Christopher Byrd

THE WASHINGTON POST – My favourite exchange in The Gunk happens early in the first chapter shortly after Rani and Becks, two financially strapped, planet-hopping scavengers, come across an uncharted world. As Becks pilots their spaceship, Rani rappels down a rope and sets out to get the lay of the land. In a cavern, Rani comes across a mound made up of a bubbly, gelatinous substance – the eponymous gunk of the title. Using a hand tool which doubles as her prosthetic limb, Rani scans the material to reveal that it’s “an organic compound. Following Becks’ suggestion, she uses her hand tool (which she affectionately calls “pumpkin”) to hoover up the substance. This reveals a small pool of bright green liquid, which another scan reveals to be a promising energy source. Hoping to secure a larger deposit of the liquid, Rani looks for more traces of it and asks Becks what she would do if they should strike it rich. After saying she’d first pay off her debts Becks says, “I don’t dream big until I know it’s within my reach” to which Rani wittily replies: “A dream, Becks, is something that’s out of our reach. Otherwise, it’s called an option.”

That snippet of conversation nicely captures the personality of the game’s central characters. Becks is prudent, Rani intrepid. It also sets the stage for the tension that threatens to sour their relationship. As Rani explores the planet and uses her hand tool to remove the gunk she is dazzled to see the environment transform from a dull greyish landscape to one bursting with exotic flora. Eventually, Rani discovers the ruins and relics of a lost civilisation and an alien suspended in a tank hooked up to machinery, the purpose of which is a mystery. And while Becks counsels caution, Rani grows more headstrong and dismissive of her partner’s input.

The Gunk is an eco-fable about characters determined to remake the world and the consequences that result from their hubris. Featuring light action sequences (there are gunk monsters) and straightforward puzzle sequences, the game focusses on the pleasures of exploration and tidying up above all else. Stepping into the role of Rani, players spend most of their time cleaning up gunk and searching for “mycelium coils” and “mulligan melons”.

Mycelium coils are round-mushroom heads attached to narrow stems rooted in the ground.

Rani can detach them using her tool and then shoot them into the pools of green liquid. This causes mushroom platforms to sprout up so that she can traverse otherwise impossible-to-access areas. Mulligan melons bear a resemblance to the tops of the mycelium coils, but once detached from their surroundings they explode after a short period of time. Rani can use these to clear away out-of-reach clusters of gunk. Most of the puzzles revolve around the use of these two substances. Save for one moment late in the game where I missed cleaning up a tiny amount of gunk that prevented me from uncovering a resource, I was able to complete the story without much effort.

The Gunk is a casual adventure game that’s easy on the eyes and benefits from the voice acting of Fiona Nova (Rani) and Abigail Turner (Becks). They endow their respective characters with no shortage of vitality.

Sure, on the face of it, a game centred around cleaning up gunk might not sound like an interesting diversion. But it works thanks to the focussed nature of the campaign (this is not a game that feels padded out with superfluous content) and because there is something intrinsically satisfying to radically altering the appearance of a landscape.

For the neat freaks out there, this one’s for you.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Lavie Tidhar

THE WASHINGTON POST – Ah, the space opera! That “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn”, as science fiction author Wilson Tucker memorably put it when he coined the term in 1941.

Science fiction writers (and readers) seem to never get enough of big spaceships, big galactic empires or giant worms. Frank Herbert’s Dune may seem like the most epic of these epics, but before him writers such as EE ‘Doc’ Smith and Edmond ‘The World Wrecker’ Hamilton were dreaming up sweeping space adventures.

Let’s talk about some of our favorites in this action-packed genre.

Silvia: Because of the success of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation, many people have been asking me for books that resemble the movie.

Although the obvious recommendation is to plow through the many volumes of the Dune series itself, newbies are sometimes fearful of being thrown into the deep end of the pool (the six Dune books penned by Frank Herbert span some 900,000 words).

Therefore, I’m not going big, but small, and recommending Binti (2015), a novella by Nnedi Okorafor.

Like Dune, Binti has a young protagonist traveling from one distant corner of the galaxy to another, while undergoing a great personal transformation. It’s a coming-of-age tale rooted in African culture, which is continued in two other novellas.

For people looking for full-blown novels, there is Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire (2019).

A new ambassador arrives at the city of Teixcalaan, intent on investigating the sudden death of their predecessor.

It’s heavy on intrigue, politics and court machinations and utilises the tried-and-true science fiction trope of transplanted memories.

An older title that falls into the brick-of-a-book category is Hyperion (1989) by Dan Simmons.

It borrows the structure of The Canterbury Tales and blasts it into space in one massive undertaking.

Lavie: I recently came back from France, where I was really taken with the vibrancy of French space opera. There’s Pierre Bordage, whose Warriors of Silence trilogy dates back to the 1990s, and Jean-Claude Dunyach, whose Dead Stars (1991) is an important early title.

Both are still popular. Joining them are a host of new writers, such as Floriane Soulas, whose The Forgotten of the Amas (2021) is a grandly ambitious novel set around a Jupiter that is presented in the true scale of a full space opera.

I was also taken with Carina Rozenfeld’s Terres (2021), which is not a neat fit but fascinating for its exploration of an entire multiverse. English-language publishers, take note!

The big blockbuster of translated science fiction has to be Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2008). The trilogy is hugely ambitious and cosmic in scope. And while I’m talking about space opera in translation, brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky in Russia created one of the great settings of 20th Century science fiction with their Noon universe, in a series of novels now gaining new appreciation and new translated editions.

Hard to Be a God (1964) and The Inhabited Island (1969) were rereleased by Chicago Review Press a few years ago. I adore Noon: 22nd Century (1961), a mosaic novel which is first in the sequence, charting the expansion into space of a Soviet utopia. This is one sadly long out of print, though.

I have a strong suspicion that the Noon universe partly inspired Iain M Banks’s Culture series.

These sprawling novels of galactic milieus, giant orbitals and even larger AI ships and their various machinations offer one of the most compelling and sustained visions of a far-flung future.

Silvia: It’s worth noting the Strugatsky translations by Chicago Review Press seem to be the most accurate ones, as the previous editions were censored back in the day.

I’ll end this column with the ever-popular X meets Y: In this case, Dune meets Hans Christian Andersen in The Snow Queen (1981) by Joan Vinge.

It contains the prerequisite galactic empire replete with political machinations. There’s also a hero’s journey, an ageless monarch, a low-tech society versus a high-tech one, and of course a lot of talk of Winter with a capital W.

So, what galactic empire floats your boat, dear readers?