Reprint: ten years of The Future Fire

Reprinted from TFFX (2015, edd. al-Ayad, Matthey and Vitale) [purchase links] as part of our celebration of The Future Fire issue #50 in 2019. Four more years may have passed, but this history of the first ten years, and what we’re trying to do with the zine, still stands.

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This anthology celebrates ten years of The Future Fire magazine (futurefire.net), by both reprinting a few highlight stories from the first thirty-one issues, and including several new, experimental, unusual or aspirational pieces to give a taster of what we’d like to see more of in the next decade.

Issue #1 appeared in January 2005, after a bit of preamble and experimentation the previous year, and apart from a short hiatus to rest up and take stock about halfway through, we’ve been publishing an average of three to four issues per year ever since. We always wanted TFF to be challenging, experimental, progressive, inclusive, political, revolutionary—even if to start with maybe we weren’t sure what we were rebelling against!

The first thing you would notice if you went back in time ten years (or just used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine) to look at the TFF website in 2005, would be how god-awful-shitty the web design was. I like to think that’s aesthetics having changed, and it wasn’t quite so ’90s-looking to a 2005 eye, but I’m lying to myself. Still, the evolution from CBBC-quality flames in 2005, via a slightly darker, smoky aesthetic in 2007, to the cathode ray tube Unicode-soup we know and love today in about 2009, echoes the growing confidence we started to have in our niche in the speculative fiction market.

We launched in 2005 as a cyberpunk market (words like “chrome,” “postmodern” and “hyperfiction” peppered our tagline, manifesto and first story contests), but through an accident of community we knew more writers of horror and dark fantasy, and there was almost no conventional scifi in the first several issues. You can hear a bit of diffidence about this in our early editorials, and our craving for that elusive cyberpunk is almost tangible…

But once our slushpile was deep enough that we could reasonably select on genre and theme as well as quality (we were always uncompromising on quality) then our niche was under our control, and we didn’t have to be shy about the geeky, retro, techno-noir look we imagined for ourselves. Not that we ever stopped publishing horror, fantasy and surreal stories as well, of course; and never will.

You might also notice the evolution in our one-line mission statement: “New writing in Dark Speculative Fantasy!” we proclaimed in 2004. “Speculative Fiction, Cyberpunk and Dark Fantasy!” we boomed in 2007. “Social-Political and Speculative Cyberfiction!” we have cried since 2009. Always the line, “An experiment in and celebration of new writing” has sat somewhere in the first paragraph.

We’ve had a thorough turnaround of collaborators too: In 2004 we were Bruce, Joseph, Equus and myself; Joseph and Equus left within days; by 2009 we had been joined by Leoba, David, John and Lois; by 2011 it was just me, which is part of the reason TFF took a year’s hiatus. Now, as of 2015, we are joined by Regina, Kathryn, Tracie, Valeria, Cécile (who has illustrated stories since 2006), Serge; plus Lori and Fabio who have guest-edited anthologies and continue to be valued collaborators.

We have attracted a fabulous team of artists, a critical and generous cohort of reviewers, and a community of support that we plug into via social networks and occasional conventions. We’ve had a huge amount of support, both financial and in-kind, during the crowdfunding campaigns for the last three anthologies, and we engage both productively and cordially with several other small presses, publications and writing communities. In 2005 it was mostly me, sketching and photoshopping, reviewing whatever junk I found lying around, bribing and threatening people to send us their stories, funding the whole thing out of my pocket.

I measure the success of TFF by such intangible things—legends who turn out to have heard of us; people who can publish professionally nonetheless sending us their stories; the generosity and excitement of new and potential collaborators. But if you want more measurable criteria, no less than eight stories first published in our pages have been shortlisted or honorably-mentioned in awards and year’s bests; ten stories have been reprinted in some of the most prestigious and high-quality anthologies such as Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best, Lethe Press’s Heiresses of Russ, the Apex World SF and Mammoth’s SF Stories by Women.

We hope to drive this success ever onwards. Our aim has always been to publish progressive ideas, underrepresented voices, socially important stories, and people clearly think that’s a worthwhile goal. We’ve learned a lot about what all of these mean over the years as well—learned to check our own privilege and be much more sensitive to issues of gender, race, class, ability, language, and so many other facets of oppression. We’re able to be selective now on features above mere quality, fit and taste; in addition we filter by features such as respect, not punching down, lazy stereotypes that we might have missed before we had such an inclusive team able to share their judgements of privilege and oppression with us.

But we’ve also always wanted to have fun, to push the boundaries, to play games that Borges, Kafka, Calvino and Eco would be tickled by, and people seem to enjoy that too. We feel it’s important to treat authors and artists with respect, which among other things means paying them properly for their work, and we have some ideas for improving our finances to do better on that front in the future.

But most importantly, my co-editors Valeria and Cécile have done a great job helping put together this anthology of old and new stories, and we hope you enjoy reading them. If you do, keep coming back to futurefire.net; we plan for there to be plenty more where these came from!

Interview with Benjanun Sriduangkaew

We are joined by Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Campbell- and BSFA-nominated author of many postcolonial cyberpunk and South-East Asian fantasy short stories (among which “Courtship in the Country of Machine-Gods,” “Vector,” “We Are All Wasteland on the Inside” and “Mermaid Teeth, Witch-Honed” in TFF publications), who is celebrating the release of her new novella, Winterglass from Apex Publications.

Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared on Tor.com, in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and year's best collections. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.

She agreed to answer a few of our questions (after the Winterglass blurb below):

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The city-state Sirapirat once knew only warmth and monsoon. When the Winter Queen conquered it, she remade the land in her image, turning Sirapirat into a country of snow and unending frost. But an empire is not her only goal. In secret, she seeks the fragments of a mirror whose power will grant her deepest desire.

At her right hand is General Lussadh, who bears a mirror shard in her heart, as loyal to winter as she is plagued by her past as a traitor to her country. Tasked with locating other glass-bearers, she finds one in Nuawa, an insurgent who’s forged herself into a weapon that will strike down the queen.

To earn her place in the queen’s army, Nuawa must enter a deadly tournament where the losers’ souls are given in service to winter. To free Sirapirat, she is prepared to make sacrifices: those she loves, herself, and the complicated bond slowly forming between her and Lussadh.

If the splinter of glass in Nuawa's heart doesn't destroy her first.

“A fairy tale, beautiful like an ice crystal, and razor sharp.”
SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA, WORLD FANTASY AWARD-WINNING CO-EDITOR OF SHE WALKS IN SHADOWS

“Winterglass is rich with diamondine prose, a scintillant retelling of the Ice Queen that challenges Occidental aesthetics, colonial mentality, and personal identity.”
CASSANDRA KHAW, AUTHOR OF HAMMERS ON BONE, BFA & LOCUS AWARD NOMINEE

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The Future Fire: Winterglass isn’t the first subverted fairy tale retelling that you have written. What is it about this genre that appeals to you?

Lusadh, illustrated by Mumi

Benjanun Sriduangkaew: The obvious one for me is to queer it all up: most fairytales and mythological stories are depressingly heteronormative, even ones that purport to center a woman rescuing a boy are stuck in this quagmire (since when are boys worth risking your life for? Exactly). My hope is that by retelling and reconfiguring these stories there's something we can reclaim for ourselves and for our places in the world. Stories are a powerful thing, the human subconscious looks for narrative patterns. I like to think that by engaging with stories with origins in our cultural bedrock we can reconfigure our minds a little, shift our default assumptions of what love stories are supposed to be like, of who gets to have power and who gets to speak.

TFF: Do you have any plans to collect your fairy tale stories into a single project of some kind?

BS: At first I thought I hadn't written that many, but as it turns out—aside from full-length novellas like Scale-Bright and Winterglass (which are too thematically different)—I have actually written a fair number of stories that fit the bill. 'Paya-Nak' is a lesbian take on a Thai folktake, 'Mermaid Teeth, Witch-Honed' [in TFF-X, ed.] is a Lovecraftian lesbian retelling of The Little Mermaid, 'The Beast at the End of Time' is a post-singularity lesbian Beauty and the Beast, and so on. At the moment there is probably not quite enough volume, but it's very much a possibility to put them together into a mini-collection (plus a new story or two), and I expect there would be interest. It will have to wait a while, as I'll have a collaboration out next year, Methods Devour Themselves (Zero Books), that's partly a mini-collection.

TFF: Why did you choose a tale from the European tradition to talk, among other things, about colonialism and cultural assimilation?

BS: Andersen lived in a culturally homogeneous region, and his entire body of work is culturally/racially homogeneous. His fairytales, like many western fairytales and European narratives, are part and parcel with cultural imperialism. It seems as apt as any to regard his fairytales as a symbol of that hegemony. ‘The Snow Queen’ in particular struck me as a useful allegory—not because the original put in any such work or even pauses to think about it (Andersen was no doubt about as familiar with post-colonialism as he was with having a fulfilled romantic life, which is to say not at all), but because the idea of imposing an unfamiliar climate is essentially what colonization is. It changes ways of life, makes the colonizer's technology seem suddenly 'necessary', and demands total submission into the new order. Having said that, the colonizer in Winterglass—the Winter Queen—is neither white nor European.

TFF: Is there a particular pleasure in remodelling stories that have been told and retold for centuries and yet being able to use them to say something completely new?

BS: Yes! Structurally Winterglass has very little in common with the Andersen story, and eschews the bildungsroman entirely (Gerda and Kay are children; Nuawa and Lussadh are respectively in their thirties and forties). What I was interested in doing wasn't a literal retelling so much as referential, so I treated ‘The Snow Queen’ as material to mine rather than a framework to replicate.

While I don't think I'm saying something entirely new I do find that most retellings—being by white authors—more interested in the gender politics of fairytales (usually the agency and role and activity of female characters; somewhat more rarely, in queering up the stories) or in grimdarking it all up (by emphasizing or adding, sometimes to excess, the violence and sexual assault). The questions of empire and culture come up somewhat less. Either way I like to think that I'm bringing something to the table that, say, Disney very much hasn't.

TFF: As a reader/viewer, do you enjoy retellings of classic stories? Is there one that taught you something you found useful in your own writing of Winterglass?

BS: Joan D. Vinge's The Snow Queen was very interesting for its time, even if on reread now it doesn't hold up, partly because it depicts an improbable white-guilt fantasy: here's a planet inhabited entirely by white pagans, here's a bunch of brown people who colonized and exploited them. Unfortunate implications, as they say. I don't think it necessarily taught me a concrete lesson, but it does show that you can really put a fairytale in unexpected settings, clones and supercomputers and all.

TFF: Why do you think mirrors make such good symbols of our deepest desires?

BS: Reflection is potent, and reflection that can distort—such as in concave or convex glass—unnerves. There's a reason doppelgangers are creepy, because it can be either a very harsh teller of truth or a version of you that's not quite right, and sometimes it can be both. Mirrors can represent so much dream logic, the subconscious, suggesting that what it brings out can be something about ourselves we don't even know (or want to know). And physically glass is an attractive material, it does interesting, intriguing things with light. There's a lot of room for metaphor there.

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Thank you so much for talking to us about Winterglass, Benjanun. I look forward to reading it!

Feminism and LGBTQIA+ in Tunisia

Guest post by Hella Grichi

“Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.”

― Derek Jarman

Yet, post-revolution Tunisia, despite its leap forward in 2011, is still a nation where religious fundamentalism and obsolete colonial articles inhibit both society and law. Morality is still law. The private lives of consenting adults are still at stake. Our personal views and beliefs are—despite the constitution's clear statement on liberty of conscience―still seen as a threat to decency and morality.

It is true that Tunisian women have reached a respectable degree of women's liberation: women are able to have abortions, they receive the same salaries as their male co-workers, they can get divorced and demand child support, and education is mandatory. However, underneath this post-colonial progress lies another side of Tunisian society: the side where cisgender Tunisian men who don't pertain to any minority have the upper hand in the country. Women and minorities are still subject to discrimination, ranging from subtle misogynistic comments to outward violence and oppression. Bigotry and misogyny are so deeply rooted into the minds and language of Tunisians that they themselves are often unable to even recognize the harm they are inflicting. Gender roles are enforced, LGBTQIA topics are taboo, and breaking the vicious cycle of obligatory traditional "values" and morality turns out to be a harder task than expected. It is even more complicated and dangerous for women and minorities in rural areas. The problem is with the underlying hegemonic structure that dominates Tunisian society; laws can be amended but their implementation will only succeed when the average Tunisian will finally understand that the devotion to a dominant set of beliefs should not dictate the life of others.

Women in Tunisia are still widely expected to succumb to the daughter – wife – mother cycle. They are treated like an expired product once they near their thirties unmarried. They are expected to protect the "honor" of their families and not dance too far out of line. It is true that it is common to find women whose families encourage their daughters' professional path but the patriarchal expectations usually accompany them far into adulthood and also often overshadow their career or dreams.

From my own humble viewpoint, feminism is not intersectional enough. We need to work more on including black, LGBTQIA and disabled women. Unfortunately, sex workers are as good as unrepresented in the movement.

LGBTQIA rights are the most difficult rights to address in Tunisia. Not only because of the colonial article 230 of the Penal Code of 1913 (modified in 1964) which decrees imprisonment of up to three years for private acts of sodomy between consenting adults but also due to Tunisian society's deeply rooted hatred towards LGBTQIA. The stigma surrounding them is astonishing and the violence and inhuman treatment they are subject to is heartbreaking. They are still forced to undergo illegal and inhuman anal tests to "verify" their homosexuality (a test with no medical basis of course). This test is only there to humiliate the victim.

Human Rights Watch reports state:

"The police arrested six students in the city of Kairouan, 166 kilometers from Tunis, in their student housing apartment in December, on sodomy charges, and subjected them to anal testing. On December 10, the first instance tribunal in Kairouan sentenced them to three years in prison and ordered them banished from Kairouan for an additional three years. In both cases, the Sousse Court of Appeal reduced the sentence – to two months in the first case, and one month in the second. But the men retain criminal convictions on their records and had already served their time in jail."

What is promising though is that Tunisia has LGBTQIA associations pushing for more rights and providing a safe space for the community and victims of hate crimes and discrimination. Two famous associations are Shams ("Sun") and Mawjoudin ("We exist"). In order to paint a more tangible picture of today's LGBTQIA struggle in Tunisia, I had the honor to interview Khalil, a Tunisian who is not only a rebellious genderqueer person but also a brave activist who staunchly believes in the LGBTQIA movement in Tunisia.

Do you think the situation for LGBTQA tunisians is getting better or not? How do you think the situation can be improved?

Khalil: The persecution of LGBTQIA+ is highly increasing, mainly due to the fact that we are more visible now. The current context is not totally favorable for the emancipation of this movement although global pressure induced by the progressive forces and their interest for minorities is growing and growing. Unfortunately, the rise of conservatism and political Islamism are hindering the establishment of coexistence.

Do you think the West should interfere in this or should this matter be resolved without interference?

Khalil: In my opinion, I think that the pressure that foreign elements are applying can be but beneficial especially when it comes to the decriminalization of homosexuality. The LGBTQIA+ movement as well as the Feminist movement are universal movements. These movements are not restricted to a certain minority or territory but are instead present all over the world and need to be connected and united in collaboration and cooperation to collectively further the cause. Some activists come from very different backgrounds and often bring universal values with them which can render the movement skeptical towards the interventions of certain elements or particular ideologies and behaviors.

Cross-dressing is not illegal, but transgender people and gay people, are often accused of violating Article 226 of the national penal code which prohibits "outrages against public decency." [Huffington Post. "Tunisia's New Gay Rights Fight" 2014]

Morality. Public decency. Vague, undefined, subjective constructs reign over Tunisia's youth that is ringing for breath, dreaming of tolerance, dreaming of a better Tunisia. If we could only replace "public decency" with "human decency", our country would be so much better off. If we could finally understand that what others do with their lives (as long as they do not harm anyone) is none of our business, we would be able to achieve so much. If only mutual respect for each other was the norm, I wouldn't have to fear for thousands of innocent people—many of them friends—who live every day in fear of this medieval witch hunt.

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Problem Daughters is thus the ideal space for writers facing these problems. It is an anthology that provides a platform where others might fear to tread. It will "amplify the voices of women who are sometimes excluded from mainstream feminism. It will be an anthology of beautiful, thoughtful, unconventional speculative fiction and poetry around the theme of intersectional feminism, focusing on the lives and experiences of marginalized women, such as those who are of color, QUILTBAG, disabled, sex workers, and all intersections of these."

"How can I help?" you might ask?

Here are some useful links:

• To help finance the Problem Daughters anthology, feel free to visit the Indiegogo fundraiser: http://igg.me/at/problem-daughters
• To submit a story or poem: http://press.futurefire.net/p/problem-daughters.html

Tunisian LGBTQIA+ associations:

• Shams: http://www.shams-tunisie.com/
  Their facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lgbtrightstunisia
• Mawjoudin: http://www.mawjoudin.org/
  Their facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mawjoudin.tn
• Without Restrictions: http://without-restrictions.org/
  Their facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Without.restrictions.tn
• You can also discover and/or support Kohl Journal which is a journal for body and gender research in the Middle East: http://kohljournal.org/

References:

1. http://www.gaylawnet.com/laws/tn.htm
2. https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/03/29/tunisia-men-prosecuted-homosexuality

Interview with Ernest Hogan

This week we’re joined by TFF old friend Ernest Hogan (who had a story in WSaDF, a mini-sequel in our ten year anniversary blog campaign, and has blogged for or about us a couple times before), to talk about his work, a forthcoming novel, art show, and the end of the world.

East L.A.-born Ernest Hogan is the author of Cortez on Jupiter, High Aztech, and Smoking Mirror Blues, which have given him the reputation as the Father of Chicano Science Fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Amazing Stories, Analog, Science Fiction Age, and many anthologies. His “Chicanonautica Manifesto” appeared in Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies. His is also an artist. He blogs at mondoernesto.com and labloga.blogspot.com. His is married to the author Emily Devenport, and they live in Arizona.

We asked him a few questions:

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The Future Fire: You wrote a mini-sequel to your story “Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus” from We See a Different Frontier, titled “Xiomara’s Flying Circus.” Have you written, or do you plan to write, any other stories set in this postcolonial steampunk universe?

Ernest Hogan: That whole universe started with the title “Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus.” I thought it up, laughed, wrote it down, and years went by before random historical details about pilots who flew for Villa and how Raoul Walsh went down and shot scenes of a silent film with him. My alternate universes tend to be something I encounter and they grow in weird ways. I had trouble getting into the story until I started thinking of it as a spaghetti western. It would be fun to expand both stories into sprawling novel like Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down or Mumbo Jumbo, but genre publishers like their novels to be slam-blang action adventures that nerdy teenaged girls can relate to, which makes it hard for sixty year-old Chicano writer. I may go back to the universe if an opportunity arises, which could happen.

TFF: You also inspired the We See a Different Frontier campaign with your coining the term “recombocultural.” Can you tell us a bit about this concept, and why you think it’s important to speculative and postcolonial fiction?

EH: I was influenced by Ishmael Reed (uh-oh, I evoked him again) in his pioneering use of the term “multi-cultural” in an essay about artist using material from different cultures. I saw it as a natural for science fiction and fantasy (in fact, fantasy was multicultural before it became a commercial genre package in the seventies). Then I started getting flak from right-wing sci-fi types who were afraid I was trying to oppress them with political correctness—even though I ain’t never been politically correct. I realized that what I was doing was more than multiculturalism. I started using recomboculturalism to explain myself. Recombo as in recombinant DNA, mixing stuff up from all over, coming up with something different, with the whole being more than the sum of the parts. Chicanos have the term rasquache that overlaps with the concept. Maybe it’s more than a concept or style. It’s more like a way of seeing, and a way of living. It scared some folks. Then there are those who like the idea of recombozoid monsters running amok, transforming the landscape. And then again, some of us are recombozoid monsters.

TFF: You’re working on a new edition of your Chicano cyberpunk novel Smoking Mirror Blues at the moment. How much will you rewrite or revise from the first edition?

EH: Actually, this will be the third edition of Smoking Mirror Blues. The first was in 2001 from Wordcraft of Oregon. In 2012, I did a self-published ebook. I went over it with a fine-toothed comb, and did some minor changes—changed a few technical terms that have become dated, and such, but I essentially left it the way it was originally published. I will be doing a new introduction that will tell the long, twisted tale of where the book came from, and how it came to be written, and eventually published. It’ll also tell of how my career crashed and burned and my life went off in an unexpected direction.

TFF: What is the most amusing, surreal or unexpected writing prompt that reality ever gave to you?

EH: My relationship with reality is all tied in to my creative process that these things happen on a day to day basis. I go through life, and the interaction spawns art and writing, like the wreckage left behind after a kaju monster attacks. It makes my life pretty surreal. Like the homeless schizophrenic who bristled like he wanted to fight and told me, “I’m watching you, CLOSELY!” a little while ago. Maybe he wanted me to write about him.

TFF: Have you ever found or left a message in a bottle? Would you like to?

EH: Being a writer is like putting messages in bottles all the time. I find them when ever I find something I enjoy that’s not a product of the multinational corporate entertainment industry. Communication is often one way, or takes a long time. Navigating timespace can be a bitch, but it’s worth it.

TFF: What ancient divinity would you like to meet and what would you ask them?

EH: I do hear Tezcatlipoca whispering in my ear from time to time. It’s where my wilder ideas come from. I try to talk to him, but he doesn’t listen, just goes around causing trouble. Life would be so dull without him. Or maybe it’s just my bad attitude.

TFF: One day you open the door to go to the grocery store and a holographic version of yourself at the kerbside yells at you, “No time to explain—get into the car!” What do you do?

EH: Get on of course. Actually, this is similar to an unfinished story about my alter-ego, that’s titled, “Bring Me the Brain Of Victor Theremin.”

TFF: You’re a writer and a visual artist. What’s the relationship between your stories and your drawings? Do you have characters hopping from pages to sketchbooks and vice versa?

EH: I started out wanting to be a cartoonist, like a lot of writers of my generation. I never could manage to land a good, paying cartooning gig. Also, society doesn’t like people who can do too many different things. “Make up your mind! This is the age of specialization!” they would tell me, so, for the sake of professionalism, I tried to keep my writing and drawing separate, but the artificial barrier keeps breaking down. I recently wrote a story—actually, more like a novella—about the Calacanaut, the skull in a space helmet that I use as a personal icon, that will be published soon in a yet-to-be-titled anthology. Another border breaking down…

TFF: Can you tell us anything about the upcoming art gallery show you’re involved with?

EH: It’s evolving and mutating as I type this… After I published some covers of some of my old sketchbooks in Chicanonautica, my column for La Bloga, it caught the attention of Josh Rios, an academic/artist. He used the word “dadaistic.” We started corresponding, and he included some of my drawings in a installation/performance he did at Sector 2337, in Chicago, and some of my drawings even sold. Since then he’s used some of my drawings—and writing—in another show, we keep corresponding, and things develop… This latest “show” or whatever the proper word is, will take place in Mexico, so I’m in the process of getting a passport, because they’re supposed to pay for expenses, and all that good stuff. At this point, I don’t feel that the details are solid enough to reveal in a public forum. Thing change in the talking stage. I’ve been through this before, and it’s best to wait for things to get settled, but once they do, I’ll be ready to go full-throttle self-promotional.

TFF: What would be the most important thing for you to hold onto if civilization started to break down in your city?

EH: My city? Some people think it’s already happened here in Glendale, Arizona, the Detroit of the Southwest. My wife and I find it just fine, though we may choose to retire in some other town. If things got bad here, we’d probably just move. If we had to leave forever, in a hurry, I’d probably grab artwork and sketchbooks, and maybe some books that I want to read. My writing is backed up online, but maybe copies of my books would come in handy. Oh yeah, our electronic gadgets, if they still worked.

TFF: You mentioned that you’re currently looking at some unfinished novels, to see which you want to write next, which can have shorter pieces cannibalized from, etc. Can you give us any sneak previews?

EH: All of my unfinished novels have bits that could probably be cannibalized for sneak previews. I could look through them, if you’re interested…

Thanks for joining us, Ernest. We’d love to take you up on that sneak preview some day!

Nisi Shawl's Everfair

Tomorrow sees the US release of Nisi Shawl’s long-awaited African steampunk novel Everfair, a book that asks the question: what if the people of the Congo had access to steam power and technology in the nineteenth century, before they were colonized by Belgium? We invited Nisi to come say a few words about her book here.

I told Djibril I would write a paragraph about my novel Everfair. I’d rather offer you something different to read, though: thoughts on this novel’s growth medium. Everfair, I’d better first tell you, is a steampunk novel that’s primarily set in an imaginary Utopia in late 19th and early 20th century central Africa.

So where’d it come from? Yes, I’m the one who wrote my novel’s text. I had help, though. People gave me money, and ideas, and medicine, and food. Books. Flowers. Tea. Places to stay. They combed my hair, treated me with acupuncture, trimmed my toenails. That nurturing environment is what I’m calling Everfair’s growth medium. It holds my novel’s roots.

In my WisCon 35 Guest of Honor speech I proposed the idea that genius is not the manifestation of a single being but of a whole community. I said the same thing on Everfair’s acknowledgments page. I don’t know if what I’m manifesting is genius, but I’m very sure it’s an expression of my community and our concerns, from the pleasures of steeping ourselves in the sensory delights of technology to the ambiguities of fully nuanced interactions between a supposedly united mind’s conflicting yet simultaneously held beliefs.

My community is where Everfair is rooted, where it derives from.

And, in a truly fair turnabout, my community is also the atmosphere into which my novel unfurls itself and the light towards which it reaches.

When you read it, Everfair is fulfilled.

One early reviewer claims my novel is an “important entry in the movement for greater diversity in sf.” It only enters the movement through your eyes, though. It’s only important when it’s important to you.

Thank you for reading my book.

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In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said of Everfair, “A compelling debut novel … Shawl deftly wields a diverse cast of characters to impressive effect, taking readers from the Victorian era to WWI and its aftermath. This highly original story blends steampunk and political intrigue in a compelling new view of a dark piece of human history.”

Nisi Shawl has posted on her website various teasers and extras, including photos of objects that inspired the story, an essay on sexuality and morals in 19th century Congo, the outline of a play performed in the novel, and other materials. There is also an extract of Everfair at the Macmillan website, where you can buy or preorder the novel.

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.

SCIFIISTA RUMBLINGS IN DE-COLONIALIZING AZTLÁN

by Ernest Hogan

So it's not just me. Things are happening here in Azltán, the Aztec homeland, the part of the United States of America that was once Mexico. The future has arrived, and it's firing imaginations.

It started with a post by Rudy Ch. Garcia, Spic vs spec – 1. Chicanos/latinos & sci-fi lit, in La Bloga about his story “Last Call for Ice Cream” in the webzine Flurb. A critic said, “It has so much slang that it become tiresome very quickly.” After a few brain clicks, Rudy asked, “Do Chicanos/latinos read sci-fi?” and “How many are writing sci-fi? Should more latinos be writing it?

This got responses from science fiction writing Latinos that triggered Spic vs spec – 2. providing some background, and answering questions from the readers.

So I had to devote my next Chicanonautica column (every first and second Thurday in La Bloga), to Sci-Fi Evolution and Revolution in the Global Barrio in which I gave examples of science fictional art and even polticial discussion, gave some advice to aspiring scifiistas, and even plugged The Future Fire and We See a Different Frontier.

In Spic vs spec – 3. Rudy went on to ask about where science fiction readers are (both Anglo and Latino), the need for entry-level books in the genre, and that “future jobs will be filled by someone who will likely have an interest in sci-fi lit.”

The series ended with Spic vs spec – 4. Rudy got a response from a publisher that was interested in, and had published multicultural science fiction and fantasy for, the young adult audience and gave a nod to David Macinnis Gill's Black Hole Sun, a YA about a Latino mercenary on Mars.

I went on with another Chicanonautica, Chewing Scifiista Holes in the Tortilla Curtain with links to blogs dealing with science fiction, fantasy, and horror in Spanish, plus a few others to help rescue sci-fi from the monocultural ghetto.

And not to be outdone, Rudy announced the approaching publication of his novel, The Closet of Discarded Dreams, a post-cyberpunk tour-de-force that boldly demonstrates how Chicano is a science fiction state of being.

Things have being stirred up. I hope some writers who hadn't considered science fiction as a possibility are creating visions of the future the likes of which no one has ever seen.

And I encourage those of you who haven't checked out La Bloga to do so. Some very interesting things are happening there.

Ernest Hogan is the author of the pioneering Chicano science fiction novel Cortez on Jupiter. His infamous short story “The Frankenstein Penis” has recently become available in the anthology Love That Never Dies. His blog is Mondo Ernesto.

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.

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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.