| Title | : | Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0989141144 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780989141147 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 366 |
| Publication | : | First published September 11, 2013 |
Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond Reviews
-
“They call those of us who made it through “time witnesses.” I can think of a couple of better terms.”
I know that this isn’t huge shocking news, but I’m a word junky. So, I hate it that this project didn’t make it as a book, but maybe its better as a short story. Horror is like that sometimes.
The outbreak:
“Within a month, a couple of thousand more infections were reported. Didn’t rip through the pobla like the dengues or the poxes. More of a slow leprous spread. A black mold-fungus-blast that came on like a splotch and then gradually started taking you over, tunnelling right through you—though as it turned out it wasn’t a mold-fungus-blast at all. It was something else. Something new.
Everybody blamed the heat. Blamed the Calientazo. Shit, a hundred straight days over 105 degrees F. in our region alone, the planet cooking like a chimi and down to its last five trees—something berserk was bound to happen. All sorts of bizarre outbreaks already in play: diseases no one had names for, zoonotics by the pound. This one didn’t cause too much panic because it seemed to hit only the sickest of the sick, viktims who had nine kinds of ill already in them. You literally had to be falling to pieces for it to grab you.”
“A huge rah-rah, but when the experts determined that it wasn’t communicable in the standard ways, and that normal immune systems appeared to be at no kind of risk, the renminbi and the attention and the savvy went elsewhere. And since it was just poor Haitian types getting fucked up—no real margin in that.”
His friend from school:
“On top of that we were both art types, which in our world of hyper-capitalism was like having a serious mental disorder.”
“Took me over to the rooftop apartment his dad had given him in the rebuilt Zona Colonial. The joint was a meta-glass palace that overlooked the Drowned Sectors, full of his photographs and all the bric-a-brac he had collected for props, with an outdoor deck as large as an aircraft carrier.
You live here? I said, and he shrugged lazily: Until Papi decides to sell the building.”
The friend’s friends:
“We drank some more spike, and some of his too-cool-for-school Dome friends came over, slim, tall, and wealthy, every one doing double takes when they saw the size of me and heard my Dark accent, but Alex introduced me as his Brown classmate. A genius, he said, and that made it a little better. What do you do? they asked and I told them I was trying to be a journalist. Which for that set was like saying I wanted to molest animals. I quickly became part of the furniture, one of Alex’s least interesting fotos. Don’t you love my friends, Alex said. Son tan amable.”
The girl:
“That girl. With one fucking glance she upended my everything.
So you’re the friend? I’m Mysty. Her crafted eyes giving me the once-over. And you’re in this country voluntarily?
A ridiculously beautiful mina wafting up a metal corkscrew staircase in highheels and offering up her perfect cheek as the light from the Dome was dying out across the city—that I could have withstood. But then she spent the rest of the night ribbing me because I was so Americanized, because my Spanish sucked, because I didn’t know any of the Island things they were talking about—and that was it for me. I was lost.”
My concern:
When we have another Carrington Event, how will I find out what happened?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_s...
Available at:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
and
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/wp-... -
Four stars instead of 5 only because this is very clearly the first chapter of a novel, not a stand-alone story. The introduction to the story that I read implied that the novel is to-come, but Wikipedia disagrees: "Since 2007, Diaz was reported to be working on another novel, entitled Monstro; however, in June 2015 Diaz stated that he had effectively abandoned that novel."
That's a shame, because I would read the hell out of it.
Two Dominican Brown University students, one a nerdy writer, one a wealthy playboy, and the beautiful but troubled girl that our narrator (the nerd) is obsessed with, all happen to be at home in the DR when a new plague breaks out. The plague's effects are a new and extremely creepy twist on the zombie trope... but I guess we don't get to find out what happens. -
An anthology of spec fic by and about people of colour--the subtitle focuses on Afrofuturism but there's a lot more in here as well.
There are some really excellent stories in here. The Tade Thompson (god, he's good), Daniel Jose Older, Minister Faust, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Victor LaValle were the standouts for me, but there's plenty of variety in here to suit most tastes in sf/f, from ancient mythology to hard sf and spaceships. A good place to start if you're looking to expand your SFF reading beyond the unbearable whiteness of being.
That said, the SP Somtow story about a Native American in Japan is shocking. The depiction of Japan is a mass of stereotypes and prejudices and if this was meant to be the opinions of the characters, unreliable narrator blah, it really didn't come across that way to me. A massive fail which also literally fridges women. I also skipped the Junot Diaz because I don't need to read abusive men, although this book was published in 2013 so you can't blame the eds for that one. But those two aside, there's much good in here, and plenty of authors to follow up. -
In recent years I've been making an effort to read more broadly, and my encounters with
Octavia E. Butler,
Nnedi Okorafor and
N.K. Jemisin have brought me into the sphere of Afrofuturism. I'd been yearning to delve deeper so this seemed the perfect find
I'm aware there is much debate about what exactly Afrofuturism is, and the "and Beyond" of this title should have suggested to me that editor
Bill Campbell trawls his net widely; there are the kind of thing that I might have expected (although somehow I expected nothing in particular, and thought myself wide open, clearly I carry the cultural baggage of of a certain age and ethnicity and gender and geography and class and experience so the stories that showed a standard SF future but with a Afrocentric slant, or some variant from a past less dominated by European colonialism - or simply from a point of view not rooted in that history.
That would have been plenty to both sate and whet my appetite, but there is more here. It is almost misleading to call this anthology Afrofuturism (if that is the use of a fashionable term for attention, it is forgivable); this is a collection of fictions of inclusion, of voices of groups marginalised in art and culture, their voices and viewpoints. This collection is a shining example of the joy of exploration beyond one's usual boundaries. The standard of the stories is superb (not every single one to my taste, for instance the few ultra-shorts, but I am not really a fan of flash-fiction) and there are a handful of tales that took my breath away - those by
Victor LaValle,
N.K. Jemisin,
Ernest Hogan,
S.P. Somtow,
Junot Díaz - and I'm sure others I'm leaving off- were the highlights.
One of the joys of anthologies is finding writers I may not have otherwise come across, and this has certainly opened my horizons. It is a perfect illustration of two of my favourite quotes:
"Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while." Malorie Blackman
“Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.” Neil Gaiman
So read widely. Read people who are not like you. Read people who have different experiences, different histories, different outlooks. Read colour, read gender, read sexuality.
Read difference. -
When I finished reading the first story in Mothership, a little voice in my head said "Was that really the story to start this anthology with? I mean, sure it's got a black protagonist, but is that enough?"
And then the rest of me took a step back, looked horrified, and said: "Have you learned nothing from Pam Noles' essay "Shame"? And from the entire Kaleidoscope project? The story has a black protagonist. That's entirely the point."
And then I sat, aghast at my own white ignorance, and felt ashamed.
And then I kept reading, because that's the obvious way to combat such an attitude and is at least part of the point of this project and why I supported its production.
There's a really wide variety of fiction in this anthology. Some skirt the edge of being 'speculative' (Rabih Alameddine's "The Half-Wall") while others hurtle over the edge and throw themselves at it. I didn't click with every story (Greg Tate's "Angels + Cannibals Unite" really didn't work for me, and nor did Ran Walker's "The Voyeur"), but many of them were absolutely breathtaking.
Nisi Shawl's "Good Boy" - one of the only stories that really qualifies for the 'mothership' appellation by being set in space - is a glorious fun romp.
"The Aphotic Ghost", by Carlos Hernandez, did not go where I was expecting and was utterly absorbing.
SP Somtow's "The Pavilion of Frozen Women" has a wonderful line in bringing together several quite disparate cultures and tying them together into a fairly creepy thriller.
NK Jemisin does intriguing things with the notion of online communities in "Too many yesterdays, not enough tomorrows."
"Life-Pod" is Vandana Singh's haunting reflection on family and identity and connection.
In "Between Islands," Jaymee Goh suggests how different things might have been for the British in colonising Melaka and surrounds with different technology...
Tenea D Johnson's "The Taken" is a profound reflection on contemporary issues and problems stemming from the historical transportation of enslaved African to America... I don't even inhabit the culture that's dealing with it.
One of the intriguing things about this anthology is that it's not focussed on African-American fiction, which I had basically expected thanks to the title's reference to P Funk and Afrofuturism. Instead, there are stories here that draw on Egyptian, Native American, Caribbean (I think? I'm Australian, sorry!!), Japanese and Malaysian (again, I think) traditions and cultures - and those are just the ones that I (think I) could identify. There are definitely others that draw on other Asian cultures (I think there's an Indonesian one?). The author bios don't universally identify where the authors are from, so that doesn't assist in figuring out what might have influenced them... which is not a complaint, by the way, because so what? (in the most prosaic 'fiction is fiction' sense). So it's a really broad understanding of what falls into "Tales from Afrofuturism and beyond" - much more inclusive therefore than, for example, many anthologies of the last few years, let alone decades.
This is an good anthology, period. That it's exploring and accomplishing a particular political aim is icing on the cake. -
This is a very un-Shira book--often violent and dystopian--but it's high quality for people who are okay with much harsher SFF. However, there were a handful of stories that I did enjoy, such as:
"The Aphotic Ghost" by Carlos Hernandez, in which the MC comes to understand the supernatural and magical elements of the one-night-stand that gave him a son several decades ago. A beautiful and hauntingly soothing story about family and being two things at once, with settings as varied as the ocean and literally Mt. Everest. Latino protagonist, hopeful ending.
"Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows" by NK Jemisin, in which a cataclysm (the book is full of them, but this one was honestly the most creative) has caused reality to fragment so much that anyone who didn't have sufficient human connections is now isolated in their own pocket universe, reliving the same day over and over again like Groundhog Day. The only place time is still linear, for these folks, is online, which is also the only place any of them can still share human contact. This one is a hetero love story and while the ending is ambiguous I choose to believe it's hopeful.
"Bludgeon" by Thaddeus Howze is a story about alien invasion and baseball and the Nature of Humanity, and after a bunch of Asimov-reminiscent humor it packs a hell of a serious punchline. I could also compare it to a Twilight Zone episode. More hopeful ending than I'm making it sound.
"Amma" by Charles R. Saunders is a tragic hetero paranormal romance set in Africa, but the beauty of the story pushed past my usual allergy to unhappy endings. Trigger warning for someone's family dying violently and for discussion of sexual assault.
"Protected Entity" by Daniel José Older. Paranormal noir adventure set in Harlem. The protagonists are a (living) Latino paranormal investigator with a Black partner who happens to be dead and a ghost, and the villain turns out to literally be the ghost of an 18th century slaver, so this is some excellent camp. Very noir ending, in which "good triumphs" but people don't get to maintain their relationships.
"Four Eyes" by Tobias Buckell, set in St. Thomas. This one has to do with restless spirits and the humans who can help other humans who are being plagued by them. Hopeful ending.
"Monstro" by Junot Díaz is about some kind of end-of-the-world event centering in Haiti and the Dominican Republic and I was really impressed with how skillfully he built tension sloooowly over the course of several sequential events. I'm not into cataclysm, again, but this earned a place on my list for amazing language like "a cascade of black hair you could have woven thirty days of nights from" and "with a Stradivarius curve to her back." This was one of those ones where an approachable style and good narration dragged me into the type of story I usually avoid. Trigger warning for mention of child sexual assault in a survivor's past.
Many of the other stories were well-written and totally captivating, holding my interest, but just took me places I didn't want to go, like the lonely undead, or serial murders of women.
This book is without a doubt someone's high-quality sci-fi/paranormal horror jam, but that kind of means it's not mine. It's the kind of book where one of the stories featured tooth fairies that attack children, leaving them screaming from bloody mouths once they've stolen all the teeth. That being said, if you like creepy and often apocalyptic science fiction, this book will give it to you by the caseful, with dozens of stories of incredibly varied settings and time periods.
General warning that it's full of all kinds of triggery subjects and I didn't write them all down as I was reading the book, so unfortunately please do not count on this one specific review for that information, although I did try to note if there were any in the stories I specifically mentioned. -
This was a very hit or miss collection for me. It has a refreshingly wide range of styles, moods, and settings. There are some striking stories here, and very interesting characters and rich worlds to explore. That said, I think some stories would be better suited to novellas or novels than one-shots, as sometimes the complexity and depth of detail can make some of the stories less accessible than others. Still, it's well worth a read, and I hope to see more such projects in the future!
-
42 SHORT STORIES IN 42 DAYS*
DAY 32: Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows by N. K. Jemisin
★
Too many characters, not enough story.
Day 8: I Left My Heart In Skaftafell by Victor LaValle
★★★★
Written in a deceptively light tone, this story about a man pursued by a troll stayed with me long after I finished reading.
*The rules:
– Read one short story a day, every day for six weeks
– Read no more than one story by the same author within any 14-day period
– Deliberately include authors I wouldn't usually read
– Review each story in one sentence or less
Any fresh reading suggestions/recommendations will be gratefully received 📚 -
This anthology is worth reading. It is (too?) long - at least for me - and I didn’t enjoy all the stories but there are some real gems in here. And if you think they are all centred on the experiences of the Afro diaspora, you will get more than you bargained for. This was a refreshing immersion in stories outside the typical white mainstream fare. Enjoy!
-
This is a crowd-funded collection of short stories focused on adding a little color to speculative fiction. Don't expect this to be just a bunch of sci-fi, only with black folks. Actually, don't expect a whole lot of sci-fi at all. There's some, but it's a broader, more varied look at speculative fiction.
There's a bunch of quality work here with a great amount of diversity, diversity of all kinds. I can't think of a real clinker in the bunch.
The only point of disappointment was that I didn't really feel challenged. I'm a white guy from the mild streets of Minnesota's suburbia. I was expecting more of the stories to make me feel uncomfortable, but, with one exception near the end, none of them did. -
If I'm allowed to use the food metaphor for literature, where pulp is fastfood and some literature is high cuisine, this collection is like dining out in an exotic restaurant (ethiopian?), where the table is filled with many dishes, to sample. The joy is in the exotic tastes, the spices, the lingering sensation in the back of your mouth, the knowledge of having a new experience, that leaves you enriched. But also sometimes it can be a bit too spicy for the untrained palate, good in the moment but afterwards you need a glass of milk and some regular food to come back to earth. It's good, but something to consume in small doses and with time in between.
Though I applaud what this collection tries to do: to make available to the reader stories by authors from other cultures, as diverse as possible, to open up their minds, to embrace more diversity, more points of view, more ways of being and telling stories, it was almost too much of that. What I mean is: I read SF and fantasy for the sense of displacement, of new experiences, of stimulating the imagination and longing for far away places and time. But this as a double dose: the out of this world experience of SF and fantasy combined with the displacement of stories set in other cultures, using other idiomes than my own. It created a double remove for me, a western reader. Which I can deal with, but I thought afterwards that it would have been better to read this collection in smaller doses, one or two stories at a time. Also I'm more of a SF-fan in the short story format, and prefer my fantasy in larger novels, and here there were many fantasy, or magical realism, or fringe genre stories, that I found interesting but not really naturally my cup of tea. But it certainly did inspire me to read more stories from outside of my own cultural niche as there is a linguistic and thematical richness to explore there! -
The best thing about this anthology is that it is filled with a variety of fiction across speculative genres from authors with both complimentary and completely different styles. While I did not like every single story in here, I appreciated all of them as well written and reflective of their author's passion. Mothership is a go to if you want to bathe in black speculative excellence, but it is also simply about the human experience across ethnicities, times, and places. It features works from and about other peoples of color, multi-racial individuals, and seats them all in different contexts. Truthfully this book caught me off guard with its sheer variety because I though it'd be mostly afrofuturism. I'm glad it wasn't after reading because these stories were on fire. This book reflects the fact that blackness or simply being a person of color doesn't have to be divorced from these genres or the raw human experience of existing, of dreaming of different worlds.
From stories evoking Egyptian mythology (this story was awesome, wish it'd been longer) to a murder mystery of magical realism in Japan there's something here for everyone. It's not the sort of book you'd put down even if you scroll through a bit to get to the next thing you like. This book should be on far more reading lists than it is. -
The diversity in this collection is amazing, with stories set in cultures all over the world (and off-world). They take place in the past, present and future. The authors' styles vary from cultural vignettes to tightly plotted stories to novel excerpts. There were a lot of reprints, but only one I'd read before. Some of my favorites included:
Thaddeus Howze's "Bludgeon", a funny story about an alien invasion and... baseball.
Charles R. Saunders's "Amma", an African myth about a gazelle-woman.
Tobias Buckell's "Four Eyes", about a taxi driver on St. Thomas and the spirit world.
Joseph Bruchac's "Dances with Ghosts", about a Native American veteran living on a reservation. With ghosts.
Daniel José Older's "Protected Entity", a great ghost/detective story set in Harlem.
Lisa Allen-Agostini's "A Fine Specimen", a very personal tale of the Carnival "wining" dance on Trinidad, with an SF twist.
Disclaimer: I have a story in here, too, about a doctor's encounter with a dragon near a Doctors Without Borders camp in Sudan. -
There were more hits than misses, more examples of stories engaging than not, and overall? Probably a GREAT introduction and refutation to the notion that people of color can't write science fiction/fantasy. REALLY enjoyed this volume.
-
Absolutely stellar story collection. I recommend this to anyone who likes spec fic; you will not be disappointed. Many of these are the type of story I will be lying awake thinking about ten years from now.
-
http://blacknerdproblems.com/site/?p=... -
“Hyenas don’t have feeling,” Auntie Fadia said. “Their laughter is only pretense.” “I”
I don't see many short story collections by African origin authors. So I thought I will check out this book when I saw it in a library. It was good. -
The stories in Mothership are incredibly diverse. Firstly, each story centers on non-white protagonists/cultures/societies, and the collection includes writing by authors from all over the world, including the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and Native Americans. Secondly, the scope of these stories includes speculative fiction, mystical/magical realism, alternative history, supernatural/fantasy, horror, and futuristic folklore.
As a reader, this collection was refreshing. It was very reassuring to see that so many non-white and non-Western authors, from every background, are writing science fiction, and it is disappointing that most of these authors do not have a mainstream following. On the other hand, it is not clear who the audience of this collection is; for example, I would use this as a resource to share with (probably white) people who do not know of any science fiction writers of colour, but I am not sure if this book appeals to me particularly because of its content. There is no consistent theme throughout. -
This long anthology has a bit of something for every one and a bit of everyone in the pages. While some stories weren't quite my taste I appreciated being able to read them and understand the creativity, personality, and uniqueness of many of these stories. As a person of color this book gave many different types of people who looked like me and those who did not but all were far flung from any stereotypes. From ancient Egyptian myths to far flung space colonies still tied to ancient african and african american folklore this book brings a refreshing and intriguing series of new takes to the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Fabulous read
-
An excellent collection of stories. The breadth is impressive with diversity among the authors, styles, subjects. I didn't love every single story, but there were several that were amazing and it was great to be introduced to new authors whose work I will definitely be following.
-
Shira Glassman's review look useful:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
============
ebook @ BG, chkd out 2/11/17. 999 copies! -
I enjoyed most of the stories in this collection of stories. There were a few that I didn’t think measured up to the rest, but hey, I’m not the editor.
“The Half-Wall”, “The Runner of n-Vamana” and “Monstro” particularly stood out for me. Excellent stories among many other good ones. -
Amazing collection! A wide variety of tales with many gems that go right to the heart of a sense of identity, connection to place and land, and culture of those whose place and identity is torn or traumatized. A good intro to afrofuturism, with post-colonial works well represented, and science fiction (with some fantasy) that comes from a core more interesting and less explored than is often the case. Very thankful to Campbell and Hall for creating this, and to the contributors for their incredible imaginations and willingness to go deep into theme with their own cultural ideas.
I read 24 out of these 40 stories, and began a few others that I chose not to complete. This was most of my reading for the last couple weeks, and a good project for these slow, long days of summer. Below are those I found most interesting, with my favourites indicated by an asterisk. I haven't read works by most of these authors, but I'm excited to do so soon, and would highly recommend others to do the same!
I Left My Heart (Victor LaValle) -3
*Too Many Yesterdays (NK Jemisin) -5
[I love letter-writing! And this is an original and well thought out vision of the end of the world, from a different place than most (or rather, how isn't the point)]
*The Farming of Gods (Ibi Zoboi) -4.5
[so weird, oddly contradictory in some ways, and feels very realistic]
The Half-Wall (Rabih Alameddine) -3
Amma (Charles R Saunders) -3.5
*The Homecoming (Chinelo Onwualu) -3.5
[the perspectives of husband of wife in different kinds of colonizing are quite well-handled]
The Voyeur (Ran Walker) -1.5
*Bio-anger (Kiini Ibura Salaam) -4.5
[this story tackles a lot, perhaps too much for its length, but those ideas it delves into and the narration are fascinating enough to remember and recommend it]
The Runner of n-Vamana (Indrapramit Das) -3.5
*Waking the God of the Mountain (Rochita Loenen-Ruiz) -5
[simple, an understood situation, but conceptualized exactly right, I feel]
*A Brief History of Nonduality Studies (Sofia Samatar) -5
The Parrot's Tale (Anil Menon)-3
Northern Lights (Eden Robinson) -4
One Hundred and Twenty Days (Tade Thompson) -3
The Pillar (Farnoosh Moshiri) -3.5
Fées des Dents (George S Walker) -4
*The Buzzing (Katherena Vermette) -5
[those few pages are used to their fullest, almost crackling with their images]
Note: I don't like alien stories and I'm not a big fan of "monsters" or supernatural creatures (with a few exceptions), and that influences what I read and my opinions on those pieces. -
So Mothership is a really excellent collection with a huge number of great stories and a few that weren't as great but were still interesting or entertaining, overall I'm super pleased. It's difficult to describe and review though, because the stories span a really broad variety of sub-genres within the spec-fic umbrella (for those coming new to the party, Mothership is a collection of spec-fic short stories focusing on characters of colour) and analysing the ways those stories and characters interact with the various stoprytelling traditions touched on (e.g. historically colonized populations becoming deep-space colonizers) could be the subject of a whole other book or several. But let's start with some favourites. There are a few takes on "traditional hard sci-fi" topics including maybe my favourite piece in the collection, Vandana Singh's creepy-wistful-evocative "Life-pod", one of several tackling deep-space settlement, and Thaddeus Howze's "Bludgeon", which is not my usual style (or subject, being an alien invasion tale) but wins me over with charm, absurdity and a delicate balance of optimism and cynicism towards human (and alien) nature. There's a bunch of alt-history and alt-world fantasy, and some magic realism-ish stuff that would often get shelved with Serious Lit and never pulled into spec fic at all, which is interesting. There's some cool contemporary and near-future fantasy and scifi, some creeeeepy supernatural horror ("The Pavilion of the Frozen Women" by S.P. Somtow: brrrr), a mecha-pilot adventure mystery (Lauren Beukes' "Unathi Battles the Black Hairballs"), a super creepy story about a doctor taking on tooth fairies and other "spirit creatures" in a Sudanese MSF outpost ("Fées des Dents" by George S. Walker), and the expected proliferation of dystopian futures, most notably "Skin Dragons Talk" by Ernest Hogan and "Bio-Anger" by Kiini Ibura Salaam.
...And now I feel like I've basically just listed most of the book, except I've totally forgotten some awesome ones--wait, the delightfully weird "The Aphotic Ghost" by Carlos Hernandez deserves a mention for being one of those stories that tells the day-to-day human-level version of a fairytale scenario and does it really wel--this is silly. Just, the whole book. I recommend it. Very readable, very high quality, doesn't get repetitive, just really really good. I incurred library fines to finish it, because I didn't want to let it go. -
To be frank, I am disappointed with the compilation of stories. Many other reviews have noted that they were surprised that many of the stories in this series, self-described as Afro-futurism, were not by and about Black people. From the first story I was confused to the choices of the editors but I assumed that I had just missed some critical literary element. Even stories that were written by Black writers or had Black main characters missed the mark of Afro-futurism. Afro-futurism is about imagining the future and possibilities of the African Diaspora. The Blackness should be blatant, culture and heritage should be woven into the stories.
In my opinion, the compilation seems jumbled and haphazard. The overall body of work seems to be largely speculative fiction written by a variety of mostly non-white authors. Even then, not all the writers are people of color and not all the stories are speculation fiction, some of them feel like simple fantasy.
I tried to finish the book because I didn't want to add something else to my "unfinished shelf" but it was too much. I drew the line after finding out the story set in the Caribbean which employed Afro-Caribbean spirituality was written by a white author. To be clear, I do not believe that white people should be interacting with religions specifically designed to help their Black practitioners survive the horrors of white supremacy. To include this story and author into a book about "Afro-futurism" was either A glaring oversight or proof that this was really just a hodge podge of short stories with no real goal. -
If he'd finished it? It would have been five stars. This looks it could have easily been the best thing he ever wrote - easily! And what do we have to show for over a decade - a decade - of waiting? A handful of short stories from a man now poised more towards a career of literary journalism than one of actually writing literature. It's certainly too soon to call it, but it would be a real shame if at the end of all this Díaz ended up a one-pump chump who never had the chutzpah to let his seeds grow for the light of day. I hope my gut gets proven totally and absolutely wrong on this.
One of the few remaining and most talented voices of the marginalized in contemporary literature and he decided to shut the fuck up. -
This was great. I really enjoyed:
I Left My Heart in Skaftafell, Victor Lavalle
Amma, Charles R. Saunders
The Runner of n-Vamana, Indrapramit Das
In the Belly of the Crocodile, Minister Faust
The Buzzing, Katherena Vermette
Monstro, Junot Diaz
The Buzzing, in particular, for as short as it is, Vermette packs a punch with it; I read it at like 0200 and it gave me goosebumps. Lavalle, Saunders, Das and Faust took folktales and/or mythology and really went places; they felt fresh. Amma I liked in particular because I like stories about animals. Monstro was cool. Diaz really did a great job with it. His characters were very complex and relevant and he layered their drama with those of the sci-fi elements expertly.
A little bit for everyone in this. I'd recommend it to anybody.
