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doormouseetcappendix · 4 years

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Afro-Futurist Reading List Vol 2.

Afro Futurism Reading List Vol 1:

Afro Futurism Reading List Vol 2:

Black Speculative Fiction Breakdown by Genre

African Fantasy (early myths and fables from the continent): Forest Of A Thousand Deamons: A Hunter's Saga by Daniel O. Fagunwa The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle by Amos Tutuola The Brave African Huntress by Amos Tutuola Feather Woman of the Jungle by Amos Tutuola Ajaiyi and his Inherited Poverty by Amos Tutuola The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town by Amos Tutuola

Utopia (alternate histories written during the jim crow & antebellum eras): Blake Or The Huts Of Africa by Martin Delany Imperium In Imperio by Sutton E Griggs Light Ahead For The Negro Edward A Johnson One One Blood by Pauline Hopkins Black No More by George Shuyler Lord Of The Sea by MP Sheil

Space Opera (far future sci fi worlds of interplanetary travel): Nova by Samuel R Delany Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand by Samuel R. Delany Binti Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor An Unkindness Of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson Rayla 2122 Series by Ytasha Womack Trouble On Triton by Samuel R. Delany Babel 17 by Samuel R Delany Empire Star by Samuel R Delany The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord The Best Of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord Ancient Ancient by Klini Iburu Salaam Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden Ascension: Tangled Axon by Jacqueline Koyanagi Teleportality by T Cisco Nadine's Bible Seris by T Lindsey-Billingsley Nigerians In Space Series by Deji Bryce Olukotun

Aliens (alien encounters): Lilith's Brood Trilogy by Octavia Butler Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor Rosewater Trilogy by Tade Thompson The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbell The Wave by Walter Mosley

Dystopia (oppressive futures and realities): Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjie Brenyah Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi War Girls Series by Tochi Onyebuchi Sunshine Patriots by Bill Campbell Gunmen's Peace by Milton J Davis Dragon Variation by T Cisco

Experimental (literary tricksters): The Ravicka Series by Renee Gladman The Freedom Artist by Ben Okri The Structure Of Dante's Hells by LeRoi Jones The House Of Hunger by Dumbudzo Marachera Black Sunlight By Dumbudzo Marachera Yellow Back Radio Broke Down by Ishmaeel Reed The Last Days Of Louisiana Red by Ishmaeel Reed The Sellout by Paul Beatty Koontown Killing Kaper by Bill Campbell The African Origin Of UFOs by Anthony Joseph Quantum Black Futurism(Theory & Practice Volume 1) by Rasheeda Philips by Rasheeda Philips Spacetime Collapse: From The Congo to Carolinas Spacetime Collapse II: Community Futurisms by Rasheeda Philips consent not to be a single being trilogy by Fred Mot

Post-Apocalyptic (worlds falling apart): The Purple Cloud by MP Shiel Dhalgren by Samuel R Delany The Parable Series by Octavia Butler Brown Girl In The Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

Dying Earth (far future post-apocalyptic worlds + magic):

The Broken Earth Trilogy by NK Jemisin The Einstien Intersection by Samuel R. Delany The Jewels Of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany The Fall Of The Towers Trilogy by Samuel R. Delany Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorofor The Book Of Phoenix by Nnededi Okorofor The Prey Of Gods by Nicky Drayden

Alternate History (alternate timelines and what-ifs): Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed Everfair by Nisi Shawl The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates The Insh'Allah Series by Steven Barnes Ring Shout by P Djelia Clark A Dead Djinn In Cairo by P Djelia Clark The Black God's Drum by P Djelia Clark Washington Black by Esi Edugyan Pimp My Airship: A Naptown By Airship Story by Maurice Beaudice The Dream Of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer Pym by Matt Johnson, Dread Nation Series by Justina Ireland From Here to Timbuktu by Milton J Davis

High Fantasy (magical kindoms and high adventures): The Neveryorn Series by Samuel R. Delany Black Leapard Red Wolf by Marlon James The Deep by Rivers Solomon & Clipping Imaro Series by Charles R. Saunders The Children Of Blood & Bone by Tomi Adeyemi The Children Of Virtue & Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi The Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps by Kai Ashai Washington A Taste Of Honey by Kai Ashai Washington Beasts Made Of Night Series by Tochi Onyebuchi A Place Of Nights: War & Ressurection by Oloye Karade, Woman Of The Woods: A Sword & Soul Epic by Milton J Davis Temper by Nicky Drayden They Fly At Ciron by Samuel R. Delany Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman The House Of Discarded Dreams by Etakterina Sedia

Magic Realism (literary naturalism with surreal, dreamlike, and mythic imagery): The Echo Tree & Other Stories by Henry Dumas The Kingdom Of This World by Alejo Carpentier General Sun My Brother by Jacques Stephen Alexis The Famished Road Series by Ben Okri The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson Montaro Caine by Sydney Portier Mama Day by Gloria Naylor Redemption In Indigo by Karen Lord Mem by Bethany C Morrow

Urban Fantasy (modern citybound fantasy): The City We Became by NK Jemisin Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson The Chaos by Nalo Hopkinson The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead Blue Light By Walter Mosley Fire Baptized by Kenya Wright

Time Travel (stories unstuck in time): Kindred by Octavia Butler Version Control by Dexter Palmer Recurrence Plot by Rasheedah Phillips

Horror (nightmare, terrors, and hauntings): Beloved by Toni Morisson African Immortals by Tananarivue Due Fledgling by Octavia Butler The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez Lakewood by Meggan Giddings The Ballad Of Black Tom by Victor Lavalle Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff The Changeling by Victor Lavealle Zone One by Colson Whitehead The Between by Tananarive Due The Good House by Tananarive Due Ghost Summers: Stories by Tananarive Due Unhollowed Graves by Nunzo Onho Catfish Lullaby by AC Wise

Young Adult (books for young adults): Akata Witch Series by Nnedi Okorofor Zarah The Windseeker & The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorofor Long Juju Man by Nnedi Okorofor Ikenga by Nnedi Okorofor Tristan Strong Series by Kwame Mbalia A Song Below Water by Bethany C Morrow Daughters Of Nri by Reni K. Amayo A River Of Royal Blood by Amanda Joy 47 by Walter Mosley

Comics (graphic storytelling) George Herriman Library: Krazy & Ignatz (1919-1921) by George Herriman The Boondocks Complete Collection by Aaron Mcgruder Birth Of A Nation by Aaron Mcgrudger, Reginald Hudlin, & Kyle Baker Prince Of Cats by Ronald Wimberly Concrete Park by Erika Alexander & Tony Puryear Incognegro Series by Matt Johnson Your Black Friend & Other Stories by Ben Passmore Bttm Fdrs Ezra Clayton Daniels & Ben Passmore Sports Is Hell is Ben Passmore LaGuardia by Nnedi Okorofor & Tana Ford Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale Of New York by Samuel R Delany & Mia Wolff Empire by Samuel R Delany & Howard Chaykin Excellence by Brandon Thomas Bitteroot by David F Walker, Chuck Brown & Sanford Greene Black by Kwanza Osajyefo Niobe: She Is Life by Amandla Stenberg & Sebastian A Jones Black Panther by Christopher Priest Black Panther by Reginald Hudlin Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates Shuri by Nnedi Okorofor World Of Wakanda by Roxane Gay Truth: Red, White, & Black by Kyle Baker House Of Whispers by Nalo Hopkinson & Neil Gaiman Naomi by David F Walker, Brian Micheal Bendis, & Jamal Campbell Far Sector by NK Jemison & Jamal Campbell

Short Stories (collections by single authors): Driftglass by Samuel R Delany, Distant Stars by Samuel R Delany Bloodchild & Other Stories by Octavia Butler Unexpected Stories by Octavia Butler Falling In Love With Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson, Kabu Kabu by Nnedi Okorofor, How Long Til Black Future Month? by NK Jemisin Nine Bar Blues by Sheree Reneee Thomas

Anthologies (collections from multiple authors) Dark Matter edited by Sheree Renee Thomas So Long Been Dreaming edited by Nalo Hopkinson Conjure Stories edited by Nalo Hopkinso Whispers From The Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction edited by Nalo Hopkinson Afro SF: Science Fiction by African Writers edited by Wor. W. Hartmaan Stories For Chip: A Tribute To Samuel R Delany edited by Nisi Shawl Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movement edited by Adrienne Marie Brown & Walidah Imarisha Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond edited by Bill Campbell The City: Cyberfunk Antholoy edited by Milton J Davis Steamfunk edited by Milton J Davis Dieselfunk edited by Milton J Davis Griots: A Sword & Soul Anthology by Milton J Davis & Charles R Saunders Griots: Sisters Of The Spear by Milton J Davis & Charles R Saunders

Non-Fiction (histories, essays, and arguments) Afrofuturism And The World Of Black Sci-Fi & Fantasy Culture by Ytasha Womack Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise Of Astral Blackness edited by Reynaldo Anderson & Charles E Jones The Black Imagination: Science Fiction, The Future, and The Speculative by Sandra Jackson & Julie E Woody-Freeman Afro-Futures & Astral Black Travel by Juice Aleem The Sound Of Culture: Diaspora & Black Technopoetics by Louis Cude Soke Black Utopia: The History Of An Idea From Black Nationalism To Afrofuturism by Alex Zamalin Afrouturism Rising: The Literary Pre-History Of A Movement by Isiah Lavendar III A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra & The Birth Of Afrofuturism by Paul Youngquist Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Poryrals In Speculative Film & TV by Diana Adesola Mafe Black Kirby: In Search Of The Motherbox Connection by John Jennings & Stacey Robinson Super Black: American Pop Culture & Black Super-Heroes by Adilifu Nama Black Space: Imagining Race In Science Fiction Film by Adilifu Nama Black Super-Heroes, Milestone Comics, And Their Fans by Jeffery A Brown Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changin Worlds by Adrienne Marie Brown

*cover image from Ytasha Womack’s “Afrofuturism: The World Of Black Sci-Fi & Fantasy Culture”

(please post anything I might have left out in the comments)

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s-leary · 4 years

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For several years now, Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination has been exploring the intersection between science and science fiction, using stories as a way to imagine what a plausible future might look like. It releases a regular series of short stories through “Future Tense”, its partnership with Slate, and over the years has released a handful of short themed anthologies covering everything from space flight to solar power.

The center released a new anthology this week, Cities of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures, which includes short stories from Paolo Bacigalupi, S.B. Divya, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Andrew Dana Hudson, along with supporting, nonfiction essays.

The anthology is free online: you can get it in a variety of formats (there’s also a print on demand option), or simply read it online. It’s an accompaniment of sorts to an earlier anthology that the center released back in 2019: Weight of Light, A Collection of Solar Futures (which featured stories by Brenda Cooper, Andrew Dana Hudson, Cat Rambo, and Corey S. Pressman).

Like that previous book, Cities of Light‘s content focuses extensively on the intersection of two things: the impending climate disaster and the role that cities might play in developing some solutions.

#cities of light #solarpunk #anthologies #center for science and the imagination #arizona state university

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years

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Solar futures and futuristic fellowships

Over the years, Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination has been merging science, engineering, the humanities and science fiction, building collaborations between sf storytellers and scholars and technologist (I've been lucky enough to be involved in several of these).

https://csi.asu.edu/

The Center has launched a fellowship: a $10,000 grant for "projects that advance visions of inclusive futures and address our greatest collective failures of imagination, including climate change, systemic inequality, and global conflict."

https://csi.asu.edu/fellows/

The fellowships come up with mentorship, support and collaboration from the CSI faculty and students; applications are due on Apr 5.

To get a feel for the Center's work, check out its brand-new anthology of original sf stories and essays, "Cities of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures," with work from Paolo Bacigalupi, S.B. Divya, Andrew Dana Hudson and Deji Bryce Olukotun.

https://csi.asu.edu/books/cities-of-light/

#pluralistic

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rhetoricandlogic · 7 years

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NIGERIANS IN SPACE BY DEJI BRYCE OLUKOTUN

reviewed by AISHWARYA SUBRAMANIAN

“Yeah, but what does that snowglobe mean?”

Deji Bryce Olukotun’s Nigerians in Space begins in 1990s America, where Wale Olufunmi, a lunar geologist, is attempting to steal a sample of moon rock from the NASA laboratory where he works. The sample is insurance, proof of his commitment to “brain gain” (the return of Nigerian academics to their home country as a corrective to the intellectual exodus to the West colloquially termed “brain drain,” about which so many countries worried during those years), and to a Nigerian space programme organised by the politician Nurudeen Bello to achieve it. Wale steals the rock—a contingency sample collected during the first moon landing, scientifically worthless but symbolically valuable—and smuggles it out of the country in the base of a snow globe. His plans rapidly fall apart, however, and Bello is mysteriously uncontactable. He finds himself stuck in limbo with his family, neither able to return to his American job, nor to enter Nigeria without a visa, witness to a murder, and in danger of arrest.

The bulk of the novel’s action takes place twenty years later. Wale, with his now-grown son Dayo, has settled in South Africa, where he runs a bamboo business out of his home, gives tours at the Royal Observatory, and has developed an obsession with finding Bello. Dayo has taken his father’s snow globe as the inspiration for a lamp which recreates natural moonlight. The two men’s lives intersect at various points with those of Thursday, a hapless abalone poacher of Malaysian descent, and Melissa, later Melle, a Zimbabwean girl with an unusual form of vitiligo that makes her skin glow with moonlight. Melle’s father is another of Bello’s victims and it is through her attempts to find out what has happened to him that we learn that most of those associated with the Brain Gain project have mysteriously died.

If all of this makes Nigerians in Space sound more like a thriller, all secret societies and high body counts, than a work of SF, that is probably accurate. None of its Nigerian characters gets to go into space. Within this sprawling, international, pan-African plot, few of them seem even to make it to Nigeria. And yet.

In September of last year, India (and if this feels like a bit of a geographical detour, such a thing is entirely in keeping with the events of this book) successfully sent a probe into orbit around Mars. The New York Times responded with a cartoon of a skinny man in a dhoti and turban, leading a cow, knocking on the door of a building marked “Elite Space Club,” with large, tuxedoed men seated inside. The paper later apologised for the offense caused, and offered a more flattering interpretation of this cartoon, but even here the humour was supposed to come from the incongruity of it all—the notion that a nation that could be represented by underfed farmers might have any place in what had been “the domain of rich, Western countries.”[1]

It’s an incongruity of which Nigerians in Space is well aware. The title is deliberately ludicrous (that “ . . . in SPAAAACE!” is what does it), and this is the book’s big challenge to the reader. What is being raised here, in the title as well as the text itself, is the whole question of who gets to imagine space, who gets to imagine themselves in space. In reality Nigeria does have a space programme, and has done for some years now (as do Egypt, Tunisia, and South Africa, among others). Olukotun, who is Nigerian-American, has claimed that one reason he did not know this when he started writing the book was that “it seemed too ridiculous to even be worth researching—I had made the idea up!”[2]

In late 2014 Africa2Moon, a crowdfunding campaign, was set up to facilitate the first phase of a pan-African mission to the moon. The campaign faced some criticism online over whether this should be a priority at all—surely there were other, more immediately useful things that such money could be spent on. But, in addition to the practical uses of a space programme that might be trotted out to counter this argument, explained the project manager, Jonathan Weltman, the moon had tremendous symbolic value. “You can walk outside and there it is [. . .] Kids across Africa can pull out a telescope and see it.”[3]

Wale also has to justify his interest in space travel in general, even to his wife. “It’s not the moon that’s important: it’s what that trip to the moon will produce. We’ll have communications satellites, improved crop yields, accurate population censuses. Nigeria doesn’t need weapons. We need innovation.” But it is the moon that is important (you can walk outside and there it is)—and it’s no accident that Dayo’s invention later in the book is tied more closely to the idea of the moon in its abstract form than to the space programme that, in the world of the book, seems not to have happened after all. This sense of the moon as a concretised symbol for a larger ideal (or several ideals) is one that recurs throughout Nigerians in Space. In Wale’s first conversations with Bello, the possibility of a Nigerian mission to the moon is presented as a form of reverse colonisation—both a satisfying response to the historical fact of colonialism and a kind of perpetuation of it.

“He said [the moon rock] didn’t belong to America but all humanity. He said we would return it to the moon when we landed our first mission as a symbol of ‘the colonized returning the cultural patrimony of all mankind.’ He wants us to plant a Nigerian flag.”

Science and symbol, science and story. In an episode later in the book, Dayo reports yet another failure to sell his lamps. “What story do you tell them about the lamp?” asks Wale:

Dayo went through his routine, trying to emphasize the technical parts. He used the words “luminosity” and “umbra” and “aqueous medium” with what he hoped was familiarity.

Wale then shows his son a part of the observatory where he works as a tour guide—a manhole once partly filled with mercury, used as a mirror to observe the sky.

“Can you imagine looking into a pool of mercury? Gauging the stars in a pool of quicksilver like an alchemist? It would be like floating in space [. . .] This is a popular part of my full-moon tour. It has nothing to do with selenometry anymore. No practical value. But this is where I get my repeat customers [. . .] You’ve got to come up with a story. Put some tension in it.”

You’ve got to come up with a story, and Nigerians in Space contains several. There’s the thriller plot, the SF plot. There’s a novel of exile and loss set in a fundamentally diasporic world (“No one knows what happened and I can’t go to Nigeria anymore . . . Because I’m a refugee”). There’s also an entire reading of the novel, one that appeals to me very much, which ignores all else and focuses on Wale’s personal relationship with the moon; his movement from scientist to priest (though even at the beginning of the book he “couldn’t defile a piece of the moon”). Wale becomes the moon’s chief storyteller, simultaneously narrating humankind’s historical relationship with it and inviting tourists to “look into the telescope and see your future.” If you (the reader) could fish around in the thick soup of meanings Wale ascribes to the moon and pick one, could make the moon a single, stable symbol to build on, perhaps the whole thing would begin to make sense.

Because the moon is what ties together the various strands of Nigerians in Space, Thursday’s abalone and Dayo’s lamp both feed off it, in different ways—as does the luminescence in Melissa’s skin. But is it the physical moon or the symbolic? What is the quality that the abalone (surely among the most SFnal of earthly creatures) recognise in Dayo’s lamps? Are we to read the “purity” of the light from the lamps as scientific innovation or as being somehow connected to the moon rock, on whose hiding place their design is based? Is Melle’s condition a biological one? Science or symbol: it’s partly in these questions that the novel’s claims to being science fictional, rather than science fiction-adjacent or even fantastic, rest. Unusual skin conditions and superior forms of solar energy may be less spectacular than the space travel promised by the title, but they deserve some attention.

In a different (and far more trite) book this constant referral back to the moon could work as a sort of levelling force—characters of Malaysian and Nigerian and Zimbabwean descent living in South Africa and France, and America, all seeing the same moon. Late in the novel, in what would in other circumstances be a climactic scene, Dayo’s lamps are strung up in the streets and they work, and the soft light from the lamps briefly erases all difference. But it’s not allowed to be a triumphant moment.

You’ve got to come up with a story, and Nigerians in Space, frustratingly, won’t let you. There’s no neat tying up of ends here. The mystery is unsolved, the thriller plot peters out. There’s so much meaning here and stories are, after all, only stories. If the novel does have a climactic scene it’s a confrontation between two of its protagonists, fittingly in the observatory, that ends in tragedy and leaves both with all their questions left unanswered. It’s a powerful scene, and a moving one, and it tells us nothing.

And of all the stories the book doesn’t tell, perhaps the most important is the one in which Nigerians go into space. In an article in Slate the author speaks about travelling to Nigeria and meeting a scientist at the National Space Research and Development Agency, whose real endeavours and successes are so easily erased by this book’s narrative of failure. “I had also learned the perverse burden of responsibility placed on an author who writes speculative fiction,” says Olukotun, but also: “Would you have read that story?”[2] I return to that title, and the story it tells about science and science fiction and who they’re for and whose triumphant journeys into the cosmos our collective imaginations allow. How much easier to imagine Nigerians on earth.

Endnotes

Source: "India Mars Mission: New York Times Apologises for Cartoon", BBC News, 6 October 2014 (accessed 12 October 2015). [return]

Source: "Meeting My Protagonist" by Deji Bryce Olukotun, Slate, September 2014 (accessed 12 October 2015). [return]

Source: "Africans Urged to Back Continent's First Moon Mission", The Guardian, 5 January 2015 (accessed 12 October 2015). [return]

#Deji Bryce Olukotun #Nigerians in Space #mahreviews

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mbti-sorted · 6 years

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Deji Olukotun

Anonymous said to mbti-sorted:

Deji Bryce Olukotun - intj?

#intj

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brucesterling · 7 years

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Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures

*Free sci-fi book from Arizona State! Go Sun Devils!

http://csi.asu.edu/books/vvev/

Why should we go to space? To learn more about the universe and our place in it? To extract resources and conduct commerce? To demonstrate national primacy and technological prowess? To live and thrive in radically different kinds of human communities? Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities takes on the challenge of imagining new stories at the intersection of public and private—narratives that use the economic and social history of exploration, as well as current technical and scientific research, to inform scenarios for the future of the “new space” era.

Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities provides fresh insights into human activity in Low Earth Orbit, journeys to Mars, capturing and mining asteroids, and exploring strange and uncharted exoplanets. Its stories and essays imagine human expansion into space as a kind of domestication—not in the sense of taming nature but in the sense of creating a space for dwelling, a venue for human life and curiosity to unfurl in all their weirdness and complexity.

The collection is free to download in EPUB and MOBI e-book formats, as a PDF, and through Apple’s iBooks Store. You can also purchase a print-on-demand copy at cost for $20.09 (plus sales tax and shipping) from Blurb. The price covers printing costs only.

Having trouble downloading the book? Drop us an email at imagination AT asu.edu and we’ll help.

Profanity-Free Versions: A version of the book with all of the profanity in the narratives bleeped is available for kids, parents, educators, and anyone else who would prefer a profanity-free reading experience. Download the profanity-free version in EPUB, MOBI, or PDF.

Stories by: Madeline Ashby, Steven Barnes, Eileen Gunn, Ramez Naam, Carter Scholz, Karl Schroeder, Vandana Singh

Essays by: Jim Bell, Lawrence Dritsas, Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, Emma Frow, Roland Lehoucq, Andrew D. Maynard, Clark A. Miller, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Steve Ruff, William K. Storey, Sara Imari Walker, G. Pascal Zachary

Interview with: Kim Stanley Robinson

Edited by: Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, with guest editor Juliet Ulman

This project was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under grant number NNX15AI31G. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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tachyonpub · 6 years

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It’s all Jacob’s fault

Photo: Jill Roberts

On Twitter, ArmadilloCon Chair Person Jennifer Juday explains how they discovered GoH Deji Bryce Olukotun.

Carol Cooper for THE VILLAGE VOICE catches up with the next generation of science fiction writers.

Ever wonder where new science fiction writers come from? Typically, the best ones emerge from its readership. This would include video gamers and other genre media fans whose love for a broad spectrum of imaginative literature is both critical and obsessive. SF fandom (the initials here meaning “speculative fiction” to capture all flavors of fantasy and science fiction in one easy acronym) incubates its own future.

Fandom as a familial collective of readers and writers has existed since at least the 1920s, when lurid pulp fiction magazines encouraged Lovecraft’s quirky circle of acolytes to pen and critique their own tales of cosmic horror, scientific fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery epics. This path of transition from fan to pro is now made explicit for the curious by events like last month’s Nebula Conference, a four-day convention featuring panel discussions and an awards ceremony celebrating the most significant writing released during the previous year. This time held at the Pittsburgh Marriott hotel downtown, the Nebula Awards, given annually since 1965, are the Oscars of genre fiction, voted on by fellow writers, editors, publishers, and book agents.

Photo: Jill Roberts

Once indie fiction magazines were viable again, some magazine editors took the next evolutionary step to become publishers. Jacob Weisman discontinued his magazine in the mid-Nineties to form Tachyon Publications, which now publishes SFWA’s newly anointed “Grand Master” Peter S. Beagle, and released Bruce Sterling’s PIRATE UTOPIA in 2016. This month, Tachyon published THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION by Peter Watts, a former marine biologist who boldly inserts high-concept speculations about time and the future of humanity into a rigorously scientific space opera. In August, the giddily picaresque THE PEOPLES REPUBLIC OF EVERYTHING is due from Nick Mamatas, or — as China Miéville, himself a New York Times bestselling novelist, prefers to describe him — “The People’s Commissar of Awesome.”

For more info on INVADERS: 22 TALES FROM THE OUTER LIMITS OF LITERATURE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Goro Fujita

Design by Elizabeth Story

For more info about THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Camille André

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

#jacob weisman #jennifer juday #armadillocon #deji bryce olukotun #twitter #carol cooper #the village voice #the new voices of fantasy #camille andré

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