by Lavie Tidhar
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 cla
sses, 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.
* * *
Dinesh Rao, originally from India, trained as an ecologist and specializes in the behaviour of spiders. His short stories have appeared in the World SF Blog and the Indian Journal of Science Fiction Studies. He now lives in a small coffee town in Mexico with his wife and daughter. His blog is at pointsofdeparture.wordpress.com.
* * *
N.A. Ratnayake is a science teacher, writer, and stubborn idealist living in Boston. He is an aerospace engineer by training and an omnivorous reader. Though presently a New Englander, he was born and raised in the American West. The mountains, rains, coasts, and deserts of the West have been the backdrop for a rich interplay of conquest, struggle, identity, and hope—themes which often emerge in Ratnayake's stories. “Remembering Turinam” is his first professional publication. He tweets at twitter.com/quantumcowboy.
* * *
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press, 2013). Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in several places, including Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld Magazine, Stone Telling, and Goblin Fruit. She is Nonfiction and Poetry Editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, and blogs at sofiasamatar.blogspot.com.
* * *
Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically-acclaimed and award-nominated novels, The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone, The House of Discarded Dreams and Heart of Iron, were published by Prime Books. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen's Universe, Subterranean and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. She is also the editor of the anthologies Paper Cities (World Fantasy Award winner), Running with the Pack, and Bewere the Night, as well as Bloody Fabulous and Wilful Impropriety. Her short-story collection, Moscow But Dreaming, was released by Prime Books in December 2012. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.
* * *
Benjanun Sriduangkaew spends her free time on words, amateur photography, and the pursuit of colorful, unusual makeup. She has a love for cities, airports, and bees. Her fiction can be found in GigaNotoSaurus and Beneath Ceaseless Skies as well as the anthologies Clockwork Phoenix 4 and The End of the Road.
* * *
Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama, of The Bookman Histories trilogy and many other works. He won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novella, for Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God, and was nominated variously for BSFA, Campbell, Sturgeon and Sidewise awards. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and in South Africa but currently resides in London.
* * *
J.Y. Yang, born, raised and centred in Singapore, has been a scientist, a screenwriter, an editor, and a journalist at various times, but she almost always has been a teller of tales. Some of them have been published in places both local and international, including Crossed Genres and Ann Vandermeer's Steampunk Revolution. Last year she co-edited Ayam Curtain, an anthology of speculative micro-fiction written by Singapore-based authors. It was fun, but she isn't sure she'll do it again soon (for her sanity's sake).
Copyright
We See a Different Frontier
First published 2013 by Futurefire.net Publishing
All stories © 2013 the authors
Cover illustration © 2013 Carmen Moran
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means—including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical methods—without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Joyce Chng’s “Lotus”, Fabio Fernandes’s “The Gambiarra Method”, Ernest Hogan’s “Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus”, Rahul Kanakia’s “Droplet”, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “What Really Happened in Ficandula”, Sandra McDonald’s “Fleet”, Sunny Moraine’s “A Heap of Broken Images”, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Them Ships”, Gabriel Murray’s “Forests of the Night”, Shweta Narayan’s “The Arrangement of Their Parts”, Dinesh Rao’s “A Bridge of Words”, N.A. Ratnayake’s “Remembering Turinam”, Sofia Samatar’s “I Stole the D.C.’s Eyeglass”, Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s “Vector”, Lavie Tidhar’s “Dark Continents”, J.Y. Yang’s “Old Domes”, Aliette de Bodard’s Preface, the editors’ Introduction and Ekaterina Sedia’s Afterword are all published here for the first time, and are © the authors, 2013.
The rights of all authors and artists appearing within this volume to be identified as the authors and owners of these works has been asserted in accordance with copyright law.
ISBN-print: 978-0-9573975-2-1
ISBN-electronic: 978-0-9573975-3-8
Contact:
[email protected]
http://futurefire.net/
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface, by Aliette de Bodard
Introduction
The Arrangement of Their Parts, by Shweta Narayan
Pancho Villa's Flying Circus, by Ernest Hogan
Them Ships, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Old Domes, by J.Y. Yang
The Gambiarra Method, by Fabio Fernandes
A Bridge of Words, by Dinesh Rao
Droplet, by Rahul Kanakia
Lotus, by Joyce Chng
Dark Continents, by Lavie Tidhar
A Heap of Broken Images, by Sunny Moraine
Fleet, by Sandra McDonald
Remembering Turinam, by N.A. Ratnayake
I Stole the D.C.'s Eyeglass, by Sofia Samatar
Vector, by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Forests of the Night, by Gabriel Murray
What Really Happened in Ficandula, by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
Afterword, by Ekaterina Sedia
Contributors
Copyright
