New Issue 2012.22

I get angry when I hear the word ‘empire’; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds me of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised.
-- Benjamin Zephaniah (on being offered the OBE)

Issue 2012.22

• ‘A History of the 20th Century, with illustrations: Atonement’, Ian Sales (illustrated by Robin E. Kaplan)
• ‘Bilaadi’, S. Ali (illustrated by Carmen)
• ‘The City of Sand and Knives’, A.J. Fitzwater (illustrated by Laura-Anca Adascalitei)
• ‘The Boy who Shattered Time’, Mark D. Dunn (illustrated by Cécile Matthey)
• ‘Requiem for Shiva’, D. Thomas Minton (illustrated by Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein)

Download e-book version: PDF | EPUB | Mobi

Representative selection of Earthlings

I recently read Nancy Kress's Steal Across the Sky (Tor, 2009), and while I usually find Kress's work to be powerful, moving, intelligently thought-out social-political science fiction, I was disappointed by one decision she made early in the book. In an online classified ad calling for 21 human volunteers to visit alien worlds across the galaxy, the following words appear: "Volunteers must speak English" (page 36).

Oh, why?

Not only is that nonsensical (if the aliens are capable of learning human language, why are they not capable of learning human languages? And if they have to pick one language, why not Mandarin Chinese?), but it would lead to a most unrepresentative sample of humans "witnessing" these alien worlds.

In an online discussion almost exactly two years ago, on the subject of aliens selecting 1000 humans to save from a doomed Earth, I made the following estimates:

• most will not speak English (under 100 do, maybe about 60 natively)
• the vast majority will not be Caucasian
• probably none will be very rich, or famous
• a little over 50% will be female
• some will be homosexual, asexual, etc.
• some will be children or elderly
• not all will be able or willing to breed
• many will not be very highly educated
• not all will be very nice people

Some of these are beside the point, but you can see what I'm getting at. If aliens want to deal with humanity, then their first call really shouldn't be to the President of the United States. I mean, duh. For a science fiction writer this sort of global variety and representativeness should be an opportunity to be interesting, not to mention to write into your story the sorts of people who are massively under-represented in Anglo-American publishing. To go out of your way to miss such an opportunity seems perverse.

Artist Interview: Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein

Artist and illustrator Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein (web page) first illustrated for TFF in our November 2009 issue. She hails from Hawai’i, studies fine art and printmaking, works with a small YA press, and has an obsession with things with claws. She was kind enough to answer a few questions and give us the excuse to show some of her wonderful work.

The Future Fire: For the story ‘Nasmina’s Black Box’, you produced very striking black and white images, including the piece showing the soldier and the corrupt priest that we loved so much we used for the cover image of that issue. Could you describe the process of creating these images, from deciding what scenes in the story to illustrate, through to the technical production of the art?

Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein: I think that this would be easier to demonstrate as describe (as many visual processes are). That said, I start every illustration by reading the story I’m working with and noting down which scenes stand out to me. Then I read it again the next day, this time with an eye for details or anything I might have overlooked the first read-through, and do a few rough thumbnail sketches.

For Nasmina’s Black Box, what immediately struck me was the main character, Nasmina, a girl stranded in a conflict that she’s really too young to understand. I wanted the uncertainty, alone-ness and danger to come across, so I chose to do the illustrations as stark black and white ink drawings. The first image came to me strongly (Nasmina encircled by a supportive shadow) which represented her family, but the second image, of the church, I struggled with more. I knew I wanted to do the scene in the church, since that’s the climax point of the story, but the final illustration really arose out of my frustration with executing the image. I think the finished one is the third attempt. The first two had a lot more white in them, and at some point on the second I got fed up, took my brush and covered most of the image in ink. Since it looked a lot better than I’d expected, I redid the picture with black instead of white, and then did a few final tweaks in Photoshop, most notably making Nasmina slightly transparent.

In my opinion, getting angry with one’s work is often an undervalued part of the creative process. It’s definitely crucial to my process!

TFF: I understand you’re studying art at Portland State University. How is that going? What have you learned in the course of this study?

RRS: I’m currently in the Fine Arts department at Portland State, which is a brand new program (it’s in it’s second year). Its a tiny program (thirteen students total), which I love, because we have a lot of one on one time with both the instructors and each other. I’m due to graduate in June, which is very exciting. Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with school at best throughout my career as a student and I am definitely not terribly broken up about moving past this stage in my life.

That said, school has given me opportunities and taught me things that I wouldn’t have otherwise learned. Mostly related to life and talking about art. If I had to choose one thing that I treasure above everything else I’ve learned, it’s printmaking. And astrogeology. Okay, so they’re not related...

TFF: How do you think art makes a difference in the world?

RRS: To be frank, I don’t think art itself can or does make a difference in the world. People make a difference in the world, and one way we communicate or express opinions is through art. What art can do is plant ideas. Without action also being taken to follow up those convictions, art is just window trappings. Decoration. And that’s fine.

TFF: What or who inspires you?

RRS: Illustration-wise, I tend to draw a lot of my inspirations from older works by printmakers like Yoshitoshi Tsukioka and Käthe Kollwitz. The contemporary artist Lee Bul continually does work that blows my mind. She works in this huge, elaborate installations, but the compositions and forms she’s working with are beautiful and disturbing, monochromatic, and expertly composed, something that I work for in my own illustrations.

Fiction-wise, I’m currently reading the David Hawke translation of The Story in the Stone (also titled as Dream of the Red Mansions) which is just crazy inspiring and I’m not even a fifth of the way through yet. Anyone interested in world fiction, Chinese history and culture, good literature, or just an entertaining story should pick these books up.

I also love comics! I work in an editorial capacity with a host of incredibly talented artists on an annual comics anthology, Tankadere, which can be found at the small press Crab Tank’s website, and working with them is fun and incredibly rewarding. There’s nothing like holding a finished book in your hands and knowing that it’s filled with amazing stories and that you had a role in bringing it about.

“I Never Did Like Smart-Ass Utopians”

guest post by Tracie Welser

Part 1 of 3 guest posts on Utopian Narrative


Utopia is an obsession of mine. I find literature that explores notions of a perfect place very appealing. People living peacefully and work together in harmony, who wouldn’t want to live in a place like that? Who wouldn’t want to read about that?

Apparently, lots of people. It’s a “no-place,” they say. Or “it could never work, it always fails in the real world, so why bother with it?” For some (and I’m basing this on discussions I’ve had), talk of egalitarian society causes a sort of anxiety about political correctness, or liberal guilt, or anger/concerns about the evils of Socialism.

As Pandora says to her niece in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, “I never did like smart-ass utopians. Always so much healthier and saner and sounder and fitter and kinder and tougher and wiser and righter than me and my family and friends. People who have the answers are boring, niece. Boring, boring, boring.”

The first big question seems to be, what constitutes the “perfect place,” and for whom? Is it a beautiful, unspoiled place very far from anywhere else, where perfectible dreams are possible? To Thomas More, credited with coining the word “utopia” in the 16th century, the perfect place meant a land with no unemployment, no overpopulation, no religious bigotry, and the elimination of private property (although, oddly enough, slavery was okay).

The dream of a perfect place depends on where you’re standing, the historical or cultural moment from which the dream arises. That perfect place may exist in a possible future, or in a place, or even in a past “Golden Age.”

In the U.S., the utopian ideal could be considered a founding principle of the nation and the driving force behind colonialism and westward expansion. The New World was New Eden, a collective fantasy, a dream of a better world. Never mind that the land was already occupied.

In fiction, these worlds exist as thought experiments. Narratives encourage the reader to reflect on social problems and possibly even solutions. Speculative fiction, science fiction and fantasy have a way of doing that.

Utopia, then, is dreaming, yearning, for something that doesn’t quite exist and never exactly will. But is it problematic that these worlds don’t, won’t or can’t exist?

Fast-forward to modern ideas of the perfect place. Let’s dream a little bit.

What would your ideal society look like, your perfect place?

How about a society where equality is the norm for people of all races and genders and ableness of body, where inequity and violence have been eliminated?

What problems or tensions do you foresee?



Suggested Reading
Ivana Milojevic and Sohail Inayatullah, "Futures Dreaming: Challenges from Outside and on the Margins of the Western World."

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sultana’s Dream (A non-Western utopia)

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed


(Next month: Feminist Utopias: What’s Gender Got to Do With It?)

Signal boost: Heiresses of Russ 2012

Signal boosted for Sacchi Green:

Heiresses of Russ, the new annual anthology series created in honor of the late writer, academic, and feminist Joanna Russ, is now taking recommendations for the 2012 edition. We’re looking for lesbian-themed speculative fiction first published in 2011.

The 2011 edition, co-edited by Joselle Vanderhooft, is available now, including work by Ellen Kushner, Tanith Lee, Rachel Swirsky, and other outstanding writers. This year Steve Berman of Lethe Press has invited Connie Wilkins to co-edit the 2012 edition with him. Connie also edited Time Well Bent: Queer Alternative Histories for Lethe Press, and has edited seven anthologies under an alternate name in an alternate genre.

We're looking for the best lesbian-themed speculative fiction published in 2011, with a length limit of 2,000-10,000 words. Science fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream, interstitital, just plain weird—we'll know it when we see it. We can’t succinctly define superlative writing, either, but we know it when we see it.

Recommendations from readers, authors, and publishers will be welcomed. We don't need the stories themselves just yet, but if we're interested and can't find copies on our own, we'll ask for manuscripts. Only work published in 2011 will be considered.

Our deadline for recommendations is March 15, 2012. The payment for these reprinted stories will be $25 each and two copies of the anthology. Recommendations and queries can be e-mailed to conniew@sff.net or sacchigreen@gmail.com.

If you can't think of any stories to recommend, go forth and read more!

Outlaw Bodies

Outlaw Bodies, a themed anthology from The Future Fire
Call for Submissions

The “Outlaw Bodies” issue of The Future Fire will gather together stories about the future of human bodies that break boundaries—legal, societal, biological, more.

In the future, what sorts of bodies will be expected and which will violate our expectations—of gender, of ability, of appearance, of functionality? What technological interventions with the "natural" body will be available, expected, discouraged, restricted, forbidden? How will societies ensure conformance to their expectations—through law, through which incentives and disincentives? How will individuals who do not conform to embodied expectations (by choice or otherwise) make their way in these future worlds?

The anthology seeks stories that interrogate these questions from feminist, disability rights, queer, postcolonial and other social-political perspectives, especially intersectional ones, for a special issue on the theme of “Outlaw Bodies,” to be guest co-edited by Lori Selke.

Word count is flexible, but we are unlikely to accept any story over 10,000 words. Send your stories as an attachment to: outlawbodies.tff@gmail.com. We prefer .doc, .docx, .rtf or .odt files—query first for any other format.

Deadline: May 1, 2012.
Payment: $35/story.

About the publisher: The Future Fire is an e-published magazine showcasing new writing in Social-Political Speculative Fiction. See our manifesto at http://futurefire.net/about/manifesto.html for more details.

About the editor: Lori Selke has been published in Strange Horizons and Asimov’s. She’s been active in queer, sex radical and feminist activist circles for over two decades. She is also the former editor/publisher of the tiny lit zine Problem Child.

Cool Wikipedia categories and lists

Wikipedia is not only an ever-changing, almost pathologically up-to-date, populist source of post-encyclopaedic information ("knowledge" is maybe too distilled a concept for this resource); because of its born-digital, crowdsourced, collectively tagged content, it is also a veritable tangled-net of categories, lists, statistical flukes and fortuitous agglomerations of tenuously related items. I know people who have used Wikipedia links as a mini-Semantic Web to test relationships between concepts and places. Some of the most interesting pages on the web are the Category pages, where one can browse the keywords with which this meta-encyclopaedia's entries have been tagged.

Last night, George Dvorky listed twenty of his favourite lists on Wikipedia, only a few of which were organic categories as I describe them above. You can see his interest in paradoxes, unsolved problems and natural disaster (just as the category ghosttown in my Delicious reveals my obsession with abandoned human settlements). All fascinating lists, by the way, especially the ones with statistics attached.

It got me thinking about the category pages that I find most fun and scintillating to browse. One of the nicest things about these is that their contents page have changed since I linked to them. The other nice thing is that they're a mine for story ideas.

• Out-of-place artifacts - these are interesting precisely because they're not in the next category: in archaeology, as in hard science, a one-off is often considered a fluke or a hoax, but these seem to be real. Hard to explain, lacking in context, but not obviously bogus.
• Archaeological forgeries - there are more fun, but fodder for "what if" or alternate history type stories: what if they weren't forgeries, but real? (Okay, let's not get into van Dänicken territory...)
• Fictional writers - we all love writers, especially, it would seem, writers.
• Nonexistent people - people who were or are thought to really exist
• People whose existence is disputed - people we just aren't sure about
• List of people reported to have lived beyond 130 - almost all of these are probably spurious, but what's the fascination with historical longevity? (This is not a category, but the curated list is more useful than the closest category I could find.)
• Fictional languages - again, these are not hoaxes, in most cases, but languages invented for fictional worlds, like Láadan or Klingon. What does it take to invent a language?
• Feminist science fiction - different kind of category, but this is one that could grow as more items get tagged this way. What can you think of that isn't here already?
• List of hoaxes on Wikipedia - a meta-list if ever there was one: entries that were created in Wikipedia, spuriously, and went unnoticed long enough to catch on, or spread to other media, before they were deleted. Catalogued here for posterity, along with a convincing appeal for why you shouldn't try to do this again.

Genderswitching Classic SF

Inspired by this lighthearted Guardian article on Genderswitching classic novels, my holiday challenge is to take a passage from classic speculative fiction (define as you like), and reverse the gender of the pronouns (or otherwise subvert, if you want to make your hero genderqueer, say). What's the most fun you can have? What SF story would be the most changed by the subversion of its genders? Which would be improved?

A couple of ideas to get us started. First (from Honor Philippa Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu):

The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears that on 1 March 1925, a thin, dark young woman of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. Her card bore the name of Henrietta Antonia Wilcox, and my aunt had recognized her as the youngest daughter of an excellent family slightly known to her, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious maiden of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams she was in the habit of relating. She called herself ‘psychically hypersensitive,’ but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed her as merely ‘queer’. Never mingling much with her kind, she had dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of aesthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found her quite hopeless.

And second (from Wilma Gibson's Countess Zero):

She’d come home and gotten right down to it, slotted the icebreaker she’d rented from Two-a-Day and jacked in, punching for the base she’d chosen as her first live target. Figured that was the way to do it; you wanna do it, then do it. She'd only had the little Ono-Sendai deck for a month, but she already knew she wanted to be more than just some Barrytown hotdogger, Bobbi Newmark, aka Countess Zero, but it was already over. Shows never ended this way, not right at the beginning. In a show, the cowgirl heroine's boy or maybe her partner would run in, slap the trodes off, hit that little red OFF stud. So you’d make it, make it through.

Do either of those change the reading of the story significantly? Please add more examples in the comments.

A book of wisdom: The Dispossessed...

Some books are beautiful.

Some novels are exciting, and thrilling, and full of adventure.

Some stories are full of the wisdom of their authors.

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed is so beautiful it brings tears to the eyes—you don't read it, it sings to you; it is so full of adventure and excitement that you run alongside the characters, feel their pain and their joy and their desperation and their hope; it is so full of the writer's wisdom that three times during the reading of it I had to dig out a pencil and scrawl a copy of a particularly amazing passage on the scrap of paper I was using as a bookmark.

From page 113  (Panther 1975 edition):

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

From page 158:

There are souls ... whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.

From page 205:

An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or  soap-works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience. [...] Though it might seem that [the] insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of a promise or a vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful.

Call for Submissions: Guest Editors

The Future Fire, an online magazine of social-political speculative fiction with an emphasis on the progressive (feminist sf, queer sf, eco sf, multiculturalism/race) is looking for guest editors to collaborate on one or two themed issues/anthologies in the coming year. We would like suggestions for the theme and applications from prospective editors. If you would like to take part in selecting, editing and producing an issue of this magazine, please write to the fiction editor (fiction [at] futurefire [dot] net), using the subject line “TFF Guest Editor application”, by October 31, 2011.

In your application (maximum one page or c. 500 words), please include:

1. Your suggested theme. Please explain the theme you suggest and why you think it is interesting. Include how such stories fit the social-political speculative slant of TFF and any writers or groups you would target in a call for submissions.
2. Any credentials and/or experience you may have. You don’t have to have edited a speculative fiction magazine or anthology before, but it may help to know, for example, whether you’re a writer yourself, how much you’ve read in the area, whether you have any background in literature or any other relevant experience.
3. How much work you're willing to put into editing. We do not expect you to perform an unreasonable amount (we all have day-jobs), but it’s good to have realistic expectations. A call for submissions will need to be both disseminated widely and targeted to potential contributors and groups; stories need to be read, selected and copy-edited; the published issue then has to be widely publicized. It would therefore be useful to know how much you would be willing to help.
4. Do you have any ideas for fundraising for this issue? TFF is a non-profit publication; the only income is from donations and all shortfall comes from the editors’ pockets. Any ideas you might have for alternative finance models (e.g. print-on-demand version for sale; funding drive; special editions, subscriptions) would be very welcome.

This doesn't need to be terribly formal, but these are ideas we'd like to start brainstorming with you. We will of course discuss all of these issues in more detail later in the process, but as much background as you can give now will be valuable.

The Future Fire is open to fiction

The Future Fire, a magazine of social-political speculative fiction with an emphasis on the progressive and inclusive, is open to fiction submissions as of today. Please see our Submission Guidelines for information on how to submit. Please report our response times and outcomes to Duotrope's Digest; this will help keep us honest, and be useful for other authors to know what to expect.

For more on what sort of fiction we're looking for, have a look at some of the guest posts on various subgenres, topics and themes that we've been posting here every day this month (see below for the full alphabetical list).

A is for Alternate History
B is for Borgesian
C is for Cyberpunk
D is for Dystopian
E is for Eco-SF
F is for Feminist SF
G is for Gestalt
H is for Hardcore Horror
I is for Identity Crisis
J is for Juvenile
K is for Kafkaesque
L is for Low Fantasy
M is for Magical Realism
N is for Noir
O is for Occultists
P is for Postapocalypse
Q is for Queer SF
R is for Race in SF
S is for Surrealism
T is for Transhumanism
U is for Uploaded Minds
V is for Vampires
W is for World SF
X is for X-Rated SF
Y is for Young Adult
Z is for Zombie

Z is for Zombie

Zombies may be the most clichéd and least sexy of all tropes of horror fiction—even if vampires and werewolves are the paranormal romance-cliché of the year, shambling mindless zombies are surely among the most pointless monsters in the canon. Add to that their problematic status in terms of racial sensitivity, since the Hollywood zombie is an appropriation and perversion of an element of Afro-diasporic culture (Vodoun practitioners do not turn people into zombies, any more than they stick pins into dolls representing their enemies), and you might well imagine that zombie fiction has no place in TFF.

Then again, the world after a zombie outbreak is usually represented as a postapocalyptic landscape (or maybe a paranoid dystopia), both of which are great themes for socio-political scifi. In addition we’ve recently seen the ability of zombies to represent sexuality and sexual conflict; human rights and alienation; terrorism and the politics of fear. In other words zombies are very political.

As with every genre or theme we’ve discussed this month, the important point is that a story is not social and political because it’s overtly about societal roles or political activism. Whatever the surface subject matter of a speculative fiction story, a good writer who is willing to speculate and extrapolate changes to our world in a way that matters, cannot help but write socio-political fiction.