Winners of the WSaDF twitfic writing contest

The results are in! At the end of October/begining of November we held a colonial speculative fiction themed twitfic writing contest, basically asking people to write short-short stories (up to 124 characters) along the lines of the WSaDF anthology. There were many brilliant entries (see all of them collected at the Web Archive or via Twitter search), but after long and in-depth discussion, our three judges (Amal El-Mohtar, Fabio Fernandes and Nisi Shawl) have picked a clear winner and three runners-up. Just look at the spareness and efficiency of this writing...

The winner


The runners-up (in no particular order)






Congratulations to all winners, and thanks to everyone who took part, the lovely judges, and the generous donors of prizes (including Bart Lieb of Crossed Genres, C. Allegra Hawksmoor of Vagrants in the Ruins, and the inimitable Ernest Hogan).

Guest post: Ways of Seeing

Guest post by Stephanie Saulter

I’ve been enjoying the stories in the We See a Different Frontier anthology of postcolonial science fiction, and thinking about how I could contribute to the blog carnival that the editors had devised to accompany its release. I’d already written about the constraints on expectation, the presumption of a small and specific sphere of interest, that marginalised cultures can have for the literary output of their own people, and I didn’t want to repeat myself. I’m also aware that, as a person of relative privilege within both my birth country of Jamaica and my adopted homeland of the UK, I’m not particularly well-placed to rail against inequity. Besides, the big injustices are easy to spot. It’s harder to unpick the small, everyday presumptions about what is standard and what is strange, the subtle and mostly unremarked prejudices that inform judgements and guide aspirations.

Given that the ethos of the anthology is to shift the reader’s perspective from the dominant to the dominated, I thought I would write about just how challenging that can be, both in life and in fiction; and how important it is to explain and persuade, when sometimes what we really want to do is bludgeon and blame. But I couldn’t quite find a way in to what I wanted to say; it all felt a bit amorphous, as difficult for me to pin down in prose as it can be to identify in action.

And then I went to Bristolcon, and had a conversation that brought it all into very sharp focus.

WSADF contributors round robin interview

Futurefire.net Publishing recently put out an anthology titled We See a Different Frontier, which includes sixteen science fictional or fantastic stories about colonialism, told from the perspective of the colonized. We have brought together almost all of the contributors (authors, editors, etc.) for a circular interview; each participants answers a question, and then in turn asks one of the next in line.

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Aliette asks Djibril:

For me, We See a Different Frontier is an important watermark in genre, presenting the perspective of the third world/the colonised instead of the usual (white) Anglo-American hegemony. As someone who lives in the UK, how do you relate to this hegemony, and what do you think should be done to counter its effects?