New Suns

by Nisi Shawl

  “Nothing happened,” Billy said. He delicately held the slide between forefinger and thumb.

  “Don’t want to be found?” she asked. “It’s too late. I found you, and I’ll find your burdened breath. Tell him it’s over! Say something, or you’ll never be together again!”

  The slide snapped in half.

  LATER, AFTER SCRUBBING mud from under her toenails, Kelsey ate pizza in her motel room and watched Pal herd dust motes around the lumpy-paint ceiling. His shimmering body spun in wide and tight circles, clockwise, counterclockwise, bouncing wall-to-wall, dizzying. He never slowed. Boredom did not seem to survive death.

  “Goodnight, Pal,” she said.

  She didn’t need to spend the night in a motel with a mermaid on its sign—police had captured the burdened breath that afternoon, after the dreadful thing turned itself in for the sake of the shimmer in the urn—but when Kelsey thought about returning to the farmhouse, she was filled with a sense of dread. Like that husk of a home was actually her urn, and maybe that’s the way her parents had felt when they escaped through an open window and fell into the sky.

  For a few minutes longer, Kelsey continued watching Pal, her thoughts residing in memories of green fields and vast blue skies. Then, she walked across the room, unlocked the window, raised it high, and removed the protective screen.

  Now, he had a choice.

  Upon returning to bed, Kelsey tugged the cotton comforter up to her chin and closed her eyes, afraid she’d peek before sunrise. She wondered if Pal would be waiting for her in the morning. If so, she’d tuck him in the backpack, eat an omelet, leave Sunny, and sell the house her father built, sell it to somebody who loved the number thirteen. Somebody who’d cultivate the earth with the same care as her mother. That done, Kelsey would cram all her belongings in the back of her car, buckle Pal into the passenger’s seat, and go west.

  Or Kelsey might wake up to an empty room. She’d still buy an omelet, leave Sunny, sell the farmhouse, and go west. She’d just do it alone.

  “It’s all so mysterious, isn’t it?” Kelsey asked the night.

  Afterword

  Nisi Shawl

  WE’VE BEEN SHINING a long time.

  Decades back, as a recent graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, I met with a committee to pick our next set of instructors. (Every year there are six different instructors for Clarion West’s six-week intensive, all writers and editors of note in the speculative genre.) Since this was a special anniversary for the workshop, I proposed that we celebrate by choosing people of color for every slot.

  We didn’t. There were numerous objections to my idea, but the one that has stayed with me was the heartfelt complaint that by doing this we’d “use them all up.” That is, if we filled our teaching roster with nonwhite instructors one year, we’d have none left to call on for following years—unless we kept inviting the same old crew back again and again.

  “This is how we breed!” I fumed later to a sympathetic listener. Far from “using up” all available writers and editors of color, I thought that focusing on their existence would encourage others to ignite and burn and light the literary cosmos with hundred-hued flames. I thought we’d help even more potential writers of color reach critical mass and fire up their brain furnaces.

  But there were fewer people of color writing speculative fiction twenty years ago. It was just conceivable that there would have been a (temporary) dearth of new nonwhite teaching candidates had my plan been accepted.

  That was then. This is now—a time when the anthology you hold in your hands could easily have filled multiple volumes, when I never even got to issue a public call for stories because I received plenty merely by asking the writers of color I personally know.

  This is not the first such anthology, as I note in the book’s dedication, and these are not the first authors of color writing imaginative fiction, as many students of the genre’s history are aware. For centuries we have been this brilliant.

  Now, though, our numbers have grown. And we shine together.

  Would you like more of what you’ve read here? Wider constellations, greater galaxies of original speculative fiction by people of color? Then seek us out. Spread the word. Wish on us, reach for us, and yes, let us gather together in the deep, dark nurseries of stars. Let us congregate. This is how new suns are born.

  CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

  Kathleen Alcalá is a Clarion West graduate and instructor, the award-winning author of six books, a recent Whitely Fellow, and a previous Hugo House Writer in Residence. Her latest book, The Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island, explores relationships with geography, history, and ethnicity. Ursula K. Le Guin said of Alcalá’s story collection Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist: “Not one tale is like another, yet all together they form a beautiful whole, a world where one would like to stay forever.”

  Steven Barnes was born in Los Angeles, California and attended Pepperdine University, majoring in Communication Arts. He has published over three million words of science fiction, fantasy, suspense, and mystery, comprising some 33 novels, as well as writing for film, stage, and television. He lives in Los Angeles with his son Jason and his wife, British Fantasy Award-winning author Tananarive Due.

  Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author. His novels and over seventy stories have been translated into 18 languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell awards for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Ohio.

  From Roots; to Star Trek: The Next Generation; to the Emmy-winning PBS series Reading Rainbow, LeVar Burton has captivated audiences worldwide with his authentic charm and his passion for storytelling, for over 40 years. As well as a beloved and acclaimed actor, he is an accomplished producer, director, and writer. LeVar’s most recent triumph is his popular podcast LeVar Burton Reads, now in its second season. Through his company LeVar Burton Kids he is creating content that harnesses a child’s unique curiosity, using stories as ways of exploring the world.

  Indrapramit Das (aka Indra Das) is a writer from Kolkata, India. He is a Lambda Literary Award-winner for his debut novel, The Devourers (Penguin India / Del Rey), and has been a finalist for the Crawford, Tiptree and Shirley Jackson Awards. He is an Octavia E. Butler Scholar and a grateful graduate of Clarion West 2012. He has lived in India, the United States, and Canada, where he completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia.

  Jaymee Goh is a writer, poet, critic, reviewer, and editor of science fiction and fantasy. She graduated from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop in 2016, and holds a PhD from the University of California, Riverside. She has been published in places like Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, and Science Fiction Studies. She coedited The Sea is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia (Rosarium Publishing), and edited The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 11: Trials By Whiteness (Aqueduct Press).

  Hiromi Goto is an emigrant from Japan who gratefully resides on the Unceded Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil Waututh Territories. She’s written four books for adults and three books for youth, and has won numerous prizes including the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award, the Sunburst Award, and the Carl Brandon Parallax Award. She has a graphic novel pending with First Second Books. Hiromi is currently at work trying to decolonize her relationship to the Land and to her writing.

  Andrea Hairston is author of Will Do Magic for Small Change, finalist for the Mythopoeic Award, Lambda Award, and Tiptree Award, and a New York Times Editor’s pick. Other novels include: Redwood and Wildfire, winner of the Tiptree Award, and Mindscape. She has also published essays, plays, and short fiction, and received grants from the NEA and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. Andrea is the L. Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies at Smith College.

  Alex Jennings is a writer/teacher/performer living in New Orleans. He was born in Wiesbaden (Germany) and raised in Gaborone (Botswana), Tunis (Tunisia), Paramari
bo (Surinam), and the United States. He constantly devours pop culture and writes mostly jokes on Twitter (@magicknegro). He also helps run and MCs a monthly literary readings series called Dogfish. He is an afternoon person.

  Minsoo Kang is the author of the short story collection Of Tales and Enigmas, the history book Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination, and the translator of the Penguin Classic The Story of Hong Gildong. His stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Azalea, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and two anthologies. He is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri St. Louis.

  Dr. Darcie Little Badger is a Lipan Apache geoscientist and writer. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple places, including Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time, Robot Dinosaur Stories, Strange Horizons, The Dark, Lightspeed, and Cicada Magazine. Darcie’s debut comic, “Worst Bargain in Town,” was published in Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection, Volume 2. She lives with one dog named Rosie and all of Rosie’s toys.

  Karin Lowachee was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her first novel, Warchild, won the 2001 Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. Both Warchild and her third novel, Cagebird, were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award. Cagebird won the Prix Aurora Award for Best Long-Form Work in English. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies edited by Nalo Hopkinson, John Joseph Adams, and Ann VanderMeer. She can be found on twitter at @karinlow.

  Anil Menon’s short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines including Albedo One, Interzone, LCRW, and Strange Horizons. His stories have been translated into Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hebrew, and Romanian. His debut YA novel, The Beast with Nine Billion Feet, was shortlisted for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword Award. Along with Vandana Singh he coedited Breaking the Bow, an anthology of speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana. His most recent work, Half of What I Say, was shortlisted for the 2016 Hindu Literary Award.

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the critically acclaimed author of Signal to Noise—winner of a Copper Cylinder Award, finalist for the British Fantasy, Locus, Sunburst, and Aurora awards—and Certain Dark Things, selected as one of NPR’s best books of 2016. In 2016 she won a World Fantasy Award for her work as an editor.

  Chinelo Onwualu is a Nigerian writer and editor living in Toronto, Canada. She is editor and cofounder of Omenana, a magazine of African speculative fiction, and a graduate of the 2014 Clarion West Writers Workshop, which she attended as the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship. Her writing has appeared in Uncanny, Strange Horizons, and The Kalahari Review.

  Rebecca Roanhorse is a Nebula and Hugo Award-winning speculative fiction writer and the recipient of the 2018 Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her work has also been a finalist for the Sturgeon, Locus and World Fantasy awards. Her novel Trail of Lightning was selected as an Amazon, B&N, and NPR Best Book of 2018. She lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pug. Find out more at https://rebeccaroanhorse.com/, and follow her on Twitter at @RoanhorseBex.

  Nisi Shawl edited Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars; WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity; and the special People of Color Take Over issue of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. She co-edited the anthologies Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany; and Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler. She wrote the 2016 Nebula finalist and Tiptree Honor novel Everfair, and the 2008 Tiptree Award-winning collection Filter House. In 2005 she co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a standard text on inclusive representation in the imaginative genres. Shawl is a founder of the Carl Brandon Society and a Clarion West board member.

  Alberto Yáñez lives in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Toasted Cake, and PodCastle. He is a graduate of Clarion West, and was awarded a 2018 Oregon Literary Fellowship. Alberto went to Portland to become a registered nurse, and has since learned more about people, bodily fluids, and himself than anticipated. He draws on his Mexican and Jewish roots to inform “Burn the Ships.” A native Californian, he misses easy sunshine, San Francisco, Chinese delivery, and other Mexicans.

  E. Lily Yu received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2012 and the Artist Trust LaSalle Storyteller Award in 2017. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Boston Review, F&SF, Clarkesworld, and Terraform, among others, as well as multiple best-of-the-year anthologies, and have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy awards.

  These are the stories of people who live at night: under neon and starlight, and never the light of the sun.

  These are the stories of poets and police, tourists and traders; the hidden and the forbidden; the lonely and the lovers.

  This is their time.

  The Outcast Hours gathers over two dozen brand-new stories from award-winning writers across genres and continents, including bold new fiction from Marina Warner, Frances Hardinge, China Miéville, Sami Shah, Omar Robert Hamilton, Kuzhali Manickavel, Will Hill, Indrapramit Das, Silvia Moreno Garcia, Jeffrey Alan Love, Maha Khan Phillips, and many, many more.

  www.solarisbooks.com

  Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories was one of the first true children's books in the English language, a timeless classic that continues to delight readers to this day. Beautiful, evocative and playful, the stories of How the Whale Got His Throat or How the First Letter Was Written paint a world of magic and wonder.

  It's also deeply rooted in British colonialism. Kipling saw the Empire as a benign, civilising force, in a way that's troubling to modern readers. Not So Stories attempts to redress the balance, bringing together new and established writers of colour from around the world to take the Just So Stories back, to interrogate, challenge and celebrate their legacy.

  Including stories by Adiwijaya Iskandar, Joseph E. Cole, Raymond Gates, Stewart Hotston, Zina Hutton, Georgina Kamsika, Cassandra Khaw, Paul Krueger, Tauriq Moosa, Jeannette Ng, Ali Nouraei, Wayne Santos and Zedeck Siew, illustrations by Woodrow Phoenix and an introduction by Nikesh Shukla.

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  A fascinating collection of new and classic tales of the fearsome Djinn, from bestselling, award-winning and breakthrough international writers.

  Imagine a world filled with fierce, fiery beings, hiding in our shadows, in our dreams, under our skins. Eavesdropping and exploring; savaging our bodies, saving our souls. They are monsters, saviours, victims, childhood friends. Some have called them genies: these are the Djinn.

  And they are everywhere. On street corners, behind the wheel of a taxi, in the chorus, between the pages of books. Every language has a word for them. Every culture knows their traditions. Every religion, every history has them hiding in their dark places.

  There is no part of the world that does not know them. They are the Djinn. They are among us.

  With stories from Neil Gaiman, Nnedi Okorafor, Amal El-Mohtar, Catherine Faris King, Claire North, E.J. Swift, Hermes (trans. Robin Moger), Jamal Mahjoub, James Smythe, J.Y. Yang, Kamila Shamsie, Kirsty Logan, K.J. Parker, Kuzhali Manickavel, Maria Dahvana Headley, Monica Byrne, Saad Hossain, Sami Shah, Sophia Al-Maria and Usman Malik.

  www.solarisbooks.com