We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (30 page)

These values are so pervasive that the world we live today is constructed along the axes of the Western (or colonizing) thought: the constant Aristotelian dichotomies bisect our discourse and thoughts in every direction. Emotion and reason, art and science, male and female—all of these sharp dualities are not necessarily endemic to any given culture, but more often then not are introduced there by Western colonization.

Interestingly, this is another common thread: whether we look at the stories set in the colonized lands or in the West, science is often pitted in direct opposition to a holistic view of the world. By extension, science is often presented as a tool of the colonizers. Western reductionism, the need to dissect and disassemble and take apart, to study the details in order to comprehend the whole, is the very nature of the scientific method, and has transcended its applications, being often applied to entire peoples and cultures and souls. We see it in the reductionism of literary analysis, the reductionism of anthropology, and of cultural history. We see echoes of this idea in many of the stories; some even take the dissecting tools and (in some cases, literally) turn them against the conquerors.

It’s a notion many of the writers explore—the weapons of the colonizers taken up by the oppressed in act of liberation. Yet, one cannot help but remember the immortal Audre Lorde’s quote about the master’s tools that cannot dismantle the master’s house, and the sense of loss and uncertainty lingers in these stories, as we are left to wonder—along with the writers—about the price paid for knowledge, as well as the adequacy of a blow that is a mere reflection of the attack.

The solution offered by several of the stories seems to be found in the integration: the tools of the colonizers are flawed, and they have to be modified, infused with cultural memory and meaning, in order to serve the oppressed. Because the very nature of post-colonialism includes the impossibility of being entirely rid of it, the best we can hope for is to comprehend the past, recognize the ongoing colonization of the mind and of internal landscapes, and to resist it as best we can.

Resistance, then: several of the stories talk about its nature, and the emerging consensus appears to be that resistance is often indeed futile; but the futility of it is not a good enough reason to stop trying. The very nature of the colonizing influence is that it is elusive and shifting, often changing its appearance or mode, and thus is extremely difficult to confront. The quest for recognition of it is never-ending, and resistance takes as many forms as the influence itself—from warfare to art. Here again we see Hollywood emerging as the cultural constant, as the colonizing influence so significant that it doesn’t need to hide—or that, by its very nature, is forced to take on many forms.

This shifting nature imitates the shifting internal boundaries as well, something that the stories in this anthology touch upon over and over again: sometimes the shift is occurring internally and sometimes externally, when the very buildings and external landscapes become mutable, deviating from known history and the memory of those living in the stories, becoming reflections of the changes taking place in the colonized psyche.

And this brings us to the final theme: transience. During colonial history, the boundaries between nations were constantly changing. As new colonies were acquired and relinquished, the conquerors redrew the internal boundaries between the conquered peoples in order to negotiate with each other, resulting not only in arbitrary divisions between nations, but also in the inherently transient nature of colonial history. The changing borders mimicked the cultural erasure and retellings, and became lines drawn in the sand, erased and drawn again. As were the colonial histories—histories retold by the conquerors, histories designed to cast the colonizers in the best possible light and to erase as much of the cultural memory of the colonized as possible.

This shortness of colonial memory is meditated upon in some of the stories as well—due to the transient nature of any specific legacy, coupled with the lasting impression of colonization itself, this transience is often remarked upon, and the loss of cultural memory in this context dovetails nicely with the theme of the intentional erasure of the colonized memory and history.

It is interesting, then, to see the role the US plays in many of the stories: the American narrative presents the country as a colony that has fought for its liberation, but in reality of course it was already settled by the colonizers, and its separation from British rule was hardly an act of anticolonial rebellion. The genocide of the native populations in the US are barely considered in the dominant narrative, and slavery has been consistently downplayed or justified. From that position, the US has risen to be the dominant colonization power today—be it through direct occupation of foreign territories, or the occupation of minds by the Hollywood machine. At the same time, the US is still often an aspirational goal for those who seek to leave their home countries for a variety of reasons, and the theme of immigration—and its disappointments—is also present in this book.

We find ourselves rebelling against the lies and the dominant narratives fed into our collective psyche,
Clockwork Orange
-style, by Hollywood’s dream factory—a truly terrifying notion, if you think about it for a bit. We find ourselves looking for ways to escape, but realizing, time and time again, that the post-colonial world is still rife with colonial injustice and oppression. And yet, slowly, slowly, we are finding voices to tell our stories, to reclaim what has been lost of history. These broken, half-forgotten histories and dreams will never be restored to their original form, and part of living in the post-colonial world is making peace with that. Because we can still create the future, and try to hope that it will be treated better than our past. The writers in this book are taking a step in that direction—because the frontier that they see is one not in space but in time, a time when all voices are heard and all stories are listened to, when no history is erased, no matter how small or inconvenient. We see a different frontier—and I hope that this book let you glimpse it as well.

Contributors

Djibril al-Ayad
is the
nom de guerre
of a historian, futurist, writer and editor of
The Future Fire
, magazine of social-political speculative fiction. His interests span science, religion and magic; education and public engagement; diversity, inclusivity and political awareness in the arts.

Aliette de Bodard
is a half-French, half-Vietnamese who lives in a Parisian flat with more computers than warm bodies. When not busy working as a Computer Engineer, she writes speculative fiction: her Aztec noir trilogy
Obsidian and Blood
is published by Angry Robot, and her short fiction has been published in markets like
Clarkesworld
,
Interzone
and
The Year's Best Science Fiction
, garnering her a British Science Fiction Association Award, and Hugo and Nebula nominations. She blogs and geeks on food over at aliettedebodard.com.

Joyce Chng
was born in Singapore but is a global citizen; she writes mainly science fiction (SFF) and YA fiction. Her stories can be found in
The Apex Book of World SF II
and
Weird Noir
. Her novels are published by Lyrical Press. Her website is A Wolf's Tale: awolfstale.wordpress.com.

Fabio Fernandes
is an SF writer living in São Paulo, Brazil. He has several stories published in online venues like
Everyday Weirdness
,
The Nautilus Engine
,
StarShipSofa
,
Semaphore Magazine
,
Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure
, and
Kaleidotrope Magazine
, and in anthologies like Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded
and
The Apex World Book of SF
, Vol. 2 (ed. by Lavie Tidhar). Two-time recipient of the Argos SF Award (Brazil), Fernandes co-edited with Jacques Barcia in 2008 the bilingual online magazine
Terra Incognita
, and has translated into Brazilian Portuguese several SF works, such as
Neuromancer
,
Foundation
,
Snow Crash
,
Boneshaker
, and
The Steampunk Bible
.

Ernest Hogan
is descended from a curandero who once treated Pancho Villa. He is no relation to Ernest Hogan, the Father of Ragtime. Despite his Irish name (and ancestors) he is a born-in-East-L.A. Chicano. He coined the term “recomboculture”, and wrote the novels
Cortez on Jupiter
,
High Aztech
, and
Smoking Mirror Blues
. He’s all about impurity. You can read about it in his blog, mondoernesto.com, and his Chicanonautica column at labloga.blogspot.com.

Rahul Kanakia
is a science-fiction writer who has sold stories to
Clarkesworld
,
the
Intergalactic Medicine Show
,
Apex, Nature
, and
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
. He currently lives in Baltimore, where he is enrolled in the Master of the Fine Arts program in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. He graduated from Stanford in 2008 with a B.A. in Economics and he used to work as an international development consultant. If you want to know more about him then please visit his blog at blotter-paper.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/rahkan.

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
is a Filipino writer living in the Netherlands. A graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop, she was the recipient of the Octavia Butler Scholarship in 2009. Her fiction has been published abroad as well as in her home country, the Philippines. Recent publication credits include
Bloodchildren: Stories from the Octavia Butler Scholars
,
Weird Fiction Review
,
The Apex Book of World SF 2
and
Philippine Genre Stories
. Her non-fiction has appeared in
The Future Fire
,
Weird Fiction Review
and the Filipino publication,
Our Own Voice
. She is a regular columnist for
Strange Horizons
. Find her online at: rcloenenruiz.com.

Sandra McDonald
’s first collection of fiction was a Booklist Editor’s Choice, an American Library Association Over the Rainbow Book and winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Four of her stories have been noted by the James A. Tiptree Award Honor List for exploring gender stereotypes. She is the published author of several novels and more than sixty short stories for adults and teens, including the
Fisher Key Adventures
(written as Sam Cameron). She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine and teaches college in Florida.

Sunny Moraine
is a humanoid creature of average height, luminosity and inertial mass. They're also a doctoral student in sociology and a writer-like object who focuses primarily on various flavors of speculative fiction, usually with a decidedly queer bent, some of which has appeared in places like
Clarkesworld, Shimmer,
Strange Horizons,
and
Apex Magazine
. Their first novel
Line and Orbit,
co-written with Lisa Soem, is available from Samhain Publishing. They spend most of their days using writing to distract from academics, except for the occasions when the two collide.

Carmen Moran
grew up in East Germany, where the combined forces of her family and pre-reunification lack of TV introduced her to crafts and poetry from an early age. Following her move to Edinburgh, Scotland in 2000, she started taking life drawing and illustration classes, and was soon found making random attempts at world domination through the production of illustrations for various publications, and the creation of an army of Minimonsters. Since then, she has helped to set up Craft Reactor Edinburgh, and when she is not trying to scare small children, she can often be found at craft fairs, flogging the produce of Carmenland to the general public.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia
is Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination, and lives in beautiful British Columbia with her family and two cats. Her short stories have appeared in places such as
The Book of Cthulhu
and
Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing
. She has edited or co-edited the anthologies
Fungi
,
Future Lovecraft
and the upcoming
Dead North
. She owns and operates Innsmouth Free Press, a micro-press dedicated to the Weird and horrific. Her first collection,
Shedding Her Own Skin
, is out in 2013. She is working on a novel about a garbage collector who meets a drug-dealing vampire in Mexico City. Maybe it'll be publishable one day.

Gabriel Murray
, contrary to the implications of his fiction, is in fact quite fond of cats. He is a graduate of the 2007 Clarion Writing Workshop and a member of the Outer Alliance. He reads submissions and reviews movies and books for
Strange Horizons
and has had work published or forthcoming in
Daily Science Fiction
and
Ideomancer
. He has studied, among other things, Victorian poetry, anti-intellectualism in mad scientist narratives, Latin, law, and vampire cinema, but prefers postcolonialism and bubble tea.

Shweta Narayan
was born in India and has lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Scotland, and California. She was the Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at Clarion 2007. The clockwork bird showed up one day and hasn’t left yet; other stories about her have appeared in Shimmer’s
Clockwork Jungle
issue (reprinted in
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded
and
The Mammoth Book of Steampunk
),
Realms of Fantasy
,
Clockwork Phoenix
3, and
Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories
. Shweta’s other fiction and poetry have recently appeared in places like
Strange Horizons
,
Goblin Fruit
,
The Apex Book of World SF 2
, and the 2012 Nebula Showcase Anthology.