This is the first year since 1994 that I’ve not published a single thing, and it’s been a tough year so 2026 might go the same way.
My seizures remain undiagnosed. My heart monitor continued to reveal nothing so I had it cut out of my chest (he said, melodramatically). My neurologist decided to treat my condition as if it were epilepsy. So ten weeks of spring and summer were spent slowly increasing the dosage of meds that gave me brain fog, lethargy, depression, and – more so than usual – a tendency to do self-evidently stupid things. At least I didn’t get the side-effect where you lose a third of your skin and die. Once I got used to the meds, the side-effects mostly vanished, apart from the aphasia around names/titles and certain kinds of words. Students quickly got used to my abrupt mid-sentence interregna, visible brain strain, angry mutterings about ‘these fucking meds’ and vain attempts to triangulate an elusive word.
Mum had a bad fall in June, was released from hospital, had a week of deteriorating health at home, was readmitted, spent another ten-and-a-bit weeks in hospital, returned home permanently bed-bound, and became increasingly frail over the following months.
Then one of our ducks, Sarah Jane, was sick.
And then, at the start of December, dad had some CT scans; a week later we were told to get him to hospital as quickly as possible because they’d incidentally revealed a pulmonary embolism. Next day, it was confirmed he has pancreatic cancer, which has spread too far for surgery; and he is not robust enough for chemotherapy.
And then mum caught the flu, followed by a chest infection and then pneumonia. She died on Xmas Eve.
We’re waiting for dad’s treatment plan, but it will only be palliative care. We’ll probably lose him in the next few months.
So Climate Monsters, my sort-of sequel to The Anthropocene Unconscious, remains almost completely unwritten, and I’ve not written anything else this year beyond drafting three (pretty sketchy) research presentations, two of which should eventually be developed into something publishable:
‘In the Chinks of the Wyndham Machine’, A Very British Catastrophe: John Wyndham Then and Now, School of English Colloquium, University of St Andrews, 7 June 2025
‘Nuoc 2030 and Climate Change Cinema’, Apocalypses: Expected, Imagined, Dreaded, University of Warwick, 24–25 June 2025
‘The Geographies of Monsters are the Geographies of Climate Change’, Weathers of the Future, University of Katowice, Poland, 3–4 September 2025, which meant we got to spend a week in Poland with our old friend Karolina (and have a drink at the deepest bar in Europe, at the bottom of a now-disused coal mine)
I did do some media stuff, though:
my first ever DVD/Blu-ray extra: a half-hour feature of me talking about sf and communism and things, called Blast Off, included in the Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA boxset from Eureka
my first ever appearance in a documentary feature film, The Big Picture (Arthur Cauty 2025), about the re-opening of the Bristol IMAX (now Bristol Megascreen), where it premiered
my first full-spectrum dominance* of a four-part TV documentary series, Wonderland – Science Fiction in the Atomic Age, episodes 1–4, Sky Arts, 3–24 April 2025
and half a dozen podcasts:
Guest on Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever, Episode 43 – La Jetée: French New Wave’s 1962 Sci-Fi Classic (14 September 2025) with Lisa Yaszek
Guest on Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever, Episode 41 – Village of the Damned: Creepy Kids and Cosy Catastrophe (17 August 2025) with Roger Luckhurst
Guest on The Climate Pod (2025) discussing The Anthropocene Unconscious
Guest on Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever, Episode 34 – The World, The Flesh, and the Devil: Harry Belafonte, Race and Apocalypse (11 May 2025) with Stéphanie Larrieux
Guest on Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever, Episode 28 – Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space: The Worst Movie Ever? (3 February 2025) with Rodney F. Hill
Guest on Brainland – Solaris: Probing the Lem/Tarkovsky Masterpiece (21 January 2025)
And I did some conference- and event-organising:
I was a Member of Programme Committee for The Future is Here: Fictions in the Age of Climate Change, University of Rijeka, Croatia (May 2025) but I don’t recall actually doing anything other than lending my name
I co-organised Psychobiddies, Harpies and Hags: Interrogating Ageing and Gender on Screen, at the Watershed, 3 May 2025. I was only responsible for the admin stuff but used the opportunity to arrange an accompanying screening of All About Eve (Mankiewicz 1950) at the Watershed and, on the following day and in collaboration with 20th Century Flicks and Horror Without End, A Psycho Biddy and Hagsploitation Double Bill: The Nanny (Holt 1965) and X (West 2022) at Bristol Megascreen. We’ve done nukesploitation and hicksploitation before; HWE want to do snacksploitation next but I’m holding out for hatsploitation (not that I’ve managed to convince anyone that that’s a thing).
And since Gale Ann Hurd was in town as the Forbidden Worlds film festival’s Guest of Honour, she suggested doing an event for film students and young filmmakers, so I ended up organising and hosting In Conversation with Gale Anne Hurd at the Watershed, 31 May 2025
I examined a PhD: Marta Alvhild Mboka Tveit, Earthrise: An Ecocritical Study of African and Norwegian Speculative Fiction, which included not only few days’ break for us in Oslo but also remuneration so handsome that, for the first time ever, I must have got close to making minimum wage.
I became second-supervisor for a PhD at Freie Universität Berlin on domestic noir.
Oh, and on 5 December, just four days before everything went completely to shit, I finally did my professorial inaugural lecture – My Favourite Thing Is Monsters – at the Bristol Megascreen. Trust me: seize any chance you ever have to do a powerpoint on an old school IMAX screen – not one of the pissy little multiplex ones, but a proper one from before Hollywood started using the format. Doesn’t even matter what you say: the ppt alone bludgeons the audience into awed submission, like a bunch of Romantic poets seeing an alp for the first time…
* In this instance, ‘full-spectrum dominance’ means I was the first person interviewed – for a whole day – when they clearly still had no idea what the series was really about, so although I do appear in each episode there are about six hours of footage of me on the cutting room floor (i.e., a couple of drives that have been wiped and used for something else).
Mark Bould 