maelstromandmoonshadow

Please note that this is a republished edition of an archived post.

A sardonic and gritty commentary on the human condition from the distance of 700 million lightyears, J.S. Harman’s The Void provides a scathing social commentary in a future where incarcerated peoples are sent to serve their time in isolated observation stations to become “contributing members of society”. Punchy jibes from the protagonist really set the tone for the piece, telling the story of a grim reality and a grimmer narrator who lives on “Observation Station 7X-1389: the destination of the truly irredeemable”. As if this premise were not dystopian enough, not only is our protagonist isolated: they are also observing a void of space where nothing happens.

Harman paints an existential portrait in The Void with mounting horror at every turn. Readers are forced to reckon with the harsh reality of slavery in the prison system and the ethics of forced service as an act of redemption. Even through the removal of space, Harman parallels his futuristic justice system with earth’s current systems of practice, leading us to the realisation that his horrific dystopian sci-fi might not be that far off from being our reality.

Reaching beyond these horrors, Harman ventures to ask: what happens when our masters simply stop noticing? This informed complicity is one atrocity, but it becomes something all the more ghastly when our protagonist reflects on one six-month period where they did not complete their work, and the result was simply . . . nothing.

The true brilliance of The Void, beyond the criticism of our justice system, is its crescendo. Here, our final competing nightmares – the super-void in space where there should be galaxies, and the remorseless villain left to monitor it – come together to create a truly brilliant story. The questions it evokes are endless, the possibilities a burden to bear. Did these galaxies ever exist? What made them disappear? What happens when you leave a sociopath in charge of monitoring the dead space?

What happens when they notice a threat to earth, and simply don’t care?

Harman builds delicious tension in this short story at a breakneck pace, and its climax will leave your mind reeling. The Void captures the very essence of what makes dystopian and sci-fi stories great: the unknown, the existential horror of the universe, the human mind. If his full-length novel debuting in late 2025 is anything near reminiscent to the gutting, tense, thought-provoking work that was The Void, then it truly will be a novel for the ages.

You can read The Void here, and view J.S. Harman’s website here.