Recs for Indigenous/Anti-Colonialist AUs, Indigenous History, POC SFF Traditions, and More!

[sanguinity]

It's time for our monthly recs post! Usually I make this a space for members to ask for recs that interest them, but this time oyceter and I want to do something different.

Dunno how many of you have been following the dustup over a certain pair of white SFF authors? (Briefest of summaries: one author wrote a "shiny" alternate-universe U.S. "frontier" story in which Indians never existed and the U.S. never had slavery; she also characterized that as a history that wouldn't be "wildly divergent". Another author made statements that, among other things, imply that POC are new to SFF.) Notice, please, that this isn't a post about the two authors: we don't write posts about white authors on this comm.

Given that we don't write posts about white authors, here's the reason I'm even bringing up that hot mess: while browsing nahrat's link round-ups, I've been noticing that now and again someone asks for recs of books that give the lie to the assumptions those two authors made. Unfortunately, the rec-making has been a bit thin, and sometimes is pretty heavily tilted toward white authors.

Happily, reccing POC authors is something this comm does really well. Let's make some recs! I'd like to see recs for the following:

• Alternate histories or universes that are indigenous-centric and/or anti-colonialist. There is no need for the AH/AU to focus on the Americas, and I'd love to see recs that don't.
  
• Books that oppose the notion of an Empty Continent -- again, books can focus on either of the Americas, Australia, Africa, or anywhere else that has had to deal with that lie.
  
• Books about how indigenous peoples have been an integral part of shaping the history of the world, and aren't just optional background scenery.
  
• Books which document and/or demonstrate that POC have a long history with SFF, or a history that's independent of the Verne/Heinlein/Asimov/Campbell anglophone tradition.

If you have other themes that seem appropriate to the discussion, do feel free to start a comment-thread for them.

Additionally, here are two existing POC-author rec-making posts in the discussion:

• ithiliana: Some of my favorite American Indian authors
  "Feel free to suggest other writers! Please!"
  
  
• Bangla at deadbrowalking
  "So several of the Desi folks commenting on the Global Represent thread have mentioned reading genre fiction in Bengali. Who are the authors you recommend? What's been translated to English or other languages?"

Remember, please: this is not a post for discussing white authors; this is a post for reccing POC authors. Let's make some recs!

ETA: I set up some category-specific comment threads below, but if you've got something that needs to be rec'd and the categories seem to be too constraining, DO feel free to ignore the categories. The recs are the important thing here, not the categories.

Comments

[sanguinity]

Indigenous-centric or anti-colonialist alternate universes / histories:

[sanguinity]

Sesshu Foster, Atomik Aztex.

Non-linear book is non-linear, weaving between what may or may not be multiple narrators in multiple universes. However. The central universe is one where the Aztecs repelled the Conquistadores, and then moved to colonize Spain themselves. Most of the action is set during WWII, within various universes/timelines.

This isn't a happyshiny AU -- the (male, imperial) protagonist makes off-hand references to raping Spanish slaves in order to let off some steam, and does a lot of self-justifying talk that the Aztek are great because they're the ones with the guts to do the horrible things that someone's gotta to do.

That said, there's a lot of stuff I positively adore as it goes by.

[carenejeans.livejournal.com]

This is one of the books I was thinking of when I answered your e-mail. I've only just started it, and have the same caveats, but second the rec.

[sirdrakesheir.livejournal.com]

I'm actually salivating. This sounds fascinating.

[scarletts-awry.livejournal.com]

Gerald Vizenor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Vizenor)'s The Heirs of Columbus (http://www.amazon.com/Heirs-Columbus-Gerald-Vizenor/dp/0819562491) is a hard book to categorize, but it needs to be rec'd and I'm going to put it in this category.

It's a difficult and funny novel, blending the trickster tradition with postmodernism. I loved it.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Caleb Fox's Zadayi Red, which is coming out in July from Tor, is a retelling of a Cherokee myth. The author has a site here (http://www.calebfox.com/).

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Steven Barnes has two books which I haven't read yet, but it looks like a novel about slavery in America in which the slaves are Celts and the free people are of African and Middle-Eastern descent.

[sanguinity]

Lion's Blood and Zulu's Heart, yes?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Er, yes. Wow, I really should not post before coffee.

[oyceter]

I can't believe it took me so long to think of Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots!

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

The Legend of Tarik, by Walter Dean Myers, is set in an alternate Spain (I think) with magic, and has an African boy, who was brought to Spain as a slave, battling the big bad.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Correct. Excellent book.

[lovecraftienne.livejournal.com]

The thread over at Tor Books about the 13th Child had a number of people linking to this comm, by the way, with much positive to say about it (as do I, when SFF racism comes up elsewhere). I'm looking forward to the recs! :)

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Me too! I don't have anything to add, which is a shame, because I think the idea of non-European centric speculative fiction is really interesting. I have now ordered two books from the recs put up so far, and so hopefully if something like this comes up again I won't be quite so unhelpful.

[sanguinity]

Countering the notion of an Empty Continent, whichever continent that might have been:

[sanguinity]

(From morgan_dhu @DW, here)

Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki), Dawn Land, Long River, and The Waters Between.

I haven't read this, but going from blurbs-on-the-internet, this is a coming-of-age trilogy about a young Abenaki man, set at the end of the last Ice Age. Apparently Dawn Land is also Bruchac's first novel?

[sanguinity]

Two more Joseph Bruchac recs, both available from Oyate.

Children of the Long House: I'm only half-way through this one (I tend to have ten-or-more books going at the same time), but so far, it features a boy with a very close relationship to his sister, and how his learning to take on a man's role in the tribe both shapes and is shaped by that relationship. The boy is also dealing with bullying, and there's cool stuff about how the tribe handles bullying and other inter-personal conflicts.

Wabi: YA fantasy quest novel about a were-owl. I loved this one a lot. (Shiny!)

[sanguinity]

Thomas King (Cherokee) and William Monkman (Cree), Coyote Columbus Story.

I cannot express the depth of my love for this book (although I have certainly tried).

Native-centric telling of the Columbus story, in which it is made VERY CLEAR that Native people were living rich, full, active lives before Columbus came. Also, the reason that Columbus is in the Americas is because Coyote dreamed him up in a fit of boredom.

There's a lot of subversive stuff going on in the illustrations, too, like putting the Native people in jeans while Columbus and his crew wear Conquistadores-meet-crossdressing-Elvis outfits. Every aspect of the storytelling pushes the reader to identify the Native people in the story as unremarkable and familiar, while identifying Columbus as inexplicable, alien, and exotic.

Also, Columbus has very bad manners. Which includes thinking that he could enslave and sell people. I especially liked that King and Monkman manage to keep the tone humorous, without erasing the fact that Columbus himself committed atrocities.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

I was going to recommend some other books by Thomas King, particularly Green Grass, Running Water, which is an incredible, funny, and sad work of historical speculative mythological fiction.

[oyceter]

Caveat that I'm only half way through this one, but given that I had an hour and a half of sleep the night before and *still* stayed up past my bedtime trying to get further in the book says something ;).

Drew Hayden Taylor, The Night Wanderer is a modern vampire (I think) novel, but the hints seem to be that the vampire character is a very, very old member of the Anishinabe tribe.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

This sounds interesting! I never heard of it.

[oyceter]

I just finished it yesterday, and it's really good! It reminds me a lot of The Silver Kiss and has bits in the end about passing on knowledge and tradition that just got me.

[sunnyskywalker]

*pops in from elsewhere teh internez* Ooh, yes! I loved that book. (And not just because it's like the anti-Twilight, though that's fun too. Teen girl has actual problems! And actual relationships with her family! The divorce matters! Pale boyfriend isn't perfect after all! Vampirism isn't hot!)

The scene where Pierre shows Tiffany that history is still alive in this land and that it's hers and it matters is awesome.

[sanguinity]

Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos.

I suspect this might better fit under "shaping the world", but I've only read the first chapter yet -- entitled "Not Just Pyramids, Explorers, and Heroes" -- and it very much fits under "not an empty continent."

Acuña begins by debunking the phrase "New World," then moves on to discussing world systems, independent cradles of civilization (two in the Americas!), and the ancient dispersal of humanity into the Americas (including the possibility of back-migration into Asia via the Bering land bridge). He then runs through a description of a handful of the numerous Mesoamerican civilizations: Olmeca, Maya, Teotihuacan, Tolteca, Tarasco, and Azteca.

I came away from this chapter with a clear sense that history in the so-called New World is old and deep, and isn't just some random footnote to "real" history.

[sanguinity]

Indigenous people shaping the world:

[sanguinity]

Emory Dean Keoke (Standing Rock Sioux) and Kay Maree Porterfield (?), Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World.

Young-adult, five volumes, available through Oyate. (There's also a single-volume version by the same authors, with a similar title.) I've only just started these last night, but there's a lot of stuff I like in here. One of the things I like most is that the authors don't use whether something was adopted by white people as the standard for what is or is not a "contribution to the world." (ETA: But if "adoption by white people" is the standard someone is making you use, you'll still find plenty of stuff in here.) The authors do a good job of combatting common assumptions about American Indian societies being "primitive": f'rex, there's stuff in here about metals electroplating and dental fillings.

Volume subject areas: Buildings, Clothing, and Art; Food, Farming, and Hunting; Medicine and Health; Science and Technology; and Trade, Transportation, and Warfare.

[sanguinity]

POC having a long history with SFF, or having SFF traditions that are independent of the anglophone, western, mainstream SFF tradition:

[sanguinity]

(via sparkymonster, here.)

W.E.B. duBois, "The Comet". Short story, published in 1920 in Darkwater, Voices Within the Veil.

Post-apocalyptic fiction!

[harborshore.livejournal.com]

Sultana's Dream (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sultana/dream/dream.html), by Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein, first published in 1905 in The Indian Ladies' Magazine. The link goes to the fulltext of the story. Utopian science fiction, written in response to the practice of purdah (which she writes about in The Secluded Ones, an essay series which is included in the Feminist Press edition of Sultana's Dream).

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

!!! This is new and thrilling to me!

[harborshore.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad I helped someone new find out about her! She deserves to be more well-known.

It's especially great when you read the two together (the story and the essay series), because the story seems fun and light-hearted, until you realize what everything in it refers to. She's really, really awesome, Hossein, I mean.

[kethlenda.livejournal.com]

That looks really interesting, thanks!

[bookloversdiary.livejournal.com]

Also thanking you for the recommendation! Hadn't heard of this before, but it is now added to my list.

[carenejeans.livejournal.com]

"Magical realism" is always sort of shunted off to the side, even though it has a lot in common with "urban fantasy." And urban fantasy by Latino or black writers is often shunted to the side as "magical realism".

I'll make a list of some of my favorite Latin@/Chican@ books that have fantasy elements. Did you know, btw, that May is Latino Book Month? I didn't!

For a long view, I'd recommend Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain, edited by Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán. (Wesleyan University Press, 2003).

[solesakuma]

Weirdly enough, in Argentinian academy, magic realism is considered the primary form of fantasy. Borges or Cortazar is what comes to mind when speaking of 'fantasy', not Tolkien.

[carenejeans.livejournal.com]

Not surprising! Imho, Borges' name should come up first EVERYWHERE when speaking of fantasy, but that's me. 8-)

[solesakuma]

Borges is a very dominating figure in Argentinian literature, in the bad sense. To this day, we still define writers (and even literary generations!) as Borgean or Anti-Borgean.

[lady-tigerfish.livejournal.com]

Sheree R. Thomas' Dark Matter anthology. I haven't read it yet (it's next on my list), but it works to show exactly this, by tracing African Diasporic SFF for a century of its development through novel excerpts, short stories and essays.

[sholio]

One I read recently - Black No More by George Schuyler, a satirical alternate history/near-future SF novel written in the late 1920s.

One I haven't read - The Wolf-Leader (Le Meneur de Loups) by Alexandre Dumas, a fantasy novel from the 1850s about a werewolf (translated and serialized in Weird Tales almost a century later).

On the non-Western SFF side of things, there's some good contemporary stuff in the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler.

[b-writes.livejournal.com]

Astro Boy, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astro_Boy_(character)) created by Osamu Tezuka in 1951. Tezuka was heavily influenced by Western animation, but it definitely has its own life (and predates the Internet by some years).

Dragonball by Akira Toryima and Gensomaden Saiyuki by Kazuya Minekura are manga adapted from/inspired by the famous Chinese novel Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en.

[lady-tigerfish.livejournal.com]

This encompasses many of the categories listed above, but as it doesn't fit under any one, I'm going to give it its own comment; please feel free to remove it if it's cluttering up the post.

So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonialist Science Fiction and Fantasy is an anthology compiled by Uppinder Mehan and community favorite Nalo Hopkinson. It was one of the first books I read for this challenge, familiarizing me with a lot of authors whose novels I went on to read, and I give it my wholehearted recommendation.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to make a separate thread for Louise Erdrich's middle-grade children's chapter books, the "Omakayas Stories" or "Birchbark Series." Starting with The Birchbark House, Erdrich follows the story of an Ojibwa girl growing up in the mid-19th century US.

They're amazing books, and they portray the rich, complex cultures that the Little House on the Prairie series marginalizes and demonizes. They're my standing present to all the little girls I know as soon as they turn 8 (the publisher's target age is 8-12).

[juliandahling.livejournal.com]

I was referred to this thread by a tumblr thread, and I'm disappointed to be three years late to the conversation. I'd like to recommend "The Gaslight Dogs (http://www.amazon.com/Gaslight-Dogs-Karin-Lowachee/dp/0316021792/ref=sr_1_1/183-1999301-8762309?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254928941&sr=1-1)" by Karin Lowachee. It's a steampunk-esque Victorian-esque fantasy novel written by a POC author, with a native main character. I really loved that the book tackled themes of colonialism in unexpected ways, defying some of the unspoken rules of the genre. If anyone has read this, I'd really like to talk more about it.

[juliandahling.livejournal.com]

Also, Karin Lowachee wrote a story for So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonialist Science Fiction and Fantasy (http://www.amazon.com/So-Long-Been-Dreaming-Postcolonial/dp/155152158X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308253018&sr=1-1) that I hear was amazing.

[sanguinity]

Hello and welcome! What tumblr thread, may I ask? I'm always curious. :-)

I've read Gaslight Dogs! (My telegraphic writeup here.) It pushed my buttons galore for about the first third (and frankly, that colored my feelings about it -- I never really end up trusting a book that sends all my sirens going like that), but ultimately did some very sweet I-Wholly-Approve-Of-That-Depiction things with its discussions of colonialism. I did have one lingering, strong reservation about it by the end, but am looking forward with interest to its sequel. (There will be a sequel, yes?)

Please feel free to post your own write-up of Gaslight Dogs, if you want -- one does NOT need to sign up for the 50 books part of the challenge to make recs or discuss books here. AFAIK, the link I gave you above is the only time the book has been mentioned on the comm, and it'd be nice to have more.

Yanno, I don't remember "The Forgotten Ones" at all -- I might have to reread that anthology.

[juliandahling.livejournal.com]

Hah, I might do a write up! I totally agree that the first third was entirely WTF (especially the first scene with Jarrod). I was really not expecting to like it/finish it after those first couple scenes... But, I ended up really really liking it, as did my sister. Yeah, I hear tell of a sequel, although I almost really liked it as a stand alone because of how UNshiny the ending was. I would worry that it would be turned into a heterosexual romance if the story continued, although I should have more faith that Lowachee wouldn't do that, because she doesn't have a tendency to do that. Unfortunately the link to your writeup doesn't work, but I'd really like to read your review.

Oh, and here's the origin (http://criptheatrequeer.tumblr.com/post/6592599615/you-know-what-i-want-more-awesome-first-nations-sf-f)of the tumblr thread in question, in which someone who later reblogged recommended this thread. I popped on over here because I've been thinking a lot lately about colonialism and SFF, and was thinking of starting a blog dedicated to SFF books explicitly complicating colonialism... Maybe still will?

[sanguinity]

Sorry, try this.

Another First Nations Spec Fic post, but not anything that meets what the original poster was dreaming of.

:: I popped on over here because I've been thinking a lot lately about colonialism and SFF, and was thinking of starting a blog dedicated to SFF books explicitly complicating colonialism... Maybe still will? ::

I'd love a link if you did.