Creative Writing in Space

As of September, 2026, the University of Leicester is introducing a new MA programme in Space and Society. Grounded in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, this unique interdisciplinary MA will critically examine how humans have imagined, experienced, and interacted with space across time. It will challenge students to think creatively and analytically about the cultural, political, and ethical dimensions of the new space age. The course will be taught under the aegis of the pioneering Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space - a ground-breaking research hub where space exploration meets the arts and humanities. 

The Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester is involved in both the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space, and the new MA in Space and Society. As part of the new programme, we will be offering an optional module called Creative Writing in Space. This exciting interdisciplinary module will be shared between the MA in Creative Writing and the MA in Space and Society, and will be available to students on both programmes. It will be taught by Dr Jonathan Taylor from Creative Writing and Dr Cheryl Hurkett from Genetic and Genome Biology. You can read more about this new module below. Email jt265@le.ac.uk if you want further information!

ABOUT EN 7923 CREATIVE WRITING IN SPACE

This module sends your Creative Writing into space, on a quest to find new worlds, new concepts, new metaphors – to boldly go where no Creative Writing module has gone before. We believe that the universe is simultaneously a scientific phenomenon and a beautiful work of art – a poem, or a (very long) story. We want you to explore cosmological concepts, the tales told by physicists, the metaphors of popular science, and to produce writing that takes on these concepts, tales, metaphors, that extrapolates futures, pasts and alien worlds from them, or that explodes them, pushing their metaphorical implications towards some kind of absurd singularity. 

On the module, you’ll write speculative fiction, scientific poetry, creative non-fiction, or maybe even just realist fiction that draws on the imagery of space in order to explore human psychology – transferring outer space to inner space, as it were. Ultimately, this is how Creative Writing can talk back to Space Studies: if, on the one hand, the module is about how Creative Writing can draw on scientific concepts, on the other, it is also about what science can learn from the very human stories told by poets, novelists, memoirists. 

No previous experience of Creative Writing is necessary to take this module. The module is shared between students on the MA in Space and Society and students on the MA in Creative Writing programmes at the University of Leicester. 

Adam Roberts, "Lake of Darkness"

Adam Roberts was born in 1965 in London. He studied English and Classics at Aberdeen University, did a PhD at Cambridge and is now Professor of 19th Century Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published 26 novels, all (except one) science fiction, and intends to continue doing so. His latest novel is Lake of Darkness (Gollancz 2024).

 

About Lake of Darkness, by Adam Roberts
An expedition to explore a black hole discovers, or seems to, that some being or beings are living inside the event horizon. A crewmember, Raine, claims he has been contacted by a being he calls "The Gentleman," goes murderously mad, and kills all his crewmates. Evil passes like a contagion through the utopian societies of the far future. A second expedition is mounted and returns to the black hole. Its lead scientist, Guunarsonsdottir, is convinced an alien species has evolved inside the exacting conditions of the black hole, and that communications can be opened across the event horizon. Joyns, a mission specialist, comes to fear that something malevolent, an ancient evil, is inside the black hole, wanting to escape. The mood aboard the ship deteriorates, and the crew split into two factions, fighting amongst themselves. Joyns is confined to quarters.

You can read more about Lake of Darkness on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

 

From Lake of Darkness
But she couldn’t sleep. She turned from her left to her right side and then again to her left, feeling the slight difference when she turned with the direction of spin as opposed to against it. She instructed the room to turn out all lights but then felt abandoned and scared in the dark, and so ordered the lights back on, to shine a low yellow-orange glow. She lay on her back. She tried to compose her mind into a meditative state, but it wouldn’t settle. She got up and knelt and prayed, but it was a vacancy, a mere going through the motions, and she soon stopped.

It was impossible to sleep.

At one point she heard two people outside her room. Given the great size of the startship and the relatively small number of crew, this was odd. Joyns sat up, believing they had specifically come to speak with her, and wondering why they hadn’t simply called her. But they hadn’t come to her.

There were two of them, one who sounded a little like Samuel, the other whose voice she didn’t recognise. That struck Joyns as odd, because she thought Guunarsonsdottir had barricaded herself and her followers in a separate part of the ship. But there they were, outside her room. Or their voices at any rate. Perhaps the barricade had been breached and Guunarsonsdottir’s followers were on the run. Perhaps they themselves were staging a raid behind enemy lines. The two of them were talking loudly about the best way of incapacitating Saccade—which must mean not only that Saccade had arrived, but the news of her advent must have reached Guunarsonsdottir’s portion of the ship as well. One of the two, perhaps Samuel said, distinctly, "kill her, it’s the only way" and the other person, Joyns didn’t recognise their voice, said: "she’s really here! really! she’s here!" and then laughed like a cat miaowing, then their voices dropped and Joyns couldn’t follow them. There followed a strange melange of sounds, scrapings and gruntings and smacking sounds, and it took Joyns a moment to piece together than the two figures were grappling and fighting one another.

Then there was a loud slapping sound, and the sound of somebody running away, their footsteps slightly syncopated by the fact that one foot was placed more spinwise than the other.

Had both parties run away? Was one lying wounded or dead outside her door?

Joyns contemplated getting up and checking, but a deep resistance to the idea occupied her limbs. She sat up and checked the ship’s time. One minute to midnight—the startship’s arbitrary midnight, by which the arbitrary business of timekeeping was calibrated, as it was on a million ships and habitats around the inhabited galaxy. I should get up, she told herself. But she did not.

It was dead midnight and the lights in her room glowed blue.

She hadn’t told the room to change the colour, and it was a chilly, morbid shade of blue that was accompanied by a distinct drop in temperature. She hadn’t ordered that either! It certainly wasn’t going to help her get to sleep, so she said "Room!" preparatory to ordering it to restore the earlier light and heat settings when she saw she was not alone.

She saw at once who it was: the Gentleman. He was dressed in a mauve jacket and trousers, the jacket sharply cut and folded over a harlequin-green shirt and necktie, after the manner and style of an actor in an historical drama. He carried a walking stick shaped like the Hebrew letter vav. His face was lean and sharp-featured. Joyns was not a fan of antique painted art and so was unaware of the old Vannick painting The Arnolfini Betrothal, but had she ever seen that image she would have recognised the face of the man in her visitor (though not the lavish Flemish cloak; the Gentleman wore nothing so voluminous). And here he was, as—Joyns assumed—he had appeared to Raine, years before. He was seated in a chair that had not been there before, surveying Joyns with prominently-lidded eyes.

"Good grief," said Joyns.

"Half right," said the Gentleman.

"You’re not here," Joyns said. She drew herself back along the floor, and rested her spine against the wall of her room. If she sprinted she would surely reach the door before the Gentleman could stop her. Indeed, it looked, from his demeanour and his posture, as if any decision on his part to rise from his seat would be a leisurely and unhurried business. But then she thought: he appeared instantly from nowhere. She thought: if I rush the door he’ll be there in the way before I move an inch. Then she reassured herself: he was a vision, a hallucination, and certainly not real. "You," she reiterated, "are not here."

"Here," he said looking around, "is a more complicated concept than perhaps you give it credit." 

Abi Curtis, "The Headland"

 

Abi Curtis is Professor of Creative Writing at York St John University. She is the author of two poetry collections, Unexpected Weather (Salt, 2009) and The Glass Delusion (Salt, 2013) and a climate change novel Water & Glass (Cloud Lodge, 2017). She also edited Blood & Cord: Writers on Early Parenthood (Emma Press, 2023) and is currently working on a co-authored guide to Speculative Fiction. She has eclectic interests and has written and presented on subjects from motherhood to bees; ancient churches to the uncanny; squid to elegy and enjoys collaborating with artists and musicians. 

About The Headland
A novel about the dark gifts of grief, what it means to belong, and the possibility that time and space may not be what we think they are.

It is the morning following a devastating hurricane on England's south coast, and local painter Dolores is walking the shingle beach of the Headland. She spots something unusual lurking in a piece of driftwood - a color, a creature, perhaps something fostered by the twin forces of storm and atomic fallout. It's all anyone has been talking about, after all, just months after Chernobyl and in the shadow of the local nuclear power station.

Decades later, her son Morgan returns to the Headland to arrange for Dolores' funeral. The power station is about to be decommissioned, and the bleak landscape is best known now as a landing point for desperate immigrants from across the Channel. Morgan's girlfriend is pregnant - an unexpected revelation that he is not at all sure about - and he is especially keen to discover what he can from his mother's unusual cottage, especially about his father, whom he has never known. He uncovers the diary his mother wrote following the hurricane. It tells a story about Dolores and the strange being she discovers on the beach - a story which is both enthralling and heartrending. As he reads the journal, Morgan's own experiences of the Headland become increasingly inexplicable. The journal challenges Morgan's ideas about love and grief, parenthood and belonging, and the very fabric of time. As he unravels the mysteries of his mother's past, he must come to terms with his own origins and face the growing violence from those who would threaten the peace of the Headland.

You can read more about The Headland on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From The Headland, by Abi Curtis
I went to the library yesterday after work, looking for a better encyclopaedia than the old one I have here, to try to work out if there are any creatures like her anywhere. When I looked, I saw that Violet has the characteristics of a Humboldt squid, with its ability to change colour, flashing brightly in the sea depending on its moods. But then, she also has the proboscis of a moth, who uses it to taste the air. But she doesn’t have wings. The golden mole has iridescent fur, but it is not invisible. There are creatures that like very hot conditions, like camels, or weird bacteria called water bears, which live off thermal vents. These can also revert to a state of agelessness and defy the passage of time. Then, I looked at plant life. The violet flower: so many different species, some thriving where there is barely any soil. Her creeping legs which shift in and away from my perception as they move belong to nothing that I can identify. Only deep-sea creatures seem to possess this quality of transparency, the filaments of their nervous systems visible beneath their jelly-like skin. But these would be like deflated balloons outside of the water, and Violet has thrived on land for weeks now. I looked at insects, mammals, birds, cephalopods. Octopuses and squids have limbs that can perceive independently. Bees are especially attuned to the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, which humans cannot see, and so attracted by white and purple flowers. They communicate by vibration and strong smell, and movement. The bookworm, which is really a beetle, eats mould, glue and the bindings of books, only incidentally devouring the paper. Moths do that too. Some butterflies like decaying matter and live near graves …

I made a list of notes like a student cramming for a weird exam. Then, I looked at another section of the library. Next to the Science Fiction were titles like Top Secret and The Many Types of Luminous Sky Phenomena, Alien Life, and We are not Alone: Alien Abduction Cases. Some had facsimile documents from places like the FBI with chunks redacted in black ink, alien autopsy photos and pilot accounts of disc- or orb-like vessels. Sketches from abduction ‘victims’ of thin grey men with big black screen eyes. If Violet is not of this world, she is not this kind of alien.

Teika Marija Smits, "Umbilical"

Teika Marija Smits is a UK-based writer and freelance editor. She writes poetry and fiction, and her speculative short stories have been published in IZ Digital, Parsec, Reckoning, Shoreline of Infinity, Best of British Science Fiction and Great British Horror 6. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Russian Doll, was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in March 2021, and Umbilical, her first collection of short stories, was published by NewCon Press in August 2023. Waterlore, her micro short story collection, is due to be published by Black Shuck Books in November 2023. A fan of all things fae, she is delighted by the fact that Teika means fairy tale in Latvian. Teika is on Twitter/X @MarijaSmits and her website is here.  

About Umbilical

Containing 21 stories of motherhood and mythology, science and spirituality, that traverse both space and time, Umbilical delves deep into the human psyche and the power of creativity. Smits’s writing dances between multiple genres, taking in science fiction, fantasy and horror, and the stories range in tone from dark to light and feature well-known figures from long-ago tales such as Bluebeard, Baba Yaga, the Minotaur and the Green Man.

You can read more about Umbilical on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample from the collection. 

From Umbilical, by Teika Marija Smits

The Green Man

“Olly, we know you can hear us,” said Jack. “So are you coming to The Green Man or what?”

Olly opened his eyes, put his hand to his earpiece and disconnected himself from the cloud. He sat up, the thin plastic mattress rucking up beneath him.

“It’ll be fun,” said Selma, “an adventure. They serve mead. Real mead.”

“You’re shitting me,” said Olly.

“No, we are absolutely not shitting you,” insisted Mohinder, his face as serious as ever. “But we’re making plans and need to know if you’re up for it.”

Olly’s eyes flicked over to Nate’s mattress. It was empty, and for a moment his face revealed the panic he felt.

Selma laughed. “Don’t worry. Lover boy’s just gone to the loo. But he wants to come with us.”

Olly reddened, told them all to fuck off, and laid down again, his back to the three of them. As he reconnected to the cloud, music and updates streaming into his consciousness, he heard Jack again: “We go on Friday. When there’ll be a full moon. A Green Grass Moon.” Selma said something about bicycles.

Olly began to doze. And as he slipped into sleep his neural feed suddenly filled with strange images: a lime-coloured moon; blades of grass; a grinning man, his green face covered in leaves.

Reality Is Not What It Seems: My Creative Writing PhD

By Kirsten Arcadio

The philosopher Yuval Noah Harari claims that "our future is in the hands of the social and digital media giants" and decisions are being taken by "a small international caste of business people, entrepreneurs and engineers." Governments have become "managers," he says. They have no vision, "whereas meet the people in Google, in Facebook, they have tremendous visions about the future, about overcoming death, living for ever, merging humans with computers. I do find it worrying that the basis of the future, not only of humankind, the future of life, is now in the hands of a very small group of entrepreneurs" (see Harari’s recent interview with the Guardian here).

Suffice to say, I agree. The idea that new technology will open the door to control of the masses is what propelled me towards pitching a PhD proposal to my supervisor, Jonathan Taylor, in late 2018. After several years writing speculative fiction in what I tend to think of as an amateur capacity, I was ready to take my writing to the next level and this theme had the potential to take me there. I was thrilled to be accepted onto a six-year part-time PhD programme in early 2019 as a result. 

The creative section of my PhD is a novel, Thrown, a socio-political tech-thriller which tells the story of what happens when a computer scientist with an ambiguous past is recruited to build a virtual reality for government services. My creative project uses fiction to examine a possible near-future dystopian scenario where the competing forces of government and online media giants use technology to manipulate society.

The idea of virtual reality is not new. However, the idea that elements of our society may be taken over by virtual and/or augmented reality is much closer than many realise (I believe). In some ways, my thesis is a cautionary tale, in others, a creative exploration. It's based on the idea that government services and virtual reality might one day combine to take complete control of society. My intention was to present this idea in a creative work rather than a factual one. It is my desire - as is the case of many science fiction writers before me - to use storytelling to bring a dry, technological plausibility to life. 

How have I approached this throughout my PhD journey? Fast forward to 2023 and I feel like a marathon runner tackling the last six miles. I’ve drafted a novel Thrown and its accompanying critical reflective commentary. I’ve written all the words … all 100,000 of them in draft form. As a digital communications professional, I’m used to writing and editing. Writing at pace doesn’t phase me. But a PhD is a completely different beast. It’s a journey into my own subconscious, an exercise in perfecting the craft, on contextualising my ideas and developing them in an interesting and engaging way.  It’s a lot - yes, I’ve come a long way, but I’ve still probably got a year’s work left to get to the end of this road. My biggest challenge now is to get the hard-hitting human challenges of my concept across, and indeed, as my novel has progressed, my mind has turned from concept to character. After all, stories are about the journeys we take as human beings and the challenges we have to overcome. Over time, my protagonist and her small crew of friends and (mostly) enemies, have grown with the work. My focus in recent months has turned to the characters’ own journeys, on their hopes and fears, on the stories they tell about themselves, and the ones they want to hide. Thrown is a high concept novel, but it’s also a character study, a journey into the subconscious mind, laid bare by the blurred lines between reality and virtual reality. 

I don’t know what questions readers will ask themselves after reading my PhD. Maybe they might include: to what extent are we already living in a VR? With one foot in an artificial reality, are we already partially "meta" - more about the stories we tell about ourselves than our real selves? Could a VR, therefore, end up being more real than the real world? But whatever the questions the thesis raises, I’m having fun writing it. 

About the author

Kirsten Arcadio has written three novels, each with a different speculative theme, Borderliners, Split Symmetry and WorldCult. Her fourth novel, Zeitgeist, is a coming-of-age adventure set in Germany against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall. She’s also a part-time poet, digital communications nerd and frazzled head of an Anglo-Italian family. After working for over fifteen years in digital communications, she returned to her twin first loves, literature and philosophy, in 2011. She’s passionate about the big questions in life and how these can be explored using speculative fiction and, to this end, has been working on a PhD in Creative Writing since 2019. When she’s not writing she’s obsessing about science fiction, she loves all things Italian, including her husband, and she once taught English in the Italian senate.

Adam Roberts, "The This"

 

Adam Roberts is the author of 24 science fiction novels, and many non-fiction and academic works, including a History of Science Fiction (2nd ed, Palgrave 2016). He is professor of nineteenth-century literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and lives a little way west of London. He blogs here. He also blogs here, and here. He probably has too many blogs, to be honest.

About The This, by Adam Roberts

The This is a pulp-science fiction novelisation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The title refers to a corporation who market a device that, once it is inserted into the roof of your mouth and when it has embedded its tendrils in your brain, allows you to go online, post to social media and so on simply by thinking it; either a simple device to make your life easier, or perhaps a malign plot to recruit you to a hive-mind consciousness. But, really, the novel is  pulp-science fiction novelisation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.  

You can read more about The This on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From The This

It was a sunny day. A marine-coloured sky. A scattering of bright white clouds were stretching their irregular-shaped wings. Birds circled. Rich paused on his building’s doorstep to put on sunglasses, and then navigated the mob of bins, gathered like ravers in the tiny front yard, mouths open at the gobsmacking splendour of the day. Then onto the pavement, turn left and along to the main road. He got his phone out and checked his feeds.

A wait at the junction, where the south circular traffic buzzed and fizzed its electric way westward and eastward. Rich on his phone, just like every other pedestrian, crowds at each of the four corners of this cross-hatched yellow box. All this infrastructure, set up in the last century to service that small fraction of the population who are actually blind had found new purpose in this century servicing the physically-sighted but functionally-blind populations walking about with their gazes kidnapped by their phones.

Bip-bip-bip-bip, and Rich stretched his legs and strode across.

Past the station and down the hill, swerving as and when another sightless pedestrian approached in the opposite direction with that fifth sense modern humanity has developed since the invention of these screens, these ubiquitous screens, these unignorable screens. An electronic patter of unignorable status updates, and he couldn’t look away. The map-app pinged him to turn left. He was at the river. Putney bridge, which is of stone, wearing its row of Victorian-style lampposts like eyelashes. And there was the Thames, still not weary after forty thousand years of scouring its gravel bed and pouring itself into the sea. The air smelt of silt and brine and vaguely of something tartly chemical, which fact barely registered on Rich’s sensorium. Rich didn’t look at the river. It’s not as though he’d never seen it before, after all. Eyes on his phone he trotted down Lower Richmond Road and stopped when his map-app sounded its little alarm.

He was there.

There is a word that always describes where we are, of course.

Rich finally disengaged his eyes from his phone. The Putney offices of The This were a new-build seven-storey weave of glass, helixing whitestone pillars and steel. It looked expensive which, Rich assumed, was the point. He walked up the ramp. Doors swished away before him and reconnected behind him and he was in a marble hallway.

‘Hello?’ he said to the receptionist. A real live human, paid to sit behind a counter all day. Rich moved closer, smacking the marble as he walked as if his own feet were slow-clapping him. ‘I’m Rich Rigby. Differencework have set-up a quick interview with,’ he checked his phone, ‘Aella Hamilton?’

Kevan Manwaring, "Black Box"

Dr Kevan Manwaring is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Winchester. He is an alumnus of the University of Leicester, where he completed his PhD in Creative Writing under the supervision of Dr Harry Whitehead in 2018. He also taught Creative Writing at the university. His novel and now audio drama Black Box was written alongside his doctoral research, inspired by interdisciplinary conversations on campus and visits to the National Space Centre. It won the national 'One Giant Write' science fiction manuscript competition in 2016. 

About Black Box

Prize-winning eco-science fiction novel Black Box, by Kevan Manwaring, has been adapted into a gripping audio drama by Alternative Stories and Fake Realities as part of their CliFi season. 

Inspired by the cutting edge research into artificial intelligence and space exploration at the University of Leicester (where Kevan completed his PhD and won various writing commissions) Black Box was written as a ‘side novel’ during his part-time research degree – a break from researching Scottish folklore for his main project. He entered the national Literature Works ‘One Giant Write’ science fiction novel manuscript competition ‘on a whim’ and won it. 

Kevan wrote a draft of Black Box while on writing retreat in a remote croft on the coast of Wester Ross, Western Highlands. To research the settings of the novel he visited the National Space Centre, and the biomes of the Eden Project in Cornwall. 

Adapting his own opening chapters for the pilot episodes, Kevan has worked closely with sound engineer and Alternative Stories director, Chris Gregory, who recruited and recorded professional British and American actors, and created the soundtrack and soundscape. 

Launched as part of the Alternative Stories CliFi season, Kevan was interviewed about his project in a special feature alongside fellow writer Anna Orridge, whose short story, ‘Backdrop,’ was also adapted. You can listen to the interview here. 

Black Box is a dark eco-science fiction thriller about the consequences of exploration of the Solar System and beyond. A desperate mission to find water – and the possibility of life – on one of Jupiter’s moons is set against a backdrop of a dying Earth. Kevan says: 'In Black Box, I wanted to look into the abyss, but I also wanted to offer a glimmer of hope. I offer not another bleak dystopian vision of the future, nor a wildly optimistic utopia, but what Atwood terms an "Ustopia" - for one man's heaven is another man's hell.'

You can listen to all three pilot episodes of Black Box here.

Sci-fi Shorts Competition

By Jonathan Taylor

Over the last few months, the Centre for New Writing, Literary Leicester Festival and the National Space Centre have together been running a Creative Writing competition called "Sci-Fi Shorts." Entrants were invited to write science-fiction short stories on a space theme. There were two categories, one for writers 15 and under, one for writers 16+. 

The winners have now been announced, and the awards ceremony took place at the Space Centre as part of Literary Leicester Festival on Saturday, along with talks by eminent science-fiction authors Philip Reeve and Alastair Reynolds. 

The judging panel included representatives from the National Space Centre and the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. I was one of them. The competition was hugely enjoyable to judge, and there were many strong entries to choose from - despite the difficulty of the challenge. As someone whose first published stories were science fiction, I often think science fiction is one of the hardest of all genres to write in. You have to juggle so many different elements in a successful science fiction story: stylish writing, characterisation, convincing scientific details, so-called "world building," and the demands of narrative - of telling a good story.  I moved away from writing science fiction many years ago - though I've always thought I might eventually return to it, and I still read widely in the form - to write in a more "realist" (or magical-realist) vein. I can't help feeling that realism is easier in some ways: you don't have to manage the science in the same way, and your world is ready-built for you. To manage these things whilst telling a good and emotional story is the great challenge of science fiction; and the winning entries for this competition did so brilliantly, almost effortlessly, in ways I very much admire.

You can read the prize-winning entries via the links below:

Age 16+:
Winner: 'In Gagarin’s Time' by Laura Ward
Runner-up: 'Bunker Mentality' by Paul Starkey 

Age 15 and below:
Winner: 'In Armstrong’s Footsteps' by Ashley Tan Mei-Lynn 
Runner-up: 'Lost In Space' by Giles Carey

Honourable Mentions:
‘What is it, Leavine?’ by Adair Cole 

‘Space Debris’ by Andrew Doubt 

Some of the winners with Philip Reeve at the Space Centre