed opportunities for speculative thinking alone. I think someone more fond of the genre might not have missed so many opportunities over and over.

Bea saying the shocking thing, “‘I thought if they’re so rich, they could just buy new kids,’” is an incredible beat, because it tells you so much about the world these robots live in, about what a brilliant teenager in a tight spot can do to rationalize, how the very real critique of the ultra-rich having designer children* doesn’t quite hold up to the crime of harming another living being, doesn’t undo the interpersonal harm.

*One parent does clarify that they think these gay parents aren’t actually rich, that they just look rich but all their cash is tied up in the children, though I’m not sure if that assertion holds water based on the rest of the characterizations. Also worth noting here, because where else, is the once-again-stunted speculative drive, that aside from a single remark on the Prime Minister, the only “parents” we see of these designer-child Phorms are 2 gay men and 2 gay women, who I guess having DINK lifestyles can simply afford them? Do the alphabet-mafia not adopt anymore? Have they finally peeled away from respectability politics angling for marriage and the right to adopt kids and jumped straight to owning kids whose every opinion and aesthetic articulation they can control (yes, this is facetious)? Is there not some class analysis that ought to happen here? I mean, Bea says one part of it, but that’s it. Is there not some thoughtful luddite movement that protests outside robot shops that you ought to adopt living children before you buy designer ones? Even as a throwaway gag?

I can also imagine an alternate version of the stories “Everything Was Fine Before Lisa Got Here” and “Between Living and Dying,” where Rebecca, falling in love with teacher Mr. Starsky, does not realize he is a Phorm (not actually the case, as far as we can tell, but seems like the perfect kind of eyelet to add to better lace the stories together), is simply reflecting her desires or offering basic decency as programmed, or embodying a particular programmer’s vision of that, or a particular law- and policy-maker’s vision of that, and from that premise, Rebecca has perhaps developed an abnormal attachment style to mentors or Phorms as an adult, and is missing Phormal support during lockdowns, or has become comfortable with hygienic Phormal socialization that does not carry the risk of viral transmission that human socialization does. I would’ve taken a hug from a lifelike robot that couldn’t get me sick every single day, twice a day even, during those initial lockdowns. Even leaving the teacher/crush theme of the initial story undeveloped in its sequel as it stands, this seems like an opportunity to ask more interesting questions and to further integrate these stories with one another. What we get instead is an adult Rebecca who has anxiety about entering the world again after Covid lockdowns eased.*

*For the record, I still mask and socialize conscientiously, for my own sake and the sake of my mother whose brain cancer and previous treatments greatly impact her immune system. I’m not a radical, I just have a stronger imagination than most people, where I can conceive of a world where we love and care for one another and aren’t selfish assholes about small-asks all the time. But I’m some starry-eyed sci-fi loser, I guess.

I apologize to Gadbsy for asking her work to answer for all the M(F)A-literary-folk’s genre crimes. It’s also not her fault that a24 puts out ‘prestige’ horror movies for people who don’t like horror—makes sense, they’re made almost exclusively by film-school-trained assholes who think they’re better than body-based genre roots (porn and real horror)—just as it’s not Gadsby’s fault an AI-developed billionaire-daddy “indie” studio put out the (10 million dollar “indie” lmao) “Game of the Year” last year (which doesn’t remotely resemble a real RPG but is a lot of people’s first brush with it).* Genre being a plaything for everyone now instead of a loser’s pursuit does feel like a new problem to me, but I’m not sure, having long been one of the losers, if it’s good or bad for the work and the culture long-term. Idk.

*Wild for me to roast Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in a literary review, but I’m serious, it’s the same fucking problem of generic co-opting that diminishes real art and equips a wave of disinterested weakly-literate consumers with unreal entitlement and the desire to go forth and badly misrepresent this “shiny new toy” they found, to slight the real art by comparison to dog-shit. The enshittification of our culture is at least partly the fault of consumers and the diffusion of criticism to the uninvested, though the studios and developers and publishers are obviously also super evil and cowardly, too.

It’s probably not anyone’s fault, really, that cultural productions are continually flattened, that publishers increasingly search for tokenized experiences to feed off the tidiest versions of (and drop as soon as it is no longer vogue to publish or it meaningfully challenges hegemony), that sci-fi/spec-fic veers ever cynical and dark (we’re scared of the future now more than ever: fair) while fantasy (I think somewhat naively) gets credited as utopian and imaginative and joyous (probably because it is less likely to materialize and face real scrutiny than our incoming techno-feudal hellscape is, and promises primeval ruins and magic to basically offset the stripping of technological progress).

I guess it must be the critic’s fault, for covetousness and neediness and greediness. For sitting all high and mighty and suspicious of writing that isn’t perfect, looking for conspicuous groups to bully and blame for very real problems of the imagination.*

*If we can’t imagine ourselves out of a paper bag in our writing, I’m not sure how we’ll be able to imagine solutions to real problems.

So I want to emphasize very late here that I’ve no real opinion on whether Gadsby is a good or bad writer, I think she wrote three really exceptional spec-fic stories that a really, really great fix-up novel could’ve emerged from and without the central clutter, a real sparkling, centrifugal thing.

I kid you not, each writing colleague I’ve spoken to over the past couple months who has asked me what I’m up to has expressed extreme admiration for Gadsby as a literary citizen in reply to my worry I am writing a pan of her debut work. Gadsby’s got a book coming out next year, too,* and, I am guessing, based on the literary trends of the CanLit system, could probably have a book coming out once a year every year or so until the Water Wars or whatever terrible thing it is that ends the world.

*I was SURE it said 2027 when I began this review in late February, but it is listed as 2028 now, so I’ll take the tiny L here on that, though even 2 years apart is too soon imo, especially if this very green (not a dig, just the truth) writer doesn’t get more editorial support than with her first book. This is a PUBLISHER problem btw. Publishing with smaller / indie-er presses is supposed to translate to closer editorial support and a more dedicated marketing and prize-submission focus than big houses (who mostly chase their winners, but do flood your book into every store in the country, and don’t strand your book with UTP and their literally evil minimum orders, blah blah blah), but indies are as bad and in some cases even worse for austerity cuts, offloading work onto the authors themselves, the exploitation of unpaid and underpaid interns, &c. The local asshole is evil the way the corporate asshole is evil, the local asshole just won’t give you benefits is the difference. It is absolutely not impossible to imagine a different version of this book that was shaken by its lapels by a committed, knowledgeable reader of the kind of work Breathing aspires to. Gadsby deserves close readership from people who aren’t me, people who are supposed to be supporting her in definition of their duties; if anyone is paying into the community with acts of service and deserves support like this, I reckon it’s a literary citizen like Gadsby.

I hope you might all consider this my attempt to be more of a Diogenes figure here, to be a good citizen by being (c)rude: Gadsby can be a good writer if she wants to (and I hope she makes that choice for herself in her future work), and I hope that by loudly-enough rattling the bars of my cage, or emerging half-naked and at a sprint from the tipped jar I live in (surrounded of course by countless street dogs), some startled soul might take a remotely relevant, perhaps even incidental lesson about asking more from undemanding literature hidden in the oversized sparkling rhinestone jacket of CanLit/MFA/beloved-local-figure niceties we usually exchange.

Literary folks trying to couch their ‘unique voice’ in genre—to ‘lure in yokel readers’ (while attempting to situate themselves amidst extremely proficient, actually good genre writers) instead of appreciating how genre adroitly constellates plot, conflict, theme, and is straight up just good art a lot of the time—must not be so new as I’ve assumed,* though it isn’t getting less prevalent any time soon in the CanLit ecology. Whether or not these attempts are fleeting, and whether or not I consider these incursions into the genre products of beliefs insincerely held by CanLit apologists, the bad-writing tax shelter that is genre will continue to sprawl and will need to be identified, contested, and argued against for some time to come.

*Look at this inane article by Jon Raymond, which opens with the admission, “I wrote a sci-fi book, and yet I don’t really love science fiction,” whereafter the man spends the entire article qualifying ‘the good ones,’ the ones he likes despite not liking science fiction. Just admit you like it or hate it, quit with this insipid gymnastics routine.

I don’t want to read any more third-hand-dilution escape-hatch magic-trick hijacking of genre-as-supplement instead of vehicle-entire, the kind of stuff Lorentzen nails Zadie Smith for: “one of those forays into speculative fiction literary writers tend to make in the pages of the New Yorker when they’ve been reading too much George Saunders,” an unintegrated blend “resulting in convolutions that aren’t very satisfying to parse.” I love Saunders too, but I don’t mistake him for the genuine genre article; Amarena skewers Saunders himself for his latest, an impotent thing: “Vigil at its core is a very liberal novel. It flatters a politics of pluralism and tolerance, of scientific knowledge, of reform rather than revolution.” Not much in the way of imagination there. Probably all good literature requires a bit of it, but the speculative stuff certainly asks for a higher dosage to get it off the ground. And Saunders probably is a master. I admit I have never been able to finish a novel of his, but I tend to get a laugh out of his short fiction.*

*I also teach and mentor other writers with his book on craft, which I like a lot.

But if we’re all dishing out third-hand takes (I shudder to think of the justifications young writers might borrow from Atwood’s terrible dilutions*), why are we even bothering to call them speculations at this point? As Gadsby’s best characters attempt to outpace death, the consequences of unprotected sex, and fully-realized existential FOMO by “recycling time,” maybe insecure literary writers should call their dilutions genre-recycling, get some colourful bins we can sort their books into before they all end up in the same landfill at the end of the day (my book will be there too! As will yours, dear reader).

*From Charlotte Ashley: “It was quaint, a page-turner and satisfied my bizzare [sic] craving for apocalypse scenarios. If it had been written by a denizen of the sci-fi ghetto I’d probably be writing raves right now. But on the other hand I’d been led to beleive [sic] by reviewers and Atwood herself that this book represented something else, some higher, more literate thing than mere science fiction. The New Yorker has likened Atwood’s ‘speculation’ to Orwell’s offerings, and Year of the Flood was long-listed for the Giller…How can so many reviewers get off calling her ‘prophetic’ for a book that simply re-treads the same material science fiction writers have been working with for the last fifteen years? She surely treads it well enough, but prophetic? Seriously? It’s insulting to the smart, clever, funny and literary science fiction writers out there who don’t have Atwood’s golden glow. Most of all I’m disappointed at Atwood herself, who rather than acknowledging the fine tradition of eco-speculation she is joining, acts as if she has invented the wheel.” I’m not totally aligned with Ashley, but I find it instructive that they, even as an Atwood apologist/optimist, can smell the rot emanating off the “literary-sf” bet-hedging that these genre haters hide behind. Great sf, historically, is purple, and purple is the only thing “literary” genre writers can pretend to infuse genre with in the first place, offering to cover an already covered sufficiency.

For now, I’d rather be stranded in the sci-fi ghetto than stuck at a party with academy-trained* literary writers “deploying” genre or pretending they’re the first writer to have ever gotten weird with it with their work.

*I do have an MA in creative writing, but I also have been begged to drop out of programs by neoliberal tenured assholes more times than the average graduate of these kinds of programs.

But what would I know? Like the Phorms laid out in front of us, all it’ll take to shut me up is a quick blow to the back of my head.

bonnyCD lives and works in rural Alberta (Treaty 7 territory). They are a proud founder of the reading series Feud Court (@feudcourt), alongside Jimmy T. Cahill and MLA Chernoff. Their recent books include The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux (Gordon Hill), GLADDENER (Anstruther), and Banazir Galbasi Doubtfiring with the Farmerettes (solipCYST). They are the most recent winner of the Grain Hybrid Experimental contest, and a previous winner of Geist’s Short Long-Distance Writing contest. They are currently at work on a short pamphlet advocating for wage transparency amongst writers, plus evil, purple short fictions.