Ten-years-after Tuesday: Xiomara's Flying Circus

Xiomara’s Flying Circus
Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus, ten years on

by Ernest Hogan

This flash sequel takes place ten years after the events of “Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus”, Ernest’s story in We See a Different Frontier, and was written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of TFF. If you want to see more fiction like this in the future, please support our fundraiser, where you can pre-order the celebration anthology and pick up other exciting rewards, for a few more hours only!

Mr. Burroughs must have thought he was Tarzan the way he treated Xiomara.

“You’ve done well for a hot little tamale. In just ten years, you’ve gone from a señorita in a dirty little town in Mexico to to owning a movie studio in Hollywood.”

He reached under the table.

I reached for the pistols under my silly embroidered waiter’s jacket

Mr. Burroughs’ bodyguard, a big lug who was too stupid to play Tarzan didn’t even notice me. He believed me when I said I “no espeak mucho English.”

Xiomara slapped Burroughs’ hand. “Please, Señor, we are in public!”

“We might as well be in Tijuana by the looks of this place. And call me Ed.”

“Ed. A funny little name.”

“We can’t all be something exotic like Xiomara.”

I hate the way gringos mispronounce her name.

“And I will be be the perfect Dejah Thoris!”

Mr. Burroughs licked his lips and grinned.

“So, Señor Burroughs, do we have a deal?”

“I’d love to have you make A Princess of Mars!”

“I’ll have my lawyers send you a contract.”

“Yes, yes. But first, I though we would seal this deal in another way.”

He panted a sloppy kiss on her lips, tore her dress, and squeezed a chichi.

I reached for my guns.

One of Xiomara’s eyes told me to wait.

“Señor! You are a married man!”

“My wife is more interested in making love to a bottle than me. And you inspire me!”

“Cabrón!” said Xiomara.

Mr. Burroughs whistled. His bodyguard aimed his gun at Xiomara’s face.

Her fist smashed Mr. Burroughs’ huevos as I put a bullet into the bodygaurd. Then I vaporized Mr. Burroughs with the Tesla death ray.

Cháirez and Holguín, who flew with me for General Villa, and now owned this restaurant, came out from the backroom, with guns drawn.

“Any problemas?” asked Cháirez.

I vaporized the bodyguard.

“Nada,” said Xiomara. “He thought my naglas were part of the deal.”

“That chingdera makes life easier,” said Holguín.

“Too bad,” said Cháirez. “It would have been a great movie.”

“It will be,” said Xiomara. “I’ll talk to his widow.”

Cháirez and Holguín hooted. “Viva Princess of Mars!”

“Princess?” said Xiomara. “I’d like to make her more of an empress.”

Friday Flash: From the Mud

From the Mud, Rising Bravely

Lotus, ten years on

Joyce Chng

This flash sequel takes place ten years after the events of “Lotus”, Joyce’s story in We See a Different Frontier, and was written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of TFF. If you want to see more fiction like this in the future, please support our fundraiser, where you can pre-order the celebration anthology or pick up other exciting rewards.

I find myself squelching through the deep brown murk, feeling the thick ooze slide up my thighs. I cherish the feeling, because it reminds me that I still live, that my family still lives on this borrowed land.

It is not really land. It is just a space I call ‘home’. Land is such a taboo word these days. The landers fight for it in a game of us versus them.

Where we live, this ‘land’, is just mud. A mixture of water and soil and dreams.

I feel for the roots beneath my bare feet, the tube-like forms that promise nourishment. I reach down, the mud inching up my bare arms. Pull, pull, pull… and the roots emerge, darkened by mud and cool to the touch. Washed, it is crisp and delicious in soups and lightly blanched in boiling water.

Children’s laughter fill the air. Even the lotus flowers bob in the wind as if they dance with the laughter. This time of the year, they are pink and white in colour. I love them.

I hear Dad swear sharply in Cantonese. Sei yen tao. Bloody hell. The kind of words that would earn him a glare from Ma. The condenser has stopped working again. We are surrounded by water, lots of it—but most of them are not drinkable. Can you drink salt? So we condense. Rain. Moisture. Anything. Any pocket of fresh water.

Sighing, I know that dinner will be filled with pockets of grumpiness and silence. But we can manage, can we? I place the lotus roots in the plastic pail. I foresee more scavenging in the great plastic heap in the sea. Plastic does not disintegrate.

Close to me, Tia is also done with her harvesting. Her duty is to cut the large leaves. Dad and Ma will exchange them for useful things at the nearest Boaters’ Meet.

Something gold and sleek dart between my legs. A flash of scales, a dash of crimson and orange, like ripple and magic.

Dad told me once that they fought over fish. It was ten years ago. It was a silly thing, fighting over fish. But fish is meat, fish is nourishment, fish is food. Then they went back again and started to breed the fish.

So, this is our little secret. Our story from the mud, rising up bravely.

Or this is what my parents tell us, day after day, night after night.

Sometimes, rising bravely from the mud is what we can do at the very least. Like the lotus. Like my name. I was born when the lotus rose from the water.

Interview: Sandra McDonald

This week saw the publishing of Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection. Dozois's annual collections are among the oldest and foremost of the genre, and we're happy to have no less than two stories from We See a Different Frontier on it: Sunny Moraine's A Heap of Broken Images and Sandra McDonald's Fleet. A while ago, I interviewed Sandra about life in a different cultural environment, gender identity and colonialism. Here it is:



1. Where are you from originally? Did you live in other cities and/or countries? Where are you living now? Are you doing something now besides writing or are you a full-time writer? 

SANDRA MCDONALD - I’m a transplanted New Englander living in North Florida, and of Florida I’ve heard it said that the more north you go, the more South you get. Which is a roundabout way of saying there’s a large cultural gap between where I was and where I am now, and I got here through a similarly roundabout route of living in New York, England, Rhode Island, Virginia, Guam, Newfoundland, Key West, Connecticut, and California. Every new place is a discovery and delight. I don’t think I’d be a very good at living in the same house on the same hill in the same town for most of my life. Also, I’d probably be very bad at staying home and writing every day. I teach creative writing and other English classes at area colleges, write novels and short stories, publish some of my own work digitally, and feed every stray animal in my neighborhood. I’ve just passed my first decade of being a published author, and that includes 8 published novels and more than 70 published short stories. It’s all going very well.


2. You were a U.S. Navy commissioned officer working abroad. Where did you travel to and what did you see during your Navy time that might have inspired you to write Fleet?

SMD - What was fascinating to me about Guam in the 1990’s was how Japanese newlyweds would come to Guam to honeymoon “in America” but most Americans had no idea where or what Guam was, or its role in World War II. My apartment in the village of Yigo wasn’t far from the South Pacific Memorial Park, where Japanese soldiers killed themselves while American troops retook the island in 1944. For recreation, many of us would go “boonie-stomping” in the jungle and find abandoned tanks or other relics of war. Guam is lovely, rugged island stepped with a history of invasion and colonialism, and seemed like a natural fit when I saw that you were seeking out tales of post-colonialism.


3. Do you speak other languages than English? What was your experience in bridging the gap between your culture and a different one whenever you were abroad? What were the challenges? (Both in work and in
leisure)

SMD - Two years ago I was in Paris when a lovely old couple stopped to ask me, in French, how to get to the Eiffel Tower. To their amusement, the only sentence I could say in French was “I don’t speak French.” I know a smattering of helpful travel words in different languages but nowhere near enough for a long conversation in a pub. I’m actually sad to be monolingual, but traveling with English-only skills seems to be easier these days than it was when I was an exchange student based in London. Bridging a gap between cultures can be done through music, food, visual arts and other means, so I try not to let my lack of language keep me from interacting with locals and new places.


4. Gender identity and colonialism: two hard issues to tackle, and you managed to get them both very skillfully in your story. Why did you choose to tell the story of Magahet/Isa, and in such a setting?

SMD - She’s a transgender character following in the footsteps of Diana Comet, the titular heroine of my first collection of short stories that won a Lambda Literary award, was a Booklist Editor’s choice, and became an American Library Association “Over The Rainbow” book.  How we define, defend and debate gender in the U.S. is fascinating to me, and certainly there are clashes between cultures where gender is rigidly enforced vs where gender variety is protected.  For years now i’ve tried to explore those schisms and honor the men and women who live outside the boxes we try to stuff them in. First and foremost in Fleet, I wanted to write about how the post-apocalyptic residents of Guam, so cut off from the world, would prepare for the inevitable return of outsiders in a way opposite that of the Pacific cargo cults after World War II. That led me into an exploration of its tragic colonial past. Isa’s birth gender was a secondary consideration. The sexual harassment she suffers is a offshoot of what it’s like to be a woman in our own age, but I carefully set up that she has a loving husband, strong friendships, and the support of her community.


5. "Stories on the themes of colonialism and cultural imperialism focused on the viewpoints of the colonized," as it was written in the pitch for WE SEE A DIFFERENT FRONTIER. Do you think your story is about revenge? Stories written by the colonized are (or should be) always about revenge? Or there is a glimmer of hope for understanding in a postcolonial world?


SMD - I don’t see it as a story about revenge, but instead about the extraordinary measures one society takes to protect itself for as long as possible from the world that has always done it harm. In my own personal belief system, which is mostly Buddhist, revenge is pointless. We only harm ourselves when we harm others. But for civilizations that have been enslaved and destroyed by others, revenge fantasies can be normal or cathartic. My hope for the locals in Fleet is that they preserve their lifestyle as long as possible, given the scarcity of resources and lasting environmental damage, before change washes ashore again.

A sentimental journey into copyediting

Guest post by Valeria Vitale

The reason I have chosen the word «journey» is not merely metaphorical. Actually, it is pretty accurate: I read the draft version of We See a Different Frontier seated on the upper deck of the number 59 bus from Brixton to Aldwych.

I had been asked to proofread it, looking for typos, mainly, but also little gaps in plot, inconsistencies or other things like that. I agreed because I was curious about the stories, and that’s how it started. Every morning, for a few weeks, I waited at my bus stop with the book in my hand and a quite serious look on my face. I would greet the driver with a little nod of solidarity (we were both on duty on that bus) and march up the stairs.

Then I sat on the first available seat and started reading, holding an imaginary red pen, happy to prove myself useful. But books and journeys often do not go in the way we expected. Other things happen. For example that you get carried away with the stories and completely forgot that you were supposed to spot mistakes. So, when I was reading Sofia Samatar’s “I stole the D.C.’s eyeglass” or Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “What really happened in Ficandula”, I suddenly realised that I had to start again.

Two times.

Three times…

Some other times it may happen that the writing is so good that you want to go a couple of pages back and read it again, just for pleasure. With Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Them ships” or Benjaun Sriduangkaew’s “Vector”, I was really tempted to poke the person sitting next to me on the bus and telling them, «Do you want to hear something really awesome?!» Sadly, after a little hesitation, a sense of social appropriateness always prevailed.

You may also find that some of the stories contain such powerful images that you feel like you have to stop reading and close your eyes for a little while. I did it when I was reading J.Y. Yang’s “Old Domes” or Lavie Tidhar’s “Dark Continents”. I wanted to visualise what the words described, in my own imagination. In the eye of the people seating next to me, I must have looked pretty much like one of those commuters that take quick and not too comfortable naps on public transportation. But I wasn’t sleeping: I was observing an army of giant cockroaches taking over London, and I was meeting the anthropomorphic spirits of old buildings.

I didn’t just read WSaDF’s stories. I talked about them, discussed them, explained what I liked and disliked and why. So, they became more and more mine; the characters more and more real. They used to keep me company on my journey back home, on the same bus, 59, Aldwych to Brixton. Often very late, when I was usually too tired to read but not to get lost in my own thoughts. I could almost see them out of the corner of my eye: a long-necked mechanical bird lurking from the front window, a were-tiger purring just behind my neck, a barefoot girl running up and down the empty deck.

I’ve been seeing them less and less in the last months. But they haven’t left me. They live somewhere in my memory and conscience, shattered in images, ideas, words. And they are not inert. They have been growing and reproducing themselves, copulating with other images, ideas and words.

That’s why each time I know that the book got a good review or a nomination for a prize, I feel happy as for the success of a friend. As everyone, I had my favourites, according to very personal (sometimes slightly irrational) criteria. But all the stories in this anthology are worth reading, all the stories have left me something. And I am glad I had the opportunity to write this post, mainly because I can finally thank all the authors for bringing those stories to life. I can’t wait to read more.

SF twitfic contest for young writers

To celebrate the recent successes achieved by the We See a Different Frontier: postcolonial speculative fiction anthology, we're going to run another "twitfic" microfiction writing contest over the first couple weeks of the new year. If you are under 20 years old, this is your chance to win a handful of lovely prizes by writing a short story that fits within a single tweet (with space for hashtags) on the topic of colonialism-themed speculative fiction.

The rules:

• To be elligible to enter, you must not yet have reached your twentieth birthday on the day you post the tweet
• Your entire story should be under 125 characters long. Post your story in a tweet along with both the hashtags #wsadf #YAscifi
• Your story can be in any of the subgenres of science fiction, fantasy, horror or even surreal or magical realist, whatever works for you, so long as you include the theme of colonisation from the perspective of the colonized
• For an idea of what sort of stories themes might work, see the original call for submissions for the colonial SF/F anthology
• The closing date for entries is midnight UTC on Wednesday January 15th, 2014
• Prize-winning stories may be used in promotional contexts and other materials for the We See a Different Frontier anthology. All other rights, including full copyright, remain with the authors.

The prizes:

• One winner will receive a hardcopy of We See a Different Frontier; a one-year e-book subscription to Crossed Genres magazine; a signed copy of Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria; a reading slot in the outro of an instalment of one of the Escape Artists fiction podcasts; a copy of Ilike Merey's graphic novel a+e 4ever from Lethe Press.
• At the judges' discretion, one or more runners-up may in addition be offered e-book copies of the WSaDF anthology.

The judges:
The winning story and runners-up will be selected by the panel of judges, made up of:

• Malinda Lo (author of Ash and Huntress)
• Catherine Krahe (Alpha Workshop and Strange Horizons)
• Regina de Búrca (TFF co-editor and YA author)

Acclaim for We See a Different Frontier

Today's been a good day.

The We See a Different Frontier anthology has been receiving good press; we're very happy with most of the reviews we've seen, and will be surprised if some of the wonderful stories in our pages don't end up on various awards shortlists in the new year. Sales have also not been bad, for a small press publication. We're delighted with the quality of the anthology, but we're also very happy with the reception it has received.

Today got even better.

1. First we learn that Gardner Dozois Year's Best Science Fiction anthology for 2013 contains two stories first published in WSaDF in its pages. This means that, in Dozois's estimation, of the many thousands of SF short stories published in the last twelve months, two of them were in this small press publication. That's a pretty good endorsement. (Table of contents.)
2. On the same day, as a cherry on the top, BFS award-winning SFF reviews site Pornokitsch listed WSaDF in their five favorite anthologies of the year (which is saying something, as I think it's been a great year for anthologies).

There have been lots of other good things said about WSaDF in the last few months (see the reviews and endorsements listed on our press page, for example), but today has felt like icing. I'm especially happy that this anthology is being read and enjoyed by general science fiction and fantasy readers, not only those interested in social justice, diversity and postcolonialism who supported the fundraiser last year.

To celebrate, we're going to run another Twitter writing contest (this time for young authors) just after christmas, with copies of the anthology and other goodies to give away. Watch this space.

If you would like to find out whether you agree with these acclaimed anthologists and reviewers, you can buy the We See a Different Frontier from all the usual online booksellers. Links again on our press page.

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.

---

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?

Postcolonial SF/F Twit-fiction writing contest

If you haven't yet read the postcolonial speculative fiction anthology edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad, We See a Different Frontier, here is a chance to win a copy, and a great bunch of other goodies, simply by writing a <140-character microstory.

The rules of the contest are simple:

1. Write your colonialism-themed SFF microstory from the perspective of the colonized (full story guidelines as per the original CFS) in 124 characters or less.
2. Tweet your microstory with the hashtags #twitfic #WSaDF by midnight UTC, November 6th, 2013.
3. Multiple entries per author are allowed.
4. Stories will be judged by Amal El-Mohtar, Fabio Fernandes and Nisi Shawl.
5. One winning microstory will receive a paperback copy of the We See a Different Frontier anthology sent in the mail (an alternative prize of a pb of Outlaw Bodies may be offered if you already own a copy), plus a signed copy of Ernest Hogan's Smoking Mirror Blues, the new Crossed Genres superhero anthology Oomph, and the steampunk anthology Journeys in the Winterlands.
6. Runners-up prizes will include e-books of WSaDF or Outlaw Bodies, and Oomph.
7. The winning microstories may be reproduced by Futurefire.net Publishing in promotion for the anthology, but beyond that they belong to the authors.

WSaDF blog carnival

As announced the other day, we're running a Blog Carnival to promote the We See a Different Frontier anthology of colonialism-themed speculative fiction, and other authors and works in the area of underrepresented and postcolonial SF/F. (Get in touch if you'd like to take part.) We'll be listing most of the entries herebelow, as well as announcing them using the #WSaDF hashtag on Twitter. Stay tuned for interviews, guest blog posts, reviews, party games, giveaways, and any other goodies we can think of.

(The anthology can be bought in print from Amazon, or in the main e-book formats from Wizard's Tower. Other venues listed at the press page: We See a Different Frontier.)

The Carnival:

• Guest post: A sentimental journey into copyediting by Valeria Vitale
• Fabio has set up a new Different Frontiers blog
• Two WSaDF stories in Dozois's Year's Best!
• Taking Over English (by Benjanun Sriduangkaew at Strange Horizons)
• Twitter-chat on language and the postcolonial (on #WSaDF hashtag)
• Different Frontier now has a FB page!
• Round Robin interview
• Twitter-chat on alien contact and postcolonial SFF (on #WSaDF again)
• Looking into the Heart of Light, the Silence by Sunny Moraine
• Diversity is the New Normal (Only it isn't) by Fabio Fernandes at Kaleidoscope
• WSaDF themed twitfic wiriting contest
• Review of WSADF in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction
• A Twitter-chat on colonialism and worldbuilding in SFF (on the #WSaDF hashtag)
• Barbara Krasnoff's review
• Come for the Science Fiction, Stay for the Romance (Heather Massey)
• Why I wrote 'Lotus' - Land and Lotus Flowers (Joyce Chng)
• Interview with Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (by Seán Wright)
• Pancho Villa Wants You to Drink Responsibly on a Different Frontier, Ernest Hogan
• A sequel to "Lotus" by Joyce Chng
• Interview with Benjanun Sriduangkaew (by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz)
• Seán Wright's review on Adventures of a Bookonaut
• Interview with N.A. Ratnayake by Margrét Helgadóttir.
• Comments by Aliette de Bodard (who wrote the preface)

Call for participation: WSaDF blog carnival

photo by Ryan Uhrich on Flickr

Futurefire.net Publishing are running a Blog Carnival over this month and next, to help promote the We See a Different Frontier anthology of speculative fiction from the perspective of the colonized, and encourage and celebrate diversity in science fiction and fantasy in all its forms (and especially the intersection of marginalizations). We shall be featuring interviews with and guest posts by many of the authors and editors, contests and giveaways, and we'll welcome guest posts by other in or with an interest in the underrepresented vertices of the speculative fiction world.

We're calling here for guest bloggers, interviewers, reviewers, bloggers who would like to host guest posts by any of us, and anyone else who'd like to take part in the Carnival in any way. If you'd like to write a short post on any aspect of colonialism or diversity in SF/F for this or another blog taking part in the Carnival; or if you'd like to host a guest post or an interview on your blog; or if you have any other ideas for livening up the party, please do get in touch. (Leave a comment here, or email me, or tweet, etc.) We'd really like this Carnival to help plug other people and projects as well as WSaDF.

We'll keep a list of all relevant posts and other events in a follow-up to this blog post, and announce everything on Twitter using the #WSaDF hashtag.

I'll bring the writers and the beer. What music would you like to put on?

We See a Different Frontier: ToC

We're delighted to be able to announce the beautiful table of contents for the We See a Different Frontier anthology of colonialism-themed speculative fiction co-edited by Fabio Fernandes. We're really looking forward this hitting the bookshelves at the beginning of July 2013.

• Preface by Aliette de Bodard
• Introduction by Fabio Fernandes
• The Arrangement of Their Parts, Shweta Narayan
• Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus, Ernest Hogan
• Them Ships, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Old Domes, J.Y. Yang
• A Bridge of Words, Dinesh Rao
• The Gambiarra Effect, Fabio Fernandes ^*
• Droplet, Rahul Kanakia
• Lotus, Joyce Chng
• Dark Continents, Lavie Tidhar
• A Heap of Broken Images, Sunny Moraine
• Fleet, Sandra McDonald
• Remembering Turinam, N.A. Ratnayake
• Vector, Benjanun Sriduangkaew
• I Stole the D.C.’s Eyeglass, Sofia Samatar
• Forests of the Night, Gabriel Murray
• What Really Happened in Ficandula, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
• Critical afterword by Ekaterina Sedia ^*

We See a Different Frontier CFS: extended deadline

As announced three months ago, we are seeking submissions for a colonialism-themed anthology of new stories told from the perspective of those with experience of colonization or postcolonial cultures, titled We See a Different Frontier, to be guest edited by Fabio Fernandes and published by The Future Fire. (See the original Call for Submissions for all rules and pay scale.)

The call for submissions was due to close one week from today. We have received many excellent submissions in this time, but we would like to give more authors who have not yet had a chance to write a story on this theme, particularly authors with underrepresented perspectives (including those whose first language may not be English) the opportunity to do so. Rather than offer this extension of the submissions deadline only to a few authors who have already asked for it, we are keeping the reading period for this anthology open for a few weeks longer, until October 31st 2012.

All stories that are currently held for further consideration will remain in our shortlist until this new closing date, at which point we will make our final decision about the contents of the anthology.

Guest post: I Hear a Different Frontier by Nisi Shawl

Fellow geniuses, I have things to tell you that you probably already know. But you may know them in different ways than I do.

For instance, my friend Jaymee Goh knows about postcolonial science fiction and fantasy the way a woman much younger than me would, and in the way someone who was born and has lived most of her life outside the US would, and in the way of someone who has traveled much further into the figurative world of academia than I. So when she was interviewed in early June on the topic of writing postcolonial SF, and a questioner asked, “Do you think belonging to a Non-Western (sic) culture is essential to write a really good, convincing story about it? Being an outsider to the culture you want to write about is an enriching or empoverishing (sic) experience (or it doesn’t matter in the end)?” her reply was much longer and more considered than mine, and also more revealing. I would have said something like, “I refuse to answer your stupid.” Or, in a more cooperative mood I would have talked about my own experience writing about a culture from its outside, which requires work, which I guess might be equated with “empoverishment.”

Not Jaymee, though. She bestowed on the questioner several paragraphs of weighty thoughtfulness while flipping the power dynamic inherent in interview and interrogation right around. She noted that describing non-Western cultures from the perspective of their conquerors, or the perspective of their conquerors’ heirs, is quite a longstanding tradition. My favorite line from her response: "I really have to question why any one writer would ask such a question, and am hard-pressed to come up with any other answer besides 'seeking validation.'" Which validation she then proceeded to deny them.

A couple of weeks before that interchange, I appeared on the “Cultural Not-Appropriation” panel at WisCon 36 with Diantha Sprouse, Sofia Samatar, and Daniel José Older, our moderator. Diantha I’d known for several years, but Sofia and Daniel were new to me.

Daniel is a something of coreligionist—his practice of Lucumi and mine of Ifa are closely related—so that’s a perspective on empire we share, along with US birth and residency. But Daniel’s also younger than me, plus he’s male, and he speaks Spanish. We both differ from colonizers’ cultural paradigms, but in different ways. Our experiences of postcolonialism, and postcolonial speculative fiction, are different. Like yours and mine.

Which is where I would have come from if I’d been seriously answering the question Jaymee got asked. Where I did come from when talking on the WisCon panel about How to Do It Right: from the place of being simultaneously innocent and implicated, and paying attention to what that means.

What we all know, from our many perspectives, is that colonialism bites the flaming donkey weenie. It messes shit up. It messes up most of what could be used to sort shit out and unmess it. It extracts costs from the colonized, costs that are carried across generations. Some of these costs masquerade as benefits. Some are presented as choices.

I do my best not to contribute to the legacy of colonialism in my fiction, but when it comes to certain entanglements I understand that I must use the utmost caution and concision.

I made what I’d call a successful foray into explicitly postcolonial science fiction with “Deep End,” which first appeared in the anthology So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004). Taking Australia as a model, I wrote about a prison ship flying to an extrasolar planet with a freight of disembodied activists; these activists were scheduled to be downloaded into clones of their oppressors. “Deep End” was reprinted in my Tiptree Award-winning collection Filter House in 2008. This summer I’m working on a sequel.

My current novel-in-progress, Everfair, is another deliberate confrontation of colonialism: steampunk set in the Belgian Congo. It arose from my dislike of steampunk’s tendency to privilege imperialism, and especially Britain’s Victorian Empire. It also focuses on the site of one of the worst modern human rights atrocities, an infamous episode intimately connected with the rape of natural resources that lies behind the Industrial Revolution.

To ensure representation of the multiplicities of non-dominant difference, I’m writing Everfair from many viewpoints: white and mixed-race Europeans, African-Americans, and indigenous Africans. Research is sometimes exhilarating, and sometimes heartbreakingly piecemeal, particularly in the case of the indigenes, whose histories were severely disrupted—to say the least—by their decimation. Often the only voice left to tell a tale is that of the colonizer. When using those versions of events, I do what I can to up-end unwritten assumptions. I learn what I can from the examples of nearby, possibly related, people. I dream and make things up.

I know I’m treading on the bones of those who went before me. It’s unsteady ground, even if I’m related to the giants beneath my feet. I walk respectfully, carefully, listening with my outer and inner ears. Repeating what I hear, what you already know, but saying it in my way.

---

Nisi Shawl was WisCon 35’s Guest of Honor and the editor of WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity. She is coauthor of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a founder the Carl Brandon Society, and a member of Clarion West’s Board of Directors. She edits reviews for the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a literary quarterly. She’s fairly active on Twitter and Facebook, and she promises to update her homepage (www.nisishawl.com) soon.

We See a Different Frontier: Call for submissions

We are seeking submissions for a colonialism-themed anthology of new stories told from the perspective of the colonized, titled We See a Different Frontier, to be guest edited by Fábio Fernandes and published by The Future Fire.

THIS CALL IS NOW CLOSED

It is impossible to consider the history, politics or culture of the modern world without taking into account our colonial past. Most violent conflicts and financial inequalities in some sense result from the social-political-economic matrix imposed by European powers since the seventeenth century—even powerful countries such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) have to be viewed through the filter of our history to fully appreciate their current circumstances. The same is true of art and literature, including science fiction; as Rochita Loenen-Ruiz eloquently explained, “it is impossible to discuss non-Western SF without considering the effects of colonialism.” Cultural imperialism erases many native traditions and literatures, exoticizes colonized and other non-European countries and peoples, and drowns native voices in the clamour of Western stories set in their world. Utopian themes like “The Final Frontier”, “Discovering New Worlds” and “Settling the Stars” appeal to a colonial romanticism, especially recalling the American West. But what is romantic and exciting to the privileged, white, anglophone reader is a reminder of exploitation, slavery, rape, genocide and other crimes of colonialism to the rest of the world.

We See a Different Frontier will publish new speculative fiction stories in which the viewpoint is that of the colonized, not the invader. We want to see stories that remind us that neither readers nor writers are a homogeneous club of white, male, Christian, hetero, cis, monoglot anglophone, able-bodied Westerners. We want the cultures, languages and literatures of colonized peoples and recombocultural individuals to be heard, not to show the White Man learning the error of his ways, or Anglos defending the world from colonizing extraterrestrials. We want stories that neither exoticize nor culturally appropriate the non-western settings and characters in them.

We See a Different Frontier will pay US$0.05 per word, with a minimum payment of $50, plus the possibility of royalties if sales are good enough. We are looking for stories between 3,000 and 6,000 words in length; we are willing to be flexible about this wordcount, but the further a story falls outside this range, the harder a sell it will be. Please do not submit stories that are also under consideration elsewhere. Query before sending more than one story to us. We are unlikely to be interested in reprints unless they were published only in a market that is not well-known to an anglo-american SF audience, but in any case please query before sending a reprint, explaining when and where the story has appeared before.

Please send submissions as an attachment (.doc[x], .rtf or .odt) to differentfrontier@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is midnight UTC, October 31, 2012.

About the publisher: The Future Fire is an e-published magazine showcasing new writing in Social-Political Speculative Fiction, with a special interest in FeministSF, Queer SF, Eco SF, Postcolonial SF and Cyberpunk. See http://futurefire.net/ for more details.

About the editor: Fábio Fernandes is a SFF writer and translator living in São Paulo, Brazil. His short fiction in Portuguese has won two Argos Awards in Brazil. In English, he has several stories published in online venues in the US, the UK, New Zealand, Portugal, Romenia, and Brazil. He also contributed to Steampunk Reloaded, Southern Weirdo: Reconstruction, and The Apex Book of World SF Vol. 2. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Fix, Fantasy Book Critic, Tor.com, and SF Signal. He is also the non-fiction editor for International Speculative Fiction.

One last book giveaway

We're coming up to the home straight now. Just four days to go on the We See a Different Frontier colonialism-themed anthology fundraiser, and although we've already passed the enhanced funding target of $4000, the Peerbackers site will carry on accepting donations until some time on Sunday night, and all money donated will be put to use making the anthology as big and as great as possible. All our authors will be paid a professional rate, and no money will be taken home by us. The word-count will just get bigger.

To celebrate the last few days of the appeal, and thanks to several generous donors, we're running another book giveaway. Everyone who donates to the We See a Different Frontier fundraiser in the next four days will go into a hat to win one of the following titles:

• Steve Berman & Joselle Vanderhooft, Heiresses of Russ (hardcover)
• Kari Sperring, Living with Ghosts (signed)
• Inanna Arthen, The Longer the Fall (signed and personalized)

We'll do the draw on Monday. If you don't want to be entered (but why wouldn't you!), just let me know when you donate.

Thanks again to the many people who have supported the project so far, in all capacities. You all rock.

Guest post: Decolonizing the Utopian Imperative

For this post, I’m wishing everyone thinking about utopia, imperialism or decolonization would just go read Ursula K. Le Guin’s esaay, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be.” You should go read that and come back.

Still here?

In this musing on the pitfalls of imperialism and its ideological conflation with utopia, Le Guin brilliantly brings together utopian thinking from Robert Elliot and Milan Kundera, notions about communitas via Victor Turner, social theory from Levi-Strauss, philosophy from Chuang Tzu along with some thoughts about the yin/yang of rationalism as opposed to the soft, the social and the unruly, the way of the Trickster. I can’t hope to summarize it here. 

But here’s what the essay inspires me to think about:

On the construct of the New World: as Le Guin says, “Only if a European discovered or invented it could America exist.”

Colonization, not only in the United States but all over the world, is/was based on economics, exploitation of people and resources, but in some sense, it’s also based on ideas. Big ideas like Democracy, Salvation, Order and Capitalism and their alleged superiority to existent social systems and relationships to the environment. Utopian ideas.

Results: subjugation, assimilation and disappearance of cultures, along with appropriation, tokenization and exoticism.

The West is still creating stories about the primitive and the unknown through history and literature: one pretends to tell the objective stories of the world, which ones are worth knowing and how to think about Progress and Civilization, and the other shapes our thinking about people, places and how to think about the Other. Maybe they both do (that landscape is changing, but there’s still a great deal of work to do).

Have you noticed yet what’s missing from my post/rant? Where are the perspectives from the “outside”? Where are the counter-narratives?

If you didn’t read Le Guin’s essay, go read it. While you’re at it, read Cornel West. Read Uma Narayan. Read Chela Sandoval. Read Arundhati Roy, anything by her at all, who said, “The only thing worth globalizing is dissent,” and “Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.”

Support the creation of new narratives, like We See a Different Frontier. Suggest resources for counter-narrative in the comments below.

Write your own counter-narrative.

Announcing cover artist for WSADF: Carmen Moran

We’re delighted to be able to announce the identity of the artist who will be providing book cover art for the We See a Different Frontier print anthology: an illustrator who has worked with TFF for some years by the name of Carmen Moran. As you know, the Peerbacker campaign is still open for a couple more weeks, and we’re keen to raise as much money as we call, so as to fill the anthology with as many great professional-rate stories as possible. Among the rewards, if you’re feeling flush, is the original signed piece of artwork that we’ll use on the cover. Carmen is a professional and exhibited (and as you can see, talented) artist, so owning a unique piece of her work will be a great privilege.

Carmen has been regularly illustrating stories for TFF (samples) since 2007 when she provided the wonderfully bright and quirky, yet powerful, images to accompany Mark Harding’s irreverent and political cyberpunk satire ‘Art Attack’, one of which (an airship exploding and giving birth to sparkling pink nanobots) we also used as the cover art on TFF #9. Her illustrations have ranged from flawlessly executed simple and gritty sketches, to extravagant and joyful cartoon-like celebrations of insane majesty. Most recently she created two heartstoppingly poignant and evocative illustrations for S. Ali’s fantastic and fierce Arab Spring parable ‘Bilaadi’, including the spine-chilling piece to the left.

In addition to SF illustrating, Carmen works in a wide variety of craft and design projects, a lot of which can be found in her portfolio. She makes and sells everything from stuffed monster toys and printed teeshirts to greetings cards and gift tags via her online store and at craft fairs, and has been commissioned for children’s books and educational exhibits. Some of our favourite examples of her work include this Tigershark print (right), monster bookplate (below), and the tattoo design (bottom).

We’re still in the drafting stage of working on the We See a Different Frontier cover art, so nothing to show yet (but watch this space for updates). One idea that Carmen is playing with is to create a stylized map, in the colours and style of an old atlas, but with the coastlines and contours and frontiers suggestive of folk art and symbols rather than the conventional borders and outlines we’re used to seeing on our maps, through western eyes and on a Mercator projection of the Earth's surface.

Another idea that always comes to mind from the POV of a Third World citizen is the concept of gambiarra. This word (maybe of Portuguese or Italian origin, but of etymology actually unknown) means something like “jury-rigging”, but with the passage of time it came to mean more than that—the poor people’s “McGiverish” power to, say, create a spaceship from junk, spit and paper clips. We thought of a “Frankenstein” spaceship of sorts, all made of different metal plaques welded together, showing different colors and different origins (a CCCP radar antenna here, a porthole design with Indian motifs, names of Brazilian and South African defunct corporations in a few scattered bits of equipment, all this decomissioned stuff, apparently junk—but a junk that works. A gambiarra spaceship made by competent people not from NASA or the European Space Agency. An alternative spaceship that takes off the ground and does its job better than a space shuttle. This has a kind of old cyberpunk flavor, but most of all it represents the post-colonial zeitgeist. The time for a true global SF has come, and we’re ready for it.

Guest Post: I Didn't Know I Was an Alien, or: How I Became a Recombocultural Sci-Fi Guy

text and art by Ernest Hogan

It's the 21^st century. Modern media interconnects the world. Suddenly, we have a global civilization, and it is diverse.

Actually, that's an illusion. Civilization has always been diverse. Unless you are part of an isolated tribe that never contacts the outside world, you have to deal with cultures not your own. It's a basic survival skill going way, way, way, way the hell back.

This illusion is part of the colonial tradition. The conquerors come in and bring “civilization” to the natives, who are expected to cooperate if they don't want to be wiped out. In my part of the world, the Wild West, AKA Aztlán, AKA The Southwest (of the United States of America), it gets interesting – especially since I'm of Mexican descent, with some Irish thrown in, and I accidentally have the same name as the controversial Father of Ragtime.

I find myself to be a vintage, veteran multicultural (though I prefer the term “recombocultural” for reasons I'll explain later) science fiction writer.

Some folks would say speculative fiction – and they may be right, but let's get to that later . . .

I didn't intend to become Mr. Sci-Fi Recombozoid. It was thrust upon me, like my ethnic identity and place in society.

I was a wee tot way back in 20^th century, in the Fifties. I was born in East L.A. – some folks call it the Barrio, my parents called it the Neighborhood. For me it was the flowers in my grandmother's garden that towered over my head. I thought the whole universe was like that.

Science fiction came in through the television set. Space Patrol and Commando Cody taught me about the larger universe. Later, Forbidden Planet landed at a local drive in. My developing mind learned early about crossing borders, and new frontiers.

At first the monsters scared me. I was plagued with nightmares, but couldn't stay away. Eventually, I came to love the monsters. They were easier to identify with than the whitebread-kid mold that the media was trying to stuff me into. I found it was easier to tell the kids at school that I was Martian rather than explain myself.

Those were the days of Godzilla multiculturalism: Japanese monsters, Mexican vampires, Russian space epics, European sleaze, and Filipino horrors were mixed in with the low-rent Hollywood fare. We can't forget that after Bruce Lee, guys in the ghettos and barrios felt they could be heroes, too.

It was the fabled Sixties. Besides comic books and monster movies, there was the space program, UFOs, ESP, LSD, and a world gone mad on the evening news. After the Chicano Moratorium riots, I found out I was part of a minority group.

Before that, Chicanos were invisible. Teachers would talk about “Mexicans” – as if we weren't in the room with them. Suddenly, we were problem. It was easier being a Martian.

So I let my overdeveloped imagination go wild. I wasn't just into science fiction – I was into surrealism, satire, underground, art films, low-budget obscurities, anything weird and out of the ordinary. Cultural mutations became a life-long obsession. Science fiction was a focus, but never a limit to my interests.

By the Seventies, my reading went to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison. Dangerous Visions and the New Wave were a big influence – yes, “speculative fiction.” I also read translations from other countries when I could find them. I was always happy to find a new kind of sf.

I also reveled in writers like William Burroughs, Ishmael Reed, and Hunter Thompson.

I boldly started writing and trying to sell my work, I didn't limit myself. I tried to come up with the most daring, outrageous stuff I could, inspired by the diverse world I lived in.

Yeah, it took me years to get good – but even after I improved, I noticed that the genre and I were going in different directions. After Star Wars, science fiction became popular, but suddenly, everyone thought they knew what it was – traditional melodrama in funny clothes – and it wasn't what I was doing.

It was also assumed that the audience was white and male – all heterosexual nerds.

I was told things like “You have blacks and hispanics in there – you have to be careful, they get offended, you know.”

My name – that I share with a black historical figure – had them thinking I was white.

By the Eighties, I began to sell stories. These were out in the fringes, but I had my foot in the door. Some readers were confused as to what I was doing in their sci-fi magazine.

And I wasn't just submitting to sf markets. I sent my stories everywhere – especially if they paid well. It just happened that most of the places that have published me have the words “science fiction” as part of their title. There seems to a tolerance for strangeness in some of these places. It also may be a hold over from when science fiction was a catch-all term for things you didn't understand.

When I sold Cortez on Jupiter, I didn't mention anything about the Chicano or Aztec stuff. Or the Spanglish. I played up the science fiction elements. I had learned how to get away with things.

When it came out, I got good reviews (The best [first novel] I've read in science fiction since Neuromancer. – Locus), and bad (an avalanche of excessive verbiage and abominable prose style – Locus, a few pages later). But nobody called it dull. And some folks really liked it.

When my second novel, High Aztech, came out, the publisher did not promote it. The ad in Locus showed the cover, but had no text. No review copies were sent out. People told me that they had to call the publisher and cuss them out to get copies.

Still, High Aztech gained an audience. People still discover it and put good reviews online. You could say it has a cult following.

And in the introduction to the glossary for the Españahutl slang is my first use of the word recombocultural. I coined to explain what I do in my work, that was rapidly being label multicultural – a term that was becoming maligned, and associated with political correctness. The recombo is as in recombinant DNA, emphasizes that what I am writing about are the cultural mutations that happen when cultures come together, fuck & fight, damage chromosomes, and generate fascinating new monstrosities.

But, back in the Nineties, they weren't ready for diversity. The New York-based publishers wanted formula entertainment for their sci-fi consumers that didn't present disturbing concepts. They assumed that the audience was white and middle class. Non-white characters were either pale or only showed the back of their heads on the covers.

Ideas became scarce. I kept meeting readers who said, “I like science fiction because I always know what's going to happen.” I wondered what I was doing trying to write in this genre.

Also, word spread about my ethnicity. It seemed like I was being treated differently – like the most talented leper they ever met. Like an alien. And it didn't seem to matter if I was legal.

I could still sell occasional short stories to far-out fringe markets, but New York wouldn't touch my novels. The rejections followed the same format: They would praise my work as highly original, then tell me that it wasn't what they were looking for. Then they'd inform me about the latest hot, new trend – military sf, sexy vampires, zombies . . .

After years of rejection, I published my novel Smoking Mirror Blues through a small press. I got a hint of why New York wouldn't touch it when an artist refused to do the cover because of a tantric sex ritual in the beginning. There was also a Chicano mad scientist, lesbian lovers, religion, politics, and the world-as-we-know-it reconstructed to illustrate conflicts that are shaping the future. Yet it has attracted a following.

As the 21^st century lurched along, I gave up on New York. They still saw me as an unpublishable alien. The audience is now seen as being young women who are sexually attracted to the undead. And publishing is going through a crisis, with the economic turmoil and the arrival of the e-book. They say they only want to publish bestsellers, but nothing seems to be selling.

In the midst of it all, I see young writers coming on the scene, doing the sort of thing that I have been doing for decades. I hope they get treated better than I was. My advice to them is to write the most exciting fiction they can, inspired the world they live in.

Projects like We See a Different Frontier show promise by doing things in a non-traditional manner. We need these experiments. I expect to see traditional publishing dropping dead very soon.

Empires are falling. Colonies are rearranging. Cultures are mutating.

Recomboculture is in the air.

I have given up on being “commercial.” I am releasing my novels as ebooks, and working on ideas that the dying publishers wouldn't dare touch – like my science fiction bullfighting novel. I have seen the audience, and they are diverse.

The funny thing is, I am not alien – I am native. I am impure, a Chicano, a mestizo, a mongrel. And that is the future.

Ernest Hogan's Cortez on Jupiter is available as an ebook from Amazon and Smashwords. Smoking Mirror Blues and High Aztech be available later in 2012. Links to short fiction that can be read for free can be found at his blog, Mondo Ernesto.