We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology

[bibliogramma]

This anthology, edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad, of speculative fiction stories written from a post-colonial perspective is well worth reading, if at times acutely uncomfortable for the member of a colonising culture who is thoughtfully reading them.

There is a great deal of unquestioned colonialist thinking in science fiction. The literature of future space exploration, particularly as written by British and American writers, is very much a literature of humans (usually male, usually white) expanding throughout first the solar system, then the galaxy, sometimes throughout the universe, taking charge of planets that are either uninhabited, or peopled with Others either too primitive or too decadent to resist, or otherwise unfit to retain soveriegnty. It's a literature of colonisation and exploitation, occasionally leavened by the insights contained in such critiques of this vision as Le Guin's The Word for World Is Forest.

These stories make us look at this narrative from the other side, for the perspective of the colonised snd exploited and othered. As Aliette de Bodard writes in her Preface:

They are the voices of the invaded; of the colonized; of the erased and the oppressed; of those whom others would make into aliens and blithely ignore or conquer or enlighten.

A brief concluding essay by Ekaterina Sedia summarises the recurrent themes of these stories far better than I could. Speaking to the importance and meaning of narratives such as those collected in this volume, she writes:

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.