A Collection of Collections, Part I

Karen Tidbeck, Jagannath

I was completely enthralled by this collection of short stories by Karin Tidbeck, translated from Swedish by the author herself. These are, for the most part, stories that inhabit the space between fantasy, science fiction and horror often refered to as weird fiction. Short-listed for the Tiptree award, many of the stories are told from the viewpoint of women, and deal, in one way or another, with variations on the themes of inheritance, bloodlines, reproduction. Tidbeck's brilliantly written tales are unsettling, disturbing, and rarely give the reader a clearly defined and closed off ending. Instead, she invites the reader to carefully consider the situation she presents, and come to their own conclusions about what happened, or will happen next.


Octavia Butler, Unexpected Stories

Octavia Butler died eight years ago. That voice of true genius was stilled. But sometimes the universe gives us an unexpected note of grace - or in this case, two notes, two early, previously unpublished stories by Butler, found among her papers by her agent and literary executor.

In these stories - A Necessary Being and Childfinder - Butler speaks to us again, about power and difference and finding solutions - but not always satisfactory ones - to the ways such thing divide and harm us. It was both sad and marvelous to read new words from Octavia Butler.


Eleanor Arrnason, Big Mama Stories

Arnason's Big Mamas are the stuff of folk tales - marvellous creatures who span space and time by their whim and will, who have the kind of adventures that gods and folk-heroes have, meeting all kinds of incredible situations with confidence and wit - Big Mamas who enjoy the occasional company of Big Poppas, but don't need them. This wonderful collection of Big Mama stories, published by Aqueduct Press, is sheer delight to read. As Karin L. Kross notes in her review of this collection on Tor.com,

Arnason’s Big Mama mythos is a highly enjoyable and strongly feminist synthesis of science, history, and sheer imagination. Like the best fairy tales and folk tales, her stories sometimes go to dark and unsettling places, but they’re really about how to overcome the darkness—how to take a long view of the universe, where individual lives are at once very small but also very important and precious.

Eugie Foster, Mortal Clay, Stone Heart and Other Stories in Shades of Black and White

It's not often that you find a collection or anthology where every single story is a gem, but that's exactly what this was. Foster writes stories that are both technically sound and emotionally powerful. Her genre choices range from straight-up fantasy to something akin to magic realism, so I urge anyone who enjoys short fiction of that kind to check out her work.

Thomas King: The Inconvenient Indian

In The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, Thomas King writes about the history of relations in North America between (mostly) white invader/settler culture and the indigenous cultures with wit and anger. The result is brilliant but uncomfortable for the white reader - which is as it should be.

Not so much a history itself as an examination and re-interpretation of history as it has been written by the dominant (i.e., white) culture, The Inconvenient Indian exposes the false stories that white North Americans have told themselves about Aboriginal peoples, and speaks instead of truths that have been forgotten, or never told - at least, not in settler stories. King is very conscious of how the kinds of narratives that a culture retains affect the perceptions and actions of its people, and makes very clear how the master narratives about Indians support and justify the ongoing colonial project to deceive, steal from, disenfranchise, disentitle, assimilate and ultimately exterminate Native peoples.

As reviewer Hans Tammemagi notes:

Most of all, he builds an impressive case regarding how Natives have been treated. King scathingly debunks the role given to Natives in contemporary history and convincingly shows that Natives have been duped, massacred, assimilated, and dealt with deceitfully since the start of colonization — and, he stresses, this continues today. Although The Inconvenient Indian takes a lighthearted approach, beneath the surface it seethes with rage.(http://www.canadashistory.ca/Books/Lire-sur-l%E2%80%99histoire/Reviews/The-Inconvenient-Indian-A-Curious-Account-Of-Nativ)

This is a book that every non-Aboriginal North American should read.

S. Alexie: The Absolutely True Adventures of a Part-time Indian

Sherman Alexie's young adult novel, The Absolutely True Adventures of a Part-time Indian is by turns hilarious and heart-breaking. And while it may be fiction (though based at least in part on Alexie's own early life), it rings absolutely true.

The narrator is Arnold Spirit Jr., a young boy growing up on a Spokane reserve. He is charmingly geekish, isolated by his intelligence, his fondness for drawing cartoons, and the physical consequences of being hydrocephalic - seizures, an ungainly appearance with an overly large head. As narrator, Arnold speaks directly to the reader, sharing his sometimes funny, sometimes angry, often poignant observations about his life and the lives of his relatives and neighbours on the reserve. There is no sugar coating here; Arnold sees the ways in which his people are trapped in destructive patterns and second-class lives:

It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian. And because you're Indian you start believing you're destined to be poor. It's an ugly circle and there's nothing you can do about it.

Early in the book, Arnold thinks about what his parents might have been like under different circumstances:

Seriously, I know my mother and father had their dreams when they were kids. They dreamed about being something other than poor, but they never got the chance to be anything because nobody paid attention to their dreams. Given the chance, my mother would have gone to college. She still reads books like crazy. She buys them by the pound. And she remembers everything she reads. ... Given the chance, my father would have been a musician. When he gets drunk, he sings old country songs. And blues, too. And he sounds good. ... But we reservation Indians don't get to realize our dreams. We don't get those chances. Or choices. We're just poor. That's all we are.

But Arnold does get a chance, and a choice, when he is suspended from the reserve school for throwing a book at his (white) teacher. (He has reason for his anger - he has just realised that he is studying from the same textbook his mother used in school, that no attempt has been made to give the Indian students an up-to-date education.) His teacher, despite his own anger at having his nose broken, sees in Arnold's anger a deeper emotion - hope. And the urges Arnold to "take your hope and go somewhere where other people have hope." For Arnold, that means the white school, 20 miles away, and there he determines to go, even though he must walk to school and back each day because his parents cannot afford the gas to drive him there.

Attending an off-reserve school brings with it many additional problems; to the white kids at school, he is an outsider - at least, until he displays an unexpected talent for basketball - while to his former friends on the reserve, he is a traitor - especially when he plays basketball against them. But he perseveres, takes this rare gift of a chance that has been denied to so many others, and makes his choice.