In science, fantasy, and horror, there is an increasing number of works that explore the idea of a home and what that might encompass, how it has changed over time, and how it has become something not always comforting and safe nor desirable but one that has been manipulated and twisted.
The concept of a home ties to the comfort it brings us, with safety, a place we desire to return to—a definition, or I suppose an understanding or exploration, that is more so about the emotion rather than the physical structure, about the individual and personal subjectivities we tie to the idea of a home rather than the objective explanation.
I thought much about the depictions of homes being left behind, sentient homes desiring their past owners or seeking new inhabitants (Stephen Howard’s This House Isn’t Haunted But We Are, “Open House on Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell, “Spectacular View” by Gordon Sun, “Do Houses Dream of Scraping the Sky” by Jana Bianchi). I think about the stories where the inhabitants become one with their homes through both memories and their bodies (“The Girl with a City Inside of Her” by Jeannette Ng, A.G.A. Wilmot’s Withered, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Parasite). The growing sense of displacement, placelessness, homelessness in the world, whether it is through disaster, war, housing crises, immigration, identity reconciliation, disillusion of nationalism, challenging the truths of old cultural traditions. The way our bodies both accept and reject our identities and our bodies themselves as homes—immigration, in particular, as leaving of both a place and a body and an identity (“Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self” by Isabel J. Kim).
Homes have become not only settings but serve as metaphors, are the keepers of histories and memories, traumas, but also of secrets held and buried and awaiting resurface (Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Beloved by Toni Morrison, White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi, His House). They have become the fosterers of futures, where new families move in, ones that have housed generations upon generations. Homes have become not only places but also people in which others seek groundedness while in the same breath causing placelessness in others.
More often than not, we are the ones choosing our own homes, shaping and molding them to our own identities and ideals, but sometimes, we have no choice, and sometimes, these homes will reject us—and sometimes, it is not just a single house or a single person or family, but a community, a city, a country and nation (“My Country Is a Ghost” by Eugenia Triantafyllou).
However, our homes are also our memories, layers upon layers buried deep—familiar things that we find solace in but also things that bring us pain (Inception, “A House Full of Voices Is Never Empty” by Miyuki Jane Pinckard). But sometimes, even that is taken away (The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa). And in other instances, we might choose to die with our homes (“On Planetary Palliative Care” by Thomas Ha) or hold onto them even in death, in chaos, in mindlessness (Zone One by Colson Whitehead).
Yet, homes can also be prisons, places of confinement, of terror and restriction and suppression and oppression (Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, 1984 by George Orwell, The Vegetarian by Han Kang). Places that we will need to interrogate the realities of (“Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin). To some, home has become a place that takes and takes and takes rather than one that gives.
With the growing genres of ecopunk, cli-fi, solar/lunar punk, what we as humans see as resources, we sometimes forget are the homes of others living on this planet: the natural homes we ourselves do not often think about because humans seldom live within these spaces—the dark depths of water, the tallest of trees slender and wispy, an echoing labyrinth of caves.
In my own work and life, I have thought much about the homes I have left behind, both willing and unwillingly, and the homes I am struggling to find and hold onto once more, as though wanting to know a far-standing stranger who refuses to approach the hand I’m holding out in greeting, who stares at it as though the gesture feels to them too foreign to accept. Or maybe, it has been me all along who has been afraid to approach—afraid of the inadequate first impression I would leave with my mangled tones and dwindling vocabulary.
What is it that I miss about my old homes? I often claw at the bits and pieces of memories as though they are leaves falling from a tree in hopes I can somehow reattach them onto the barrening branches. I pick and prod at my skin in hopes it might tell me the pasts and histories ingrained within its cells and DNA. But the truth of it all is that my birthplace had somehow over the years become a home I don’t remember how to miss, yet something within me continues to tell me that it is a feeling I should know, should remember, should learn again. And whenever I return to the place where I was born, it feels as though I am lying in my childhood bed in thin, floral pajamas too short, now riding above the ankles, my back against cool bamboo instead of too-soft mattress, with my hair in a short bob instead of long and tangled, resting to the sound of nighttime traffic and shopkeepers pulling down their metallic shutters instead of the buzz of white noise and my humming mind chattering stresses.
—an unexplained nostalgia of a time and place and person lost and found and lost and found and lost, a time and place and person I had moved on from and grown without, a place that has moved on and grown, too, without me—
Sometimes I am asked, why am I still trying to remember, how is it I still remember; and sometimes I am told, I should never forget, that I should have never forgotten.
And I suppose that is why I write, why many of us write—to remember and to forget; to hold on and to let go; to lose and to find; to become lost and to become found.
© 2025 Ai Jiang
