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Samuel R. Delany is as well-known and respected for his literary and social/queer criticism as he is for his writing of fiction in multiple, often paraliterary, genres, from science fiction to queer erotica. Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, a collection of critical essays on race, sexuality, science fiction, and the art of writing, plus a number of interviews on a variety of topics, that demonstrates the breadth and depth of his thinking and his academic work in these areas, and offers the reader a sustained experience both instructive and challenging.

The book is divided into three sections - Part One: Some Queer Thoughts, Part Two: The Politics of the Paraliterary, and Part Three: Some Writing/Some Writers. These categories, while suggestive of the overarching themes of each section, should not be taken as exclusive. In the first section, for instance, Delany has gathered essays and interviews that talk about queerness, but also queerness in relation to art, to his own writing in various paraliterary genres (science fiction, pornography), in other writers. In the second, he examines theory and criticism of science fiction, comics, and other paraliterary genres, but does so from the persoective of a queer academic, critic and author. The third section looks at specific writers and works, both literary and paraliterary.

There’s a documentary about Delany, called The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. I’ve never seen it (though I’d love to if I can ever find a coy), but one thing I am certain of, is that polymath is one of the words that one can definitely use to describe him. It’s there in his writing, in the breadth and scope of his thinking, his references, his allusions, the often very disparate threads of knowledge that he draws together in presenting his arguments. To read Delany is to learn things you never would have imagined. To read this collection of essays and interviews is to have your perspectives on race and sexuality challenged, to have your understanding of the art and practice of writing and the genre of speculative fiction - and a few other paraliterary genres - broadened.

Sisters of the Revolution, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, is a reprint anthology that brings together work from some of the most important feminist voices in science fiction. This is not hyperbole. Among the works collected in this PM Press publication are Joanna Russ’s When It Changed, James Tiptree Jr’s The Screwfly Solution, Octavia Butler’s The Evening and the Morning and the Night, and Ursula Le Guin’s Sur, as well as several other stories I’ve read and loved before from authors Eleanor Arnason, Vandana Singh, Nalo Hopkinson and Elisabeth Vonarburg. There were also a fair number of stories new to me, by authors both familiar and new. It’s an outstanding collection of writing by remarkable women.

In their introduction, Ann Vandemeer and Jeff Vandemeer write of this anthology as part of an ongoing conversation around feminist speculative fiction, neither a defining nor a definitive work. “We think of this anthology—the research, the thought behind it, and the actual publication—as a journey of discovery not complete within these pages. Every reader, we hope, will find some writer or story with which they were not previously familiar—and feel deeply some lack that needs to be remedied in the future, by some other anthology.”

As such, it is both deeply enjoyable in its right, and an encouragement to seek out further examples of the feminist vision in speculative fiction.

The stories contained in this collection examine many aspects of women’s lives and struggles. Woman as mother, woman as daughter, woman as leader, woman as revolutionary, woman as healer, woman as explorer, woman as hero. Women who defy the expectations of their society, women who choose to escape, women who try to do the right thing, women who rebel, women who kill, women alone, women betrayed, women who survive. I recommend it highly.

Martin Delany, author of Blake, or The Huts of America, was a free black man, associate of Frederick Douglas, an abolitionist, journalist, physician, soldier and writer, and an early advocate of black nationalism. He wrote his two-part novel, the first part of which was serialised in the The Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Where Stowe’s book urged patience and resignation for enslaved black people, and valorised Christian piety among slaves, Delany tells a story of planning for an armed insurrection of black people in North America, and Cuba and labels Christianity as the religion of the oppressor. It should be noted, although, that by this he means a white-led Christian church which preaches patience and acceptance of one’s fate. His main character espouses instead a form of liberation Christianity in which black Christians will interpret scripture directly and in revolutionary terms.

Delany explains his concept of religion most clearly in this speech by his main character, Blake (known throughout the first part of the book as Henry Holland): “No religion but that which brings us liberty will we know; no God but He who owns us as his children will we serve. The whites accept of nothing but that which promotes their interests and happiness, socially, politically and religiously. They would discard a religion, tear down a church, overthrow a government, or desert a country, which did not enhance their freedom. In God’s great and righteous name, are we not willing to do the same?” .... “Our ceremonies, then,” continued Blake, “are borrowed from no denomination, creed, nor church: no existing organization, secret, secular, nor religious; but originated by ourselves, adopted to our own condition, circumstances, and wants, founded upon the eternal word of God our Creator, as impressed upon the tablet of each of our hearts.”

The full text of the novel has been lost, but Part One and a large part of Part Two survive. [1] It is a fascinating read, being of interest both as a work of African-American nationalist literature, and as an early work of black speculative fiction.

The novel begins with the heart-rending account of the break-up of a black family through the sale of a young slave woman. Colonel Franks, a Southern landowner, is persuaded by Arabella Ballard, a relative of his wife’s, and the wife of a business associate, to sell her Maggie, a house servant trained as a lady’s maid, to accompany her on a trip to Cuba. It is strongly suggested that his decision to sell Maggie - his biological daughter - is motivated by her refusal of his sexual advances toward her. By this sale she is separated from her young son Joe, her husband, known as Henry Holland, an educated black man from the West Indies tricked into slavery when young, and from her mother, Mammy Judy, the cook, and Mammy Judy’s husband Daddy Joe, who are also devastated by the loss.

But where Judy and Daddy Joe try to accept the loss of Maggie with Christian platitudes about suffering and being together again in Heaven, Henry is outraged at the callous destruction of his family and rejects the advice of the others to accept the loss and trust in God. He confronts the Colonel over the sale of his wife, and in turn is sold himself. But before his new master can take possession, he runs away. After arranging for his son to be carried to safety in Canada, he contacts two trusted friends, Andy and Charles, and shares with them his plan, not only to never be enslaved again, but to organise a country-wide slave revolution, a goal that they eagerly agree to support him in.

Delany makes the reader look at all aspects of slavery, from the philosophical arguments used to justify the ownership of human beings, to the economics of plantation culture, to the casual everyday cruelty exhibited toward enslaved blacks. He also examines the range of survival strategies used by black people under slavery, showing the ways in which the myths of the slave who is eager to please, happy amusing, slow-witted, childlike, or a comforting ‘mammy’ are all, to some degree or other, masks adopted as means of surviving interactions with whites - with varied results, depending on the skill of the actor and the mood and whim of the target. The real hearts and minds of black people appear only when they speak together, or act out of the sight of whites, in the black-occupied ‘huts of America’ where they can congregate away from the gaze of the master. Even the very real faith of some blacks is exaggerated into a performance of confused and frenzied religiosity - for example, when Mammy Judy uses this strategy as a way of avoiding uncomfortable questions about the whereabouts of Henry and his son Joe. There are no happy plantation stories here.

As Henry travels through the South, spreading the idea of an organised rebellion, his encounters with the workers on different plantations provide a sense of the scope of slavery as a means of cheap labour - the sheer numbers of blacks working to produce the cash crops that drove the economic growth of not only the plantation south but the industrial north - and the ways in which this commodified labour force was treated.

Henry’s travels through the Southern states, rousing the black populace to prepare for a coming insurrection, occupy much of the book; having made this circuit, he returns to the Franks plantation, gathers these closest to him, and leads them to Canada, where he buys land and sets up a community of escaped slaves. Then, his family and friends taken care of, he heads toward Cuba in search of his wife. Thus ends Part One of Blake.

Where Part One was largely an exploration of the life of blacks under slavery, with some detailed advice on the dangers facing escaping slaves due to the Fugitive Slave Act and directions on how to reach Canada - complete with warnings not to expect much beyond freedom on arrival in what was still a very racially stratified society - the early chapters of Part Two examine first the conditions of slavery in Cuba, and then the conditions of the slave trade itself, as Henry’s adventures continue. It is in this section of the novel that Delany’s African nationalism is most strongly elucidated, in passage such as this:

“Heretofore that country [Africa] has been regarded as desolate-unadapted to useful cultivation or domestic animals, and consequently, the inhabitants savage, lazy, idle, and incapable of the higher civilization and only fit for bondmen, contributing nothing to the civilized world but that which is extorted from them as slaves. Instead of this, let us prove, not only that the African race is now the principal producer of the greater part of the luxuries of enlightened countries, as various fruits, rice, sugar, coffee, chocolate, cocoa, spices, and tobacco; but that in Africa their native land, they are among the most industrious people in the world, highly cultivating the lands, and that ere long they and their country must hold the balance of commercial power by supplying as they now do as foreign bondmen in strange lands, the greatest staple commodities in demand, as rice, coffee, sugar, and especially cotton, from their own native shores, the most extensive native territory, climate, soil, and greatest number of (almost the only natural producers) inhabitants in the universe; and that race and country will at once rise to the first magnitude of importance in the estimation of the greatest nations on earth, from their dependence upon them for the great staples from which is derived their national wealth.”

In Part Two, Henry, now using the name Gilbert, travels to Cuba in the service of a party of three young white men - Captain Richard Paul, Lieutenant Augustus Seely, and Midshipman Lawrence Spencer - desirous of entering the slave trade, and Cordelia Woodward, a young woman who later becomes Seely’s wife.

Once in Cuba, Henry leaves the party to search for his wife; finding Maggie at last, he gives her the money to purchase her freedom, and arranges for Joe to be brought to Cuba by some of his friends in Canada. We now learn that Henry, who speaks both Spanish and Creole fluently, is originally from Cuba, and that his name is actually Henrico Blacus - Henry Blake. He visits his cousin, Placido, a revolutionary poet, and they agree on working toward an uprising in Cuba. Henry then takes a position as a sailing master on a slave ship carrying arms - the Vulture, commanded by Captain Paul and his associates.

Blake’s journey to Africa, where the Vulture takes on two thousand kidnapped and branded Africans, gives Delany the opportunity to enumerate the horrors of the Middle Passage, the physical and mental torture endured by the transportees, the callousness toward the health and lives of their human cargo.

On his return, Blake discovers that he has been appointed the General of the Cuban Army of Emancipation; the revolutionaries, comprising many of the free blacks and people of mixed race in Cuba as well as soaves, plan for action. The last preserved chapter offers a picture of heightened political tensions between the Spanish administrators, the American platers who seek to have Cuba annexed by the US, and the black and mixed race general population, free and slave. Conditions are ripe for a revolution; but the conclusion of the book is lost to us.

Those looking for a cohesive personal narrative in Blake will be disappointed. This is not that kind of novel. Henry’s travels and exploits are governed, not by the desire to tell a story, but to impart information and promote a cause. Its shape is also affected by the length of time taken to write the work. Delany began publishing the chapters in 1959, before the outbreak of civil war. By the time he finished writing, it was 1862, and the possibility existed that a Union victory might end the rule of slavery in the South, rendering moot his main character’s arguments for a black insurrection. The value of Blake lies in its articulation of a nationalist vision of diasporic Africans, and its contemporary account of the conditions of black people under slavery.

[1] Part One has been published online (http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/africam/blakehp.html)

Frances Hardinge’s A Skinful of Shadows is a YA historical fantasy, set in England during beginning if the civil war. Makepeace Lightfoot, the central character, is a young girl, not yet 13, when the novel begins. Makepeace is not exactly an ordinary girl. Her dreams are haunted by ghosts, who she feels trying to burrow into her mind. After the death of her mother in a riot, she learns that she is the illegitimate child of Sit Peter Fellmott, now dead as well, the scion of a family with a history of occultism possessed of the ability to absorb the ghosts of the dead. Her mother’s family being unwilling to keep her, she us sent to the Fellmott estate of Grizehayes, where she becomes a kitchen servant.

Nit long after arriving at Grizehayes, Makepeace realises that she has already absorbed a ghost, that of a tormented dancing bear that had been haunting the marshes near her former home. It’s not easy, keeping the bear’s instincts from overwhelming her own feelings and actions, but she knows that she must keep her secret from the family patriarch, Obadiah, in whom she senses something dark and threatening.

When Makepeace finally is confronted with the full secret of the Fellmotts, and their intentions for her, she makes a desperate bid for escape, beginning a journey that takes her from the court-in-exile of King Charles at Oxford to the heart of the Parliamentarian forces, seeking a way to free herself -and her half-brother James, already a victim of the Fellmott legacy - forever. Along the way, she chooses to absorb several ghosts - mostly out of necessity, hoping their knowledge or skills will help her, but partly, too from pity, offering them a ‘second chance.’

Hardinge’s narrative is distinctly critical of the excesses of the aristocracy of Charles’s era, but at the same time does not soften the harshness of the Puritan vision of the correct, Christian society. Her sympathies - and Makepeace’s - lie with the common people who suffer from war no matter what side they may favour, who mostly just want to be left alone.

Makepeace is a character that grows on one, as she learns from her experiences and grows strong enough to defeat her enemies, find ways of using her strange power for some good, and build a life for herself, her brother, and the community of souls within her.

This is the first of Hardinge’s novels I’ve read, but the enjoyment I gained in reading this one makes me think that I ought to explore her other books.

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, by law professor Dorothy Roberts, was first published in 1997, but the topic it addresses, the relationship between race and concepts of reproductive freedom, are no less fraught today than they were 20 years ago - in fact, these issues, in the era of Black Lives Matter, may be even more crucial now.

White feminism has long framed reproductive freedom as the freedom not to bear children, and advocated for access to birth control and abortion. What this fails to recognise is the ways in which reproduction for black women is a story that begins with forced rape and abduction of children during slavery, and continues through eugenicist narratives to coerced administration of birth control and forced sterilisation.

“...we need to reconsider the meaning of reproductive liberty to take into account its relationship to racial oppression. While Black women’s stories are sometimes inserted as an aside in deliberations about reproductive issues, I place them at the center of this reconstructive project. How does Black women’s experience change the current interpretation of reproductive freedom? The dominant notion of reproductive liberty is flawed in several ways. It is limited by the liberal ideals of individual autonomy and freedom from government interference; it is primarily concerned with the interests of white, middle-class women; and it is focused on the right to abortion. The full extent of many Americans’ conception of reproductive freedom is the Constitution’s protection against laws that ban abortion. I suggest an expanded and less individualistic conception of reproductive liberty that recognizes control of reproduction as a critical means of racial oppression and liberation in America. I do not deny the importance of autonomy over one’s own reproductive life, but I also recognize that reproductive policy affects the status of entire groups. Reproductive liberty must encompass more than the protection of an individual woman’s choice to end her pregnancy. It must encompass the full range of procreative activities, including the ability to bear a child, and it must acknowledge that we make reproductive decisions within a social context, including inequalities of wealth and power. Reproductive freedom is a matter of social justice, not individual choice.”

By tracing social responses to black women’s reproductive history, fertility and family choices, Roberts demonstrates the ways in which reproductive freedom has many different meanings for black women. Where white ablebodied women have in general been encouraged to have children, leading to a construction of reproductive freedom as the choice not to reproduce except on her own terms, the mass of historical and social meanings surrounding reproduction for black women leads to a far more complex formulation of what it means for them to have full autonomy over their reproduction.

Roberts begins where all narratives of black people in the Americas must begin, with the conditions of slavery. Black women were seen not only as labourers, but as the source of new slaves to add to the labour force. While systematic breeding of slaves was not common, most slaveowners were well aware of the economic benefits of black women’s fertility. Childbearing was encouraged, barrenness punished. Rape was common, both at the hands of white men, and black men chosen as mates for potentially fertile women. At the same time, black women had no rights to their children, who were legally the property of their owners. Their children might be taken from them, and sold away or rented out without any recourse. Even when their families remained intact, mothers often had little choice over the rearing of their children. As healthy slaves were required to work long hours, childrearing was often assigned to older or disabled slaves who could no longer work at hard labour.

Roberts goes on to discuss the shift in social pressures brought to bear on black women once slavery was abolished and their reproduction no longer benefits owners. The growing eugenics movement, based in a belief that a range of character traits from intelligence to moral behaviour were hereditary in nature, combined with racist constructions of black people as unintelligent, sexually promiscuous, morally lax, lazy, insubordinate, and otherwise undesirable, began to argue for limitations on reproduction among black people, as well as other “undesirable” groups. Sterilisation of both men and women in these groups, as well as limited access to prenatal and perinatal care for the poor were advocated as means of preventing the passing on of inferior genes.

“I turn to a discussion of eugenics because this way of thinking helped to shape our understanding of reproduction and permeates the promotion of contemporary policies that regulate Black women’s childbearing. Racist ideology, in turn, provided fertile soil for eugenic theories to take root and flourish. It bears remembering that in our parents’ lifetime states across the country forcibly sterilized thousands of citizens thought to be genetically inferior. America’s recent eugenic past should serve as a warning of the dangerous potential inherent in the notion that social problems are caused by reproduction and can be cured by population control.”

However, Roberts acknowledges the complexity of black attitudes toward birth control. Many black women used various forms of birth control, from abstinence to barrier methods to post-coital douching and abortion. Over the first half of the 20th century, the birth rate among black women fell to the same levels found among white women. The ambiguities result from the mixed messages for birth control. Many white birth control advocates - and some Black advocates as well - used the language of eugenics, while most black advocates talked in terms of spacing families, improving maternal health and decreasing infant mortality. At the same time, a significant number of black voices called for blacks to resist family planning as a firm of racial suicide, and indeed, to raise birth rates in order to outpace white population growth.

Roberts devotes considerable space to a discussion of the use of Norplant as a birth control method aimed at - and in some cases forced upon - poor and minority women, with particular emphasis on preventing pregnancy among unmarried teens and women on welfare. Issues ranging from unethical testing on Third World women to lack of long-term testing, to side effects, health risks and problems with implant removal, point to a ‘solution’ adopted without much thought fir the real concerns of women, as a measure to control the reproduction of the poor, and particularly women of colour. Part of the hidden coerciveness of Norplant comes from the fact that, unlike other forms of contraception, which a woman can simply decide not to use, Norplant can only be discontinued with the intervention of a medical practitioner.

“Being able to get Norplant removed quickly and easily is critical to a user’s control over reproductive decisionmaking. Yet poor and low-income women often find themselves in a predicament when they seek to have the capsules extracted. Their experience with Norplant is a telling example of how a woman’s social circumstances affect her reproductive “choices.” A woman whose insertion procedure was covered by Medicaid or private insurance may be uninsured at the time she decides to have the tubes removed. A woman who had the money to pay for implantation may be too broke to afford extraction. Some women have complained that they learned of the cost of removal—from $150 to $500—only after returning to a physician to have the implants taken out.”

Other key examples of the policing of Black women’s bodies and reproduction focused on in Roberts’ examination of race and reproductive freedom include the prosecution and incarceration of poor, and primarily black, pregnant and post-natal drug users on charges of child abuse, child neglect, and similar crimes. She shows clearly that, despite rhetoric to the contrary, the goals here are not to protect black fetuses or to fight drug abuse, rather, that the factor driving such prosecutions is the desire to control black reproduction. She also dissects the American welfare system, showing how it is designed to penalise poor black women with children. A discussion of new reproductive technologies such as IVF observes the ways in which the costs if these technologies, and the fact that they are not covered by Medicaid or many insurance plans, make them inaccessible to Black women and families who are infertile or otherwise having difficulty in having a child.

Roberts concludes her examination of race and reproduction by examining the ways in which the liberal understanding of liberty as a defense of individual choice fails to provide true social justice and equality. Modern American law and society has focused on liberty as a protection from government intervention, and ignored the potential for equality that can come from government action. To ensure equality in the area of reproduction, as in many other areas, requires a balance between liberty and equality as guiding principles. This formulation of a positive, progressive idea of liberty:

“... includes not only the negative proscription against government coercion, but also the affirmative duty of government to protect the individual’s personhood from degradation and to facilitate the processes of choice and self-determination. This approach shifts the focus of liberty theory from state nonintervention to an affirmative guarantee of personhood and autonomy. Under this postliberal doctrine, the government is not only prohibited from penalizing welfare mothers or crack-dependent women for choosing to bear children; it is also required to provide subsistence benefits, drug treatment, and medical care. Ultimately, the state should facilitate, not block, citizens’ efforts to install more just and egalitarian economic, social, and political systems.”

Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes begins in a violent crime scene. Four bodies, floating in null gravity, the air full of globules of blood. A fifth body will be found hanging, an apparent suicide, on the bridge. The sixth and last crew member lies in the medical bay, battered, in a coma, near death.

One of the dead, in her final act, initiated the automatic sequence that would awaken six clones, implanting the last back-up of their memories, resurrecting the crew to deal with whatever catastrophe brought about their deaths.

There is, however a problem. The last backups are those the crew made on beginning this generations-long voyage. And from the age of most of the bodies, and the position of the ship, over twenty years (in ship’s time, over a century on Earth) have passed, years that the newly awakened clones have no memories of.

It gets worse. The AI that essentially runs the ship, IAN, is down. Important data files and software have been wiped. The machine that create new clones from a kind of allpurpose protein gel and give the new clones the memories of their last body have been fatally sabotaged - no new clones can be created when the current ones die.

One more thing. Every crew member is a criminal, offered this long watch over the sleeping colonists as a way to repay society for their crimes. No one knows what the crimes of the others are - at least, no one is supposed to know - but odds are at least one of them is a murderer.

This oddly matched crew must solve the mystery of their predecessor’s deaths, the multiple acts of sabotage that range from a food replicator that only makes hemlock to a major course deviation, and try to salvage the colony mission - all without any knowledge of what has happened over the past 25 years, and without killing themselves or each other, again.

The main narrative - solving the mystery of what happened to them - is interspersed with flashbacks to each character’s life before being recruited for the colony mission. As the reader learns more about the former lives of the crew, a link emerges - Sallie Mignon, one of the first people to become a clone, and one of the richest and most powerful people in the world that the ship has left behind. Not only was Sallie in one way or another involved in placing these specific crew members on board, but they have been connected to each other in multiple other ways, though sometimes unknowingly. Even more than their hidden criminal records, they carry secrets, and are not necessarily who, or what, they seem to be.

Six Wakes is a solid mystery thriller in space, with some truly interesting characters, a tight, suspenseful plot, and a very satisfying conclusion. The world these characters inhabited, a world of cloning and hacking of DNA, personalities and memories, is also a world of serious ethical questions about identity, responsibility and autonomy. Is a cloned person responsible for a crime committed by a previous clone, especially if that clone died without leaving a memory map? Is killing a clone murder, when resurrection of a new clone is a simple matter? Is it ethical to hack the biological data of someone with a generic disorder, so that once killed, their clone will live on without the illness? Is it proper to waken a clone of someone who has committed suicide? More than just a thriller, this is science fiction that makes you think, and that’s always a good thing.

In the land of Gujaareh, they worship the Hananja the Dreamer, the Goddess to whom those who sleep go in dreams, and those who die go at the end, the goddess who brings peace. Among the holy men of the Dreamer, the Hetawa, there are those who gather the power of dreams, and these who can transmute that power into healing. There are different kinds of dream energy, dreams of fear, which yield dreambile for halting infections and tumours, dreams of lust, yielding dreamseed, which can promote growth, dreams of absurdity, yielding dreamichor. And then there is the dreamblood, harvested from the most potent of dreams, those that carry with them all the richness of a life, that is collected at the moment of death, as the Gatherer gives the dying one peace and aids their path to the land of the Goddess. In some ways, peace is the highest value, the ultimate goal, of Gujaareh society, peace above all. But there is corruption in the heart of Gujaareh, and the monstrous perversion of the Gatherer’s role, by a greedy and ambitious prince who would use the power of wrongly gathered dreams to instill fear, wage war, gain power that no one man should have.

This is the world of N. K. Jemison’s Dreamblood duology, a strikingly original fantasy inspired by Egyptian history and theology. In the first volume, The Killing Moon, Ehiru, a devout Gatherer and his apprentice Nijiri, become aware of the evil that dwells at the heart of both the kingdom’s ruling prince - Ehiru’s brother - and the Superior of their order. To root out the corruption and save both Gujaareh and the neighbouring state of Kisua from the devastation of war, they must ally with Kisuati ambassador Sunandi - whose dreamblood they have been ordered to take, leaving her dead. But war is not the worst of what the prince plans. He has created a killing monster known as a Reaper from a broken Gatherer, and intends to use its power to bring the world under his rule. But a mistake made during what should have been a simple gathering have brought Ehiru halfway to becoming a monster himself, and his control over the killing desires within him is weakening. If he somehow defeats his brother’s Reaper, will he succumb and become one himself?

The second novel of the Dreamblood series, The Shadowed Sun, takes place some years after the first. The Prince’s son, Wanahomen, is now an exile, having found refuge among the nomadic Banbarra following conquest of Gujaareh and his father’s downfall. Now an adult and a hunt leader, he is waging a long-term war against Kisua, hoping to return one day to Gujaareh as its ruler. And he has uneasy dreams, of his father’s spirit, wasted and corrupted, warning him of the coming of... something he does not understand.

Others are having bad dreams, too, and one Gujaraah man may have died from them. During a difficult healing, Hanani, the Hetawa’s only female Sharer, or healer, asks for more dreambile, but when the young apprentice Dayu tries to collect it from a man who has come to the temple plagued with nightmares, both die. Hanani later learns that the man’s nightmares were not ordinary things, but dreams of deep foreboding, a sense that something evil was waiting for him.

In Gujaareh, unrest seethes beneath the placid surface of a society that values peace. The Hetawa have so far supported the Kisuati occupation - under the governorship of former ambassador Sunandi - but if a better alternative comes along, they will not hesitate to shift that support, and the people still follow the Hetawa, though with less devotion than before. Trade laws favour the Kisuati, threatening the wealth of the upper and middle classes. The occupying army acts as occupying armies always act, with petty cruelty and random violence. Raiding by nomads has created fear within the city, though much of the damage seems restricted to Kisuati people and their property. There is, in reality, little peace in the city. When the old prince’s general Charris contacts them with offers of alliance from the Banbarra, they are not unwilling to listen - though Wanahomen does not endorse the alliance, blaming the Hetawa fir the death if his father.

Indeed, the idea of rebellion has advanced to the point that a group of wealthy Gujaareh nobles are ready to swear alliegiance - and more importantly, commit money and men - to Wanahomen’s cause. More than that, Sanfi, the leader of the rebel faction, has offered Wanahomen his daughter Tiaanet as first wife. But Sanfi has deeper plans, and is far more dangerous, not just to the Kisuati, but also to Gujaareeh. For he holds the key to the killing dreams that stalk the city, and there is nothing he will not encompass to achieve his ends and feed his desires.

Jemisin does not deal in easy characterisations. Here, there are few fully heroic, or fully villainous, only people who must learn and grow, or die, in soul if not also in body. And even as she writes the richness that is Gujaareh society, she includes a critique of some of its ways, a need for transcendence of the rigid roles that have long existed along with the deep desire for a peaceful society.

Jemisin has created a rich and complex world, in which to explore her themes of power and corruption, faith and deceit, ambition and sacrifice. These are the sorts of books you start reading one evening and suddenly notice that you’ve been immersed in its reality for hours.

Jemisin has suggested that there are other stories of Gujaareh to be told, and so, while this story is complete, I look forward to the possibility that there may someday be more tales set in this rich and intriguing world.

This week I felt a need for some light but still interesting reading, which brought to my mind a series I’d gotten interested in through reading several short stories, but had not gotten around to reading any of the novels. That series is Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma books, set in the seventh century British Isles (primarily Ireland) and featuring an Irish religieuse and lawyer of noble blood and deep perceptions.

The first novel of the series is set in 664 AD, during the Council of Whitby at the abbey of Streoneshalh, run by Hild (St. Hilda), relative of King Oswy of Northumbria, a powerful woman in her own right. At this time, there was a great deal of antagonism between the Roman and Irish/Ionian churches, which were different in a number of small, and not-so-small ways. The Council of Whitby was convened to present arguments before King Oswy for which church should be given royal sanction in Northumbria. Sister Fidelma is present as an advisor on legal matters to the Irish delegation.

On their way to the abbey, Sister Fidelma’s party encounter a grim sight, the hanged corpse of a fellow brother of an Irish church order, and learn that he was killed because his defense of the Irish church was taken as an insult by the local lord, Wulfric. This violence pales, however, before the crime that Fidelma is called upon to investigate - the murder of Etain, abbess of Kildare, and a major proponent of the Irish church. In order to remove all suggestion of possible investigative bias, due to the politically charged atmosphere surrounding the crime, Fidelma is asked to conduct her investigations jointly with a young Saxon monk of the Roman church, Brother Eadulf.

The book follows the standard format of the mystery/ crime procedural, of course. Fidelma and Eadulf observe the crime scene, arrange for an autopsy, interview witnesses, suspects and other persons of interest, gather clues, develop timetables and theories, and so on. What makes the novel particularly interesting to me is the wealth of research into legal and social conventions, monastic life and the variations of Christian doctrine that Tremayne employs in building the background and atmosphere. Details of clothing and patterns of monastic life, differences between Saxon and Irish law, arguments over the correct way to determine the date of the Paschal feast (which the Saxons call Easter after their goddess Oestre), all these things help to make the characters and situations real and interesting.

Of course, as with all historical fiction, Tremayne has made some creative alterations to the bare accounts of the events of the Synod of Whitby. There are no records of an abbess of Kildare named Etain, but then the early records of Kildare are a little sketchy, and Etain, in the novel, had only been abbess nine months before her death. And since Etain dies before the Synod is opened, there would have ben no record of her presence there if she had existed. The death of Archbishop Deusdedit of Canterbury is another bit of creative supposition. One would have expected Deusdedit to speak at the Synod, but he does not appear in the records. He is known to have died around the time of the Synod, probably of plague. It is within the realm of possibility that he did go to Whitby, but fell ill and died without participating.

I enjoyed the short stories I’d read, and I’ve enjoyed reading this novel. I look forward to the rest of the series.

The Hugo finalists are out, and while quite a few of the short fiction pieces were ones I’d nominated, there are a few I hadn’t read. So, I’ve gotten my hands on those (much thanks to Sarah Pinsker for making a pdf of her novelette available on her website) and corrected those gaps in my reading.

Short Story

“The Martian Obelisk,” Linda Nagata; tor.com, July 19, 2017.
https://www.tor.com/2017/07/19/the-martian-obelisk/

The Earth is dying. Slowly, from ecological breakdown and climate change and loss of infrastructure and antibiotic resistant diseases and natural disasters and sporadic violence and all the things we’ve been fearing in recent years. A series of slow apocalypses. Susannah is an architect, and with the backing of one of the world’s remaining millionaires, she has spent the last 17 years building a soaring monument to the memory of humanity - on Mars, remotely accessing the technology of a Mars colony that was prepped but never settled. And then the unthinkable happens. A message from a survivor of the last functioning Mars colony, previously thought lost, is received. A woman and her children, the only ones left alive on Mars, have battled halfway across Mars and are asking for the resources of the monument to build a place where they can survive just a little longer. Susannah must decide, what will be the final shape of the Martian monument - the obelisk she’s spent years building, or a few more years of life for a doomed family. Powerful story, both in its depiction of the end of the world - not with a bang, but a long slow series of whimpers - and in its examination of the irrational, irrepressible, persistence of hope.

Novelettes

“Wind Will Rove,” Sarah Pinsker
(Originally published in Asimov’s September/October 2017, available for download as pdf on Pinsker’s website: http://sarahpinsker.com/wind_will_rove)

In this novelette, Pinsker explores the tension between preservation of the past and creation of the future through the situation of a generation ship that, through an act of sabotage, has lost its cultural and historical databases. This results in a concerted decision by the passengers to restore and preserve as much of the lost material as possible, not just through the creation of new databases, but through continued repetition and accurate reproduction of the restored material - music, plays, art, and Earth’s history. The narrator, Rosie Clay, is a history teacher and traditional fiddle player, challenged by one of her students who rejects the emphasis on the history and creations of the past, of an Earth that means nothing to them. Forced to look beyond the truism that those who forget history are destined to repeat it - questionable in a world that is entirely different from the Earth where that history took place - Rosie finds herself examining her own assumptions. Quiet but very thought-provoking.

“Children of Thorns, Children of Water,” Aliette de Bodard; Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/children-thorns-children-water/

This novelette is set in the world of de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series, and requires some familiarity with that world to be fully understood. It’s a world where Fallen angels wield magic and rule Houses, life for the houseless is bleak and often violent. The novels are set in an alternate late 19th century Paris and deal largely with relationships, politics and power - within houses, between houses, and in the larger postcolonial society. In this story, Thuan, a dragon in human form and member of the Dragon kingdom based in the waters of the Seine - the dragons, being drawn from Annamese (Vietnamese) tradition, are water beings) seeks to enter one of the Houses, House Hawthorn, as a spy, to gain information on what the tensions between houses might mean for the dragon kingdom. The day of testing, when new house dependents are chosen, is interrupted by a magical assault by creatures made of thorns, manifestations of House Hawthorne itself. Thuan proves useful to the Fallen in charge of the the tests in dealing with the crisis, and thus wins his place in the House. It’s a well-written piece, but I’m not all that fond of this secondary world. I read and enjoyed the first novel in the series and found it interesting - but not compelling enough to have pushed me to read the second volume. Good story, not quite my cup of tea.

Novellas

River of Teeth, Sarah Gailey

In her foreword, Gailey says: “In the early twentieth century, the Congress of our great nation debated a glorious plan to resolve a meat shortage in America. The idea was this: import hippos and raise them in Louisiana’s bayous. The hippos would eat the ruinously invasive water hyacinth; the American people would eat the hippos; everyone would go home happy. Well, except the hippos. They’d go home eaten.” It was this unfulfilled notion that spurred Gailey to imagine the alternate history of this novella, though she places the introduction of hippos into the American ecology and economy some decades earlier. In Gailey’s version of the American South, marshes have been encouraged to allow for the development of hippo farming. Hippos serve instead of horses for cartage and personal transport, and there are canals and pools for the animals to use as rest stops, and instead of stables. Part of the Mississippi has been dammed up, forming a marshy lake area called the Harriet where feral hippos range, interfering with water trade along the river. This lake region is controlled by a shady - and very wealthy - man named Travers, who operated gambling riverboats on the lake, and is known to feed people he dislikes to the feral hippos. The story begins when adventurer Winslow Remington Houndstooth is hired by a government agency to clean out the feral hippos. The general plan is to get them through the barrier at the downstream end of the Harriet by any means necessary, and encourage them to migrate south into the gulf, freeing the river for trade, and not quite incidentally interfering with Travers’ business. In addition to the large payment offered to him and any members if the tram he pits together, Houndstooth has a strong personal motivation for injuring Travers, who burned out his hippo farm sone years ago, leaving him penniless.

The first part of the novella is devoted to assembling the team, which could not be comprised of a more diverse group of characters: Regina “Archie” Archambault, a cross-dressing conwoman; Hero Shackleby, a nonbinary demolitions expert; Cal Hotchkiss, fast gun, card shark, and former employee if Houndstooth who may or may not have betrayed him to Travers; Adelia Reyes, a pregnant lesbian assassin; and Houndstooth himself, a mixed race Immigrant from England whose dream and passion is to rebuild his hippo farm. Gailey also spends time letting us get to know, not only the characters, but their hippos, their personalities and distinguishing traits. It’s clear in this society that people form bonds with their hippos not unlike those with other working or companion animals like dogs, cats or horses. As for the plot - everything goes wrong, of course, and there are double-crosses and hidden motivations and a tangle of cross purposes, and this is not a light-hearted caper, not everyone survives. But it is very entertaining, and I hear there’s a sequel.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Seanan McGuire

McGuire uses a delightfully arch and ironic tone in beginning this story - the backstory of Jaqueline and Jillian, Jack and Jill, two of the distinctly different children from the first of the Wayward Children series, Every Heart a Doorway - by introducing Chester and Serena Wolcott, two self-absorbed people who chose to have children to complete the image of their perfect nuclear family. Things go wrong, of course, from the beginning. As soon as they knew they were having twins, they assumed they would have a boy and a girl, thus efficiently creating the ideal family in one swoop. They never considered the possibility of two girls.

Parenthood does not suit the Wolcotts, being too disorderly and entirely too loud and messy. Chester’s mother is almost immediately recruited to actually raise the girls. At least until it becomes inconvenient to have her around, so at age five the twins lose the only person in their lives who saw them as people to be encouraged to grow, rather than accessories to be programmed for the benefit of their parents.

Those who have read Every Heart a Doorway already know a little of what happens to Jack and Jill. One day, they find a doorway where no doorway should have been and it takes them to a strange land where nightmares are real, but at least here they have some choice over which nightmare they will live in, where their parents gave them no choices at all. It is a strange place, a cruel place, and each child is changed in ways that do not bear much thinking about.

This is part of why, while I appreciate McGuire’s skill and invention in writing these stories, I don’t like them. I am not good with reading about abused children who don’t get to really escape their abuse - because we know that while Jack and Jill will someday find their way home, they will be damaged, perhaps permanently, perhaps beyond any hope of being ... normal, happy, able to function in a world of ordinary people. Of course, you can say that of many traumatised children, because the scars of some hurts never heal. So there is a fundamental truth underneath the fantasy here. As it happens, it’s a truth I live with, and reading about it requires accommodations that McGuire doesn’t offer, like the possibility of grace and hope.

Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal, is a collection of tributes, homages, memories, essays and other writings in honour of this vastly influential, respected and beloved author. It follows in the vein of other recent collections honouring James Tiptree Jr, aka Alice Sheldon, and Samuel “Chip” Delany.

Alexandra Pierce says in her Introduction to the collection:

“This book collects some of the ways people relate and connect to Butler, with each section’s title a quote from a letter or essay within it. The first section, ‘Your work is a river I come home to’, focuses on how Butler has inspired people: in their work, in their lives. In the second, which uses a line from Butler’s own essay ‘Positive Obsessions’, authors reflect on systemic and current political issues that Butler either commented on or would have, were she still alive. ‘Love lingers in between dog-eared pages’ includes letters and essays mainly interested in Butler’s fiction—from Kindred to Xenogenesis to Fledgling—with reactions, arguments, and reflections on her work. Next, in ‘I am an Octavia E. Butler Scholar’, are letters from some of the Octavia E. Butler Scholars: Clarion and Clarion West students who received the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, set up by the Carl Brandon Society in Butler’s honour after her death. The following chapter fits neatly after the Clarion one: ‘Forget talent. There is only the work’. It features writers reflecting on how Butler influenced their writing through tutoring at Clarion or otherwise. The subsequent section, ‘I love you across oceans, across generations, across lives’ includes, broadly speaking, love letters. They recount ways in which Butler and her work changed something about the writers in situations as individual as the people describing them. The book is rounded out with a memorial that appeared in Science Fiction Studies in 2010, highlighting Butler’s many contributions to science fiction as well as examining how Butler has been studied. And we end with Octavia Butler’s own words, in an interview with Stephen W. Potts from 1996. It was important to us we allow Butler to speak for herself.”

Butler’s work has always been important to me; like so many others, I count her as one of my favourite authors, someone whose work has not only entertained but challenged and inspired me. One of the most important things to me about Butler’s work is how unapologetically political she is, in the broadest sense of examining existing power relations and social injustice, and imagining ways to survive, resist, oppose, change, create a more just and community-oriented world. That’s a feeling shared by many of those who contributed to this volume.

Mimi Mondal writes in her Introduction about the experience of editing this volume in the aftermath of the 2016 US elections, of being an immigrant from India, who had seen the country of her birth elect a “right-wing religious demagogue” in 2014.

“I remember staying curled up in bed way past daytime on November 8, trying to grasp for a reason to get up and finding none, absolutely none. My landlord at the time, an otherwise extremely active and optimistic gay man in his early fifties, was lying crumpled in the other bedroom. My mother, on the other end of a cross-continental phone call, was advising me to stay indoors, in case there was backlash in the streets. Where was I going to go now? What was the point of doing anything, writing anything, believing anything? Someone like me wasn’t wanted anywhere—not back at home, not even in this other country which had taken so much of my faith and love. Once again, I was back to being a number: the gunk that needed to be drained out of the swamp, denied visas to stay or work, turned back from airports, put on the other side of a wall, and made to pay for it too.

It was through this endless numbness that I walked into this project. I felt barely functional, but I took it up because I had read and loved more of Octavia’s work in the meantime, because I had never stopped feeling grateful for the scholarship, because I had to keep my brain and my hand going. I had been an editor before. Even on a really bad day when nothing else made sense, I could mechanically line-edit pages and pages of text. I did not expect this anthology to hold me together, make me cry tears of gratefulness, help me draw strength and hope, through the next few months as wave after wave of bad news kept hitting. I expected these letters to fondly reminisce about a favourite author whom some of the writers may have met, but I did not expect unrestrained conversation about politics, or avowals of continued resistance and solidarity. I expected to help create a tribute volume, something elegantly detached and intellectual that went well with the muted shades of libraries and halls of fame, but the letters in this anthology are alive, bleeding, screaming, urgent—in a way that reflects my own state of mind at these times.”

These are the things that Butler calls forth from us, the passions for justice, for resistance, for struggle, for speaking and writing and performing truth in the face of unbridled arrogance, privilege and power.

In essays and more personal narratives, writers such as Andrea Hairston, Nisi Shawl, Karen Lord, Katheen Kayembe, Rachel Swirsky, Steven Barnes and Nnedi Okorafor - to name only a few - discuss Butler’s work, and talk with passion about what Butler meant, and means, to them. In turn, their words help the reader to clarify and expand on what Butler and her work mean to us.

She was genius, and giant, and she left us such generous gifts.

Tanya Huff’s The Future Falls is the third book in her more-or-less urban fantasy series about the Gale family, whose women are strangely gifted and powerful and whose men - rare in a family of many sisters, aunties and nieces - are embodiment of the Horned God.

As The Future Falls begins, one of the Gale clan’s senior auntie, Aunt Catherine, has a cautionary vision about a large rock falling, betokening danger for the family. At roughly the same time, an astronomer reports in secret committee the results of his calculations concerning eccentricities in the path of an asteroid scheduled to make a near miss pass of the earth. The math indicates the presence if a much larger asteroid, masked by the first, coming in behind it on a timetable that will make a direct, and catastrophic hit, in 22 months.

Catherine Gale’s visions aren’t always literal, but this time, they’re exact, though of course, no one in the Gale family has any way of knowing that. At least, not until Wild talent Charlie - short for Charlotte - gets involved. While out Walking, following strands of music that draw her here and there, she meets a bouzouki player who she senses carries a deep, sad secret. An engineer by training, he’s quit everything to go touring with his wife, playing gigs and seeing the world. Charlie knows she hasn’t met Gary by chance, but she doesn’t know why.

But then, at home in Calgary, she hears a news report about a homeless man, Doomsday Dan, who’s been insisting that the sky is falling and everyone is going to die. Then Aunt Catherine calls her, with a cryptic message - that the homeless man is right. With her cousin Jack, Wild himself, and half dragon, she tracks down Dan, and discovers that he’s a powerful telepath, driven mad by the endless voices in his head - but when he repeats what he heard about the sky falling, she connects it with her meeting with Gary, and tracks him down.

Now she, and Jack, know what’s coming. The only question is, with all the powers they have between them, and the magic the Gales can summon, do they have enough to save the world?

Huff outdoes herself in this one, and that’s saying something. In the course of unfolding a very complicated plan to save the world, Huff also gives us a serious love story, and answers most of the questions about the Gales that have been simmering in my mind since book one, such as where did the Gales come from, and why are there only two families of Gales, one in Ontario and one in Alberta. It looks as though this is the last of Huff’s Gale Women books, so I’m glad those nagging questions were answered. A good end to a fine story.

I was paging idly through my collection of ebooks looking for something to read, when my eye was caught by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Falcons of Narabedla, which I had never actually read but have sometimes heard mentioned as loosely connected to the Darkover books.

Setting aside all considerations of Bradley’s quite reprehensible personal actions, which I’ve discussed here before, I’m not al that fond of her early writing at a technical level. It contained too many of what I find to be the least interesting elements of the “pulp” style - overblown writing, limited background and characterisation, and the sense of getting thrown into situations without any context or incluing, such that, if the character is confused or taken by surprise, the reader is not just equally so, but not given much information about what is happening to the character right now, from which some notions of what’s happening can be drawn.

The Falcons of Narabedla is like that. The lead character, Mike Kenscott, is a man of the mid-twentieth century, a scientist what has been somehow strangely affected by a lab accident. He disrupts energy flows, shorts out electrical devices, things like that. He goes to spend some time in the wilderness with his brother, and his consciousness is somehow transported across time to what may be a far future.

He finds himself in the body of a man named Adric, Lord of the Crimson Tower, with only the faintest and most fragmentary access to Adric’s conscious memories, although he seems to function well enough in matters if habitual action, such as dressing in unusual clothing or getting around the Tower. He tries to tell those around him - a Dreamer named Rhys, a veiled woman named Gamine, Adric’s brother Evarin - that he’s not Adric, that he doesn’t known anything about where he is, or about Adric’s life, no one gives him any really useful information and so he’s left to figure things out on his own. Among the few things he does learn is that he has a controversial relationship with a powerful and not particularly liked woman named Kameny, and that unlike the others of his class, who each have properly bound and exploited the telepathic abilities of one of a group of people known as the Dreamers, his Dreamer is unbound and free to move.

Kenscott comes to understand what’s happened to him in this passage, which I quote rather than try to paraphrase:

“Once before, for a little while, Adric and I had touched lives on—what had Gamine called it? The Time Ellipse. That day they thought the lab was struck by lightning. For eighteen hours, while I lay crushed under a laboratory beam, and later under drugs in the hospital) he and I had shared a fragment of life somehow. But the escape had not been complete. Something had driven him, or drawn him, back to his own world.

And he had tried again, or had been sent back And this time he seemed to have succeeded. Was he in my hunting cabin in the mountains, cleaning fish for supper, curiously rummaging through my electrical equipment? Viciously I hoped he'd give himself some damned good shocks on it.”

But it seems that more than Adric’s memories remain, or perhaps Kameny’s “magic” is affecting him, for he finds himself taking actions that he doesn’t understand, that he, Mike Kenscott, would never do. At times Kenscott gains ascendancy, but the Adric personality seems to be more in control, a circumstance that becomes potentially disastrous as Kenscott/Adric finds himself caught up in a rebellion of commoners and Dreamers, hoping to end the rule of the Tower dwellers. Kenscott himself is in sympathy with the aims of their leader, Narayan - the Dreamer he is incompletely bound to - but Adric seeks to use Narayan’s power to avenge himself on Kameny, who challenged his power as leader of the Rainbow Towers.

And then, somehow, Adric returns, in Kenscott’s body, and forces Kenscott back, retaking his own body - now both Adric and Kenscott are in the same time and place, in their own bodies. Can Kenscott warn Narayan in time, and be believed?

It’s a decent pulp portal fantasy, but having read it, I have no idea why it’s sometimes associated with the Darkover books. Oh, there are telepaths and towers, but those are common tropes. The only actual textual link is that the characters sometimes swear by Zandru, but that’s hardly enough to build a link on. So, now I’ve read it, and need no longer wonder about it.

In Monstrous Beauty, Marie Brennan’s collection of retellings of fairy tales, the happy endings of the classic stories of princes and princesses, queens and little girls visiting their grandmothers transmuted into horror. The title is an apt one - just as most of the fairy tales feature women so beautiful they inspire acts of the greatest cruelty and courage, these retellings give us monsters disguised in beauty, and the cruelest of fates.

It’s a slim volume, seven short stories - one of them very short indeed - and where the source materials, at least in the sanitised versions we now read to children, are about things like the power of love to conquer all, these are more about the evil that lies beneath the glamour. These are worlds where darkness waits for the bold, where mysterious women alone in the wilderness are best ignored, where love cannot conquer death. Brennan is scholar of folklore, and she knows that many of the stories we tell our children in picture books and animated films have much darker roots. In these stories, she reaches for the depths underneath the pretty stories, and gives them to is, unvarnished and untamed.

Cassandra Khaw is an author I’ve only recently come to appreciate. I’ve read a few short stories, and one novella - A Song for Quiet, which rocked me deeply. The pieces I’d read up to this point have been dark fantasy and horror, which she does very well, so well that I thought I’d acquaint myself with her other work.

Hammers on Bone, another novella, and I believe the first one featuring John Persons, who also appeared in A Song for Quiet, is a horror story with a difference. It draws on parts of the Lovecraft mythos for its characters and situations, but the real horrors are all too human - domestic and child abuse. Persons is an interesting character, definitely in the anti-hero mode. A private detective by trade, and a Yith by nature - one of the time travelling, body snatching entities found originally in Lovecraft’s stories, he has otherworldly powers, but also a detached, inhuman perspective that is partly influenced to occasional human responses by the faint presence of the human whose body he wears. Being who and what he is, his cases tend to have something of the supernatural and monstrous about them, and he does not necessarily handle these the way a human PI would. Khaw does an excellent jib if capturing the alienness of Persons, and the desperate humanity of those he deals with. With two Persons stories written, I rather hope there Khaw intends there to be more.

Bearly a Lady, on the other hand, is supernatural chick lit comedy. Zelda Joshua Andreas McCartney is a werebear, which is hard on all sorts of things, like underwear and dating. Her best friend and roommate Zora is a vampire. And she has, thanks to Zora’s pushing, a hot date with a very sexy werewolf she’s been lusting after for a very long time. And she’s still got a bit of a crush on co-worker Janine. Then her employer assigns her to act as a bodyguard to her visiting nephew, an arrogant, entitled fae lordling with full-tilt glamour. It’s Bridget Jones for the fantasy-reading woman, and it is as different from Khaw’ dark fantasy as it can be and still occupy the same broadly-defined genre.

There’s a lot of good stuff in here about female friendship, and some pointedly cautionary advice for the modern female wereperson who wants to have a bit of romance in her life. It’s a delightful change fir this author, who says in her afterward, and with perfect truth, “Because there’s a place and time for darkness and grim ruminations, and there’s a place and time for bisexual werebears with killer wardrobes and a soft spot for pastries.”

And then there’s the Rupert Wong stories: Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef and Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth, two novellas which I read packaged in omnibus format and titled Food of the Gods. I’m not entirely sure how to categorise these stories. Not exactly horror, though certainly full of horrific things. Not humorous, really, although the main character does use humour to deal with the improbabilities in his life. Definitely supernatural, full of gods, ghosts, ghouls and monsters from multiple cultural traditions. But whatever you decide it is, it’s certainly interesting.

Rupert Wong is a self-described “superstar chef to the ghouls and liaison for the damned of Kuala Lumpur.” His specialty is preparing human flesh and blood for the consumption of the various undead. He employs a large number of kwee kia, ghouls created from unborn fetuses, and despite the blood bind between them - he feeds them ritually from his own wrist - but he’s the kind of guy who believes in educating the exploited workers, and now they’re threatening to unionise. But that’s hardly the worst if his problems.

He’s a hard-working chef with a commitment to satisfying his employer, and not just because his employer is a powerful ghoul who’s likely to kill and eat him if he doesn’t. He’s a devoted family man, though both his wife Minah and their son are undead themselves. A sad story - Minah was pregnant when her first husband murdered her, and so when she awoke from the dead to take vengeance, her unborn child did as well. Rupert feeds both of them, too. And he has a lot of other responsibilities, too.

Rupert, you see, has a past. A very bad past. And when he finally realised that his bad past was going to seriously affect his afterlife, he made an arrangement with the gods to start working off his time in the Courts of Hell early. As he explains: “So now I’m working off my karmic debt through community management. I mediate arguments. I listen to complaints. I exorcise stubborn ghouls. I push pencils on hell paper and do the books every Hungry Ghost Festival.”

In the first of these tales, Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef, it’s this reputation that brings the Dragon King to him, with a demand that he investigate the reasons why the Erinys killed his youngest child. It’s not a request he can refuse. He wants to, of course, but the Dragon King isn’t just threatening to kill him if he declines - or takes the job and fails. The dragon holds a trump card. He can procure a reincarnation for Minah, a chance to work out her own karmic debt for killing her ex-husband. And Rupert would do anything for Minah. But as he begins his search for the Erinys, complications compound and he repeatedly runs afoul of various persons living, dead and divine, it begins to look as though there is no possible solution that doesn’t end in death, or worse.

Rupert does find a way through the maze of conflicting loyalties and demands, surviving to return in Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth. Due to various repercussions from his mission for the Dragon King, Rupert is now persona non grata among certain Asian pantheons, and his patron loans him to the Greek gods - currently based in London - to get him out of Kuala Lumpur. With his wife Minah reincarnated, and thus lost to him, there’s not much to keep him there anyway.

Being in London as the chef of the Greek gods is not a pleasant experience. No one seems to want to tell him what’s going on - why, for instance, a band of men in suits with guns suddenly appear on his first day in Demeter’s soup kitchen and gun down most of the homeless people eating there. As best as he can figure, he’s caught in a war between the old pantheons and the new gods created from human needs. And he has no idea what are the rules of engagement, or what role he’s supposed to play.

These stories are not for the squeamish. Rupert is, in his own way, a kind of a hero, but he does cook people for a living. And the gods and ghouls of the new and old pantheons around him are generally rather bloody and violent beings. But there’s a certain pleasure in watching Rupert as he survives the machinations of the endlessly powerful and manages to keep body and soul more or less intact.

Daniel José Older’s YA fantasy Shadowshaper is a rich fantasy drawing on contemporary urban mythologies commingled with older traditions with Hispanic and African roots. The protagonist, Sierra, is a mixed race young woman whose family came to New York from Puerto Rico. She’s a talented street artist who makes fantastic, monumental murals on abandoned buildings. And perhaps, she is something more.

Sierra helps her family care for her grandfather Lázaro, who is paralysed and not entirely coherent following a severe stroke, but who keeps trying to communicate a message to her, about a person called Lucera, about shadowshapers, and about the importance of a mural she’s working on. At his insistence, she recruits another street artist, a Haitian boy named Robbie, to help her complete her mural. It turns out he’s a shadowshaper himself, but is reluctant to talk about it.

What he does tell her, and what she manages to glean from remarks by some of her abuelo’s old friends - and in one case, the notes of one old friend gone missing who was an anthropologist studying urban mythology and magic systems - is that something is going wrong, some evil force is possessing the dead body of one of her abuelo’s friends, and Lucera, a spirit woman, may be the key if she can be found.

Sierra slowly learns that shadowshapers are people gifted with the ability to make alliances with spirits, to create shapes that spirits can inhabit. Most shadowshapers draw forms for the spirits they work with, but some, like her abuelo, could tell stories so vividly that the shadows, or spirits, could manifest in his words. For real shadowshapers, this is a cooperative thing, they invite the shadows to come into their work, and the shadows, in return, agree to help the shadowshaper. But there are shadowshapers who are corrupted by power, and these can force the spirits into doing their bidding, turn them into corrupted haints, used them to animate the dead. And it seems that one such corrupted shadowshaper is waging war against Sierra, her abuelo, and his friends.

As Sierra learns more about her family and her abilities, the dangers grow stronger, but her friends band around her for the final showdown between the evil that seeks to destroy her family and the other remaining shadowshapers, and take the gifts of shadowshaping for itself.

Sierra is a wonderfully realised character. Strong, talented, she is at once an ordinary teenaged girl dealing with body image and first boyfriend, and the inheritor of a powerful mystical tradition. She’s a warrior on many levels - she fights for her family’s mystical heritage, but she also fights as best she can against the day-to-day issues she faces as a yiung woman of mixed race - street harassment, casual racism, colourism among her own relatives, some of whom disapprove of her “nappy hair” and hanging out with a boy darker skinned than she is. Sierra’s worlds are both fantastic, and very real, and that’s a big part of what makes her such a pleasure to read about. Representation matters, and this is representation at its best.

Shadowhouse Fall, the sequel to Shadowshaper, takes place several months after the first book. Sierra, as the new Lucera, or central focus of the spiritual powers that allow her and others like her to work with the spirits, is rebuilding the shadowshaper community with a new generation of practitioners, including her own mother, finally reconciled to their family legacy.

Sierra is waiting for trouble. Back when she was first discovering her abilities and tracking down Wicks, the corrupt power-seeker who was responsible for the deaths of so many of her grandfather’s shadowshapers friends, she crossed paths with powers called the Sorrows, who were using Wicks for their own purposes, and wanted to use her, too.

Now the Sorrows have sent her a message, through one of her schoolmates, a white girl named Mina, who tries to give her a card that looks like a Tarot card, but not one from any deck she’s every heard of. All Mina can tell her is that something known as The Deck is now “in play” and that the Sorrows are trying to connect the cards of the deck with the people each card represents. And that it means trouble for those of the Shadowhouse. While she doesn’t know much about what it means, or how to use it, she does know that whoever holds the deck will have an advantage in whatever is coming. And right now, that advantage is hers - if she can figure out how to use it before the Sorrows and their allies destroy her house and her people.

In addition to the things like plot, characters, worldbuilding, use of language, description, dialogue, and all those other things that can make or break a book, and which are all good in these two books, what is wonderful about Shadowshaper and Shadowhouse Fall is the way that Older works real life issues into his created world. This is a universe that acknowledges things like police brutality, racism, colourism ablism, sexism, and shows the little everyday things that wear away at anyone who is marginalised. Dealing with the metal detectors every day at school. Learning your friend is dealing with a mental health issue and trying not to say the stupid ableist things. Coping with your aunt’s colourism. Not trusting a white teacher to get it right when they teach about slavery. Wolfwhistles and catcalls on the street when all you want is to be left to your own business in peace. This is more than a fantasy about young people gaining their powers and coming of age. It’s also a realistic story about living in an unjust world and coping with the daily assaults and microagressions. That’s a huge part of what makes these books not just good, but special.

I do not often read picture books for children. Largely because it’s been a very long time since I had very young children in my life on the sort of basis where I selected and read picture books to them, and a much, much longer time since I was reding picture books for myself. So I don’t know much about picture books these days and what’s done and not done in them. I think the last picture book I remember reading for my own interest was Where the Wild Things Are, because there was a time when everyone was talking about it. My own tastes in picture books were influenced by Madeleine, and Babar, and Peter Rabbit.

But when I heard the story of how A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo came to be written, I had to read it.

Because gay bunnies are delightful, and messages of accepting and valuing difference are important, and there’s a decent civics lesson in there too.

I don’t know what children will think about it, but I was crying at the end, it made me so very happy.

Just in case you don’t know the story, it goes something like this. US Vice President Mike Pence has a bunny named Marlon Bundo. And his daughter has written a book about Marlon Bundo, called Marlon Bundo’s Day in the Life of the Vice President. Now there’s nothing wrong with the book itself, as far as I know. What has annoyed some people is that the Pences are promoting it through, among other places, the notoriously queerphobic Focus on the Family organisation. And as far as I’m concerned, once you politicise your book by linking it to a known hate group, you make it fair game for satire.

But because satirist John Oliver has class, he decided not to troll the book directly. Instead, he arranged for the creation and publication of a legitimate children’s book, written by Jill Twiss and illustrated by E. G. Keller, that’s a message of inclusion and acceptance. In this book, Marlon Bundo, the Vice President’s bunny, is lonely, until he meets a floppy-eared bunny named Wesley, and they enjoy hopping around the garden together so much, they decide to get married and hop together for the rest of their lives. But when they tell their friends about how happy they are together, along comes the Stink Bug, who seems to be in charge, and he tells them all that boy bunnies can not marry boy bunnies. And that being different is wrong. The animals decide to reject this message, and hold a vote to remove the Stink Bug from power. And Marlon Bundo and Wesley get married and hop together forever more.

It’s important to note that there are no cheap shots at Pence here. The Stink Bug is a homophobic autocrat, but in the story, Marlon Bundo talks about his family, his Mom, his Grandma and Grampa, who is Mike Pence. The book says nothing about the Pence family beyond that. Mike Pence is not identified as the Stink Bug (although there may be some ways in which the drawing is a caricature of the VP). The Stink Bug is symbolic of anyone who tries to marginalise and oppress those who are different.

And the illustrations are lovely. There’s a few particularly charming images of Marlon and Wesley doing hoppy bunny things together, and later warming themselves in front of a fireplace, gazing into each other’s eyes. Both text and pictures do a marvelous job of portraying love in a way that is absolutely accurate, and appropriate for children.

And the proceeds from the book are being donated to the Trevor Project, a suicide hotline for young LGBTQ people, and the AIDS charity AIDS United. So you really can’t go wrong with this book. And if you have small kids, they might like it. If they do, let me know.

Whose Land Is It Anyway? A Manual for Decolonization, edited by Peter McFarlane and Nicole Schabus, is exactly what the title says. A collection of essays on the mechanisms of colonisation, resistance, land claims, and true reconciliation by noted Indigenous thinkers and activists including Glen Coulthard, Taiaiake Alfred, Arthur Manuel, Pamela Palmeter, Bev Sellars and others, this volume was produced by The Federation of Post Secondary Educators of BC and is available for download at http://fpse.ca/sites/default/files/news_files/Decolonization%20Handbook.pdf

It’s an important collection of voices that need to be widely heard and understood, because these issues speak to the essence and survival of Canada as a nation. We settlers live on stolen land.Indigenous people’s land, taken through conquest and deceit and the arrogance of such legal fictions as the Doctrine of Discovery. If we are to work through this history that poisons our relationships with Indigenous people, with the land, with more recent arrivals on these lands, with our notions of what Canada ought to be, then the first thing we need to do is decolonise our relationships, and to remake the theft into a true partnership.

This book provides insights into what has gone before, and what must come after, in order to make this a reality. It’s not easy for settler peoples to acknowledge that what was done, was wrong. But that’s the first step. The essays collected here show first how it was done, and how government policy continues to support colonisation, land theft, and genocide under the goal of extinction of land title and special status, and second, how Indigenous peoples are resisting these goals.

These essays speak to everyone living within the nation called Canada. Much of the work is by Indigenous people, addressing Indigenous people. But the teachings are important for those of us from settler backgrounds, and those who have come as immigrants to the Canada built on colonialism. We all need to understand where we have come from, in order to see where we can go to, as Indigenous people and allies, as partners in defending the land and water, in a truly postcolonial world.

Africa. For people of European heritage, it is a word that calls up many images. It’s the Dark Continent, the home of primitive and violent tribes, a lace where civilisation has come lately and reluctantly, a place if hunger and disease , of poverty and violence, of natural disasters. On our television and computer screens, we see nothing but ethnic and religious warfare, squalor and corruption, starving children and AIDS victims.

For centuries, Africa has been mythologised, exploited, altered and interfered with. It has had its very truth eroded under the weight of erasures, self-serving constructions of inferiority and otherness and outright lies, suffered the effects of Europe’s grimy, grasping, violent fingers on its peoples and its histories, its lands and waters and everything that is on or in them.

I don’t know much about Africa. I know something about its great kingdoms and trade empires which flourished while Europeans were still grunting in huts. I know a little more about how those Europeans and their special gifts for making weapons and telling lies, colonised these ancient civilisations, stole the riches of their lands, the labour of their peoples, and the memories of their past. I know very little about modern Africa, about the ways in which a history of coloialism and exploitation has left it reeling from centuries of violence, its peoples still suffering from the generations of trauma, with those cold and greedy white fingers still trying to strangle any attempts on the part of those peoples to reinvent themselves, the legacy of colonislism still alive and looming over an entire continent.

It is in an attempt to understand a little more of these things that I turn to Chinua Achebe’s personal narrative, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.

The Biafran War, also known as the Nigerian Civil War, happened in my lifetime, but I did not know much about it at the time. Since then, I’d learned a little more. And since - though you would hardly know it from the world media - there is conflict again in what once, briefly, was Biafra, it seemed a good time to learn more about the issues that have resulted in so much pain and death in this one part of Africa.

Achibe is a master of context. He situates Nigeria in the context of colonial history, himself in the context of his birthplace, heritage and time, his art in the context of both Igbo artistic traditions and the renaissance of African literature in order to tell the story of Nigeria, and Biafra, as he experienced it, and wrote about it.

The first part of the narrative focuses on Achebe’s youth, his education, and his early career in broadcasting, up to hs publication of one of the great classics of African literature, Things Fall Apart. He speaks with appreciation of the quality of education available to him and the other young men and women of his generation, at both Christian mission schools and secondary schools established by the government, which was then under British control. At the same time, he reflects on the opportunities he had to learn about the traditional culture and religion of his people, the Igbo. He presents his sense of self and identity as coming from a crossroads, shaped by both the European, Christian tradition of the British missionaries and government officials, and by the Igbo traditions of his people’s past. Positioning his personal history within the history of his generation, he says:

“It has often been said that my generation was a very lucky one. And I agree. My luck was actually quite extraordinary. And it began quite early. The pace of change in Nigeria from the 1940s was incredible. I am not just talking about the rate of development, with villages transforming into towns, or the coming of modern comforts, such as electricity or running water or modes of transportation, but more of a sense that we were standing figuratively and literally at the dawn of a new era.

My generation was summoned, as it were, to bear witness to two remarkable transitions—the first the aforementioned impressive economic, social, and political transformation of Nigeria into a midrange country, at least by third world standards. But, more profoundly, barely two decades later we were thrust into the throes of perhaps Nigeria’s greatest twentieth-century moment—our elevation from a colonized country to an independent nation.”

Achebe begins his historical account in pre-independence Nigeria, under the colonial administration of the British Empire. While the transition occurred relatively smoothly, as British administrators left their positions to return home and educated Nigerians took their place, the new country was born in corruption, the first elections rigged to deliver a victory to a previously agreed-on candidate, chosen by the powerful Northern People’s Congress party. Achebe suggests that, given its birth in corruption, it was inevitable that corruption remained a problem for the newly independent country:

“Within six years of this tragic colonial manipulation Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption and misrule. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth. Elections were blatantly rigged. The subsequent national census was outrageously stage-managed; judges and magistrates were manipulated by the politicians in power. The politicians themselves were pawns of foreign business interests.

The social malaise in Nigerian society was political corruption. The structure of the country was such that there was an inbuilt power struggle among the ethnic groups, and of course those who were in power wanted to stay in power. The easiest and simplest way to retain it, even in a limited area, was to appeal to tribal sentiments, so they were egregiously exploited in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Nigeria was at particular risk of conflict between peoples: the country was formed from a colonial administration district that brought together into one region the homelands of multiple African nations, some of whom had been traditional rivals. In addition to the three main groups - Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo - there were a number of smaller ethnic communities - Ijaw, Kanuri, Ibibio, Tiv, Itsekiri, Isang, Urhobo, Anang, and Efik - many of them ancient nation-states in their own right.

Achebe, like most Nigerians living in what once, briefly, was Biafra, is Igbo. His analysis of why the Igbo are resented by other Nigerians may be biased, I cannot tell. But he does point out that members of the educated, professional classes in Nigeria of the 1960s were disproportionately Igbo. This resentment, he argues, was at the root of a wave of anti-Igbo violence which followed on the January 1966 military coup in which the prime minister and a number of senior government officiated were killed. The instigators of this coup were soon deposed by the leader of another faction within the military, who in turn was assassinated by a faction of officers from Northern Nigeria. Some of those involved in the first two actions were Igbo. Achebe describes the violence:

“Looking back, the naively idealistic coup of January 15, 1966, proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted with plausibility as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the East to take control of Nigeria from the Hausa/Fulani North. Six months later, I watched horrified as Northern officers carried out a revenge coup in which they killed Igbo officers and men in large numbers. If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a very tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the Northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the North and unleashed waves of brutal massacres that Colin Legum of The Observer (UK) was the first to describe as a pogrom. Thirty thousand civilian men, women, and children were slaughtered, hundreds of thousands were wounded, maimed, and violated, their homes and property looted and burned—and no one asked any questions.”

Achebe argues that it was this large scale massacre of ethnic Igbo people, following on the political instability resulting from the series of military coups, that made the Biafran war inevitable. His narrative of the war - 30 months of fighting from the declaration of Biafra as an independent state to the flight of Biafran national leader Ojukwu and the surrender of the remaining officials of the Biafran military and state - is both historical and personal. He talks about the battles, the conditions, the attempts to gain international aid and support, but he also talks about how the war affected his own family as they fled from one part of the country to another, trying to avoid the Nigerian army, struggling to survive. He talks about the blockade of humanitarian aid to the civilian population, the massive death toll among the children of Biafra due to malnutrition and starvation. He examines the question of whether the actions of federalist Nigeria during the war constituted an attempt at genocide.

And he talks frankly about the aftermath of the war, not just on the Eastern region that was Biafra, but on the political and economic development of reunified Nigeria. His assessment of Nigerian politics is not a positive one:

“That road to a remedy of Nigeria’s political problems will not come easily. The key, as I see it, lies in the manner in which the leadership of the country is selected. When I refer to leadership I am really talking about leaders at every level of government and sphere of society, from the local government council and governors right up to the presidency. What I am calling for is for Nigeria to develop a version of campaign election and campaign finance reform, so that the country can transform its political system from the grassroots level right through to the national party structures at the federal level.

Nigerians will have to find a way to do away with the present system of godfatherism—an archaic, corrupt practice in which individuals with lots of money and time to spare (many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs) sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the desired political position, bribing, threatening, and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process. We will have to make sure that the electoral body overseeing elections is run by widely respected and competent officials chosen by a nonpartisan group free of governmental influence or interference. Finally, we have to find a way to open up the political process to every Nigerian citizen. Today we have a system where only those individuals with the means of capital and who can both pay the exorbitant application fee and fund a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury and the nation blind are the ones able to run for the presidency!

The question of choice in selecting a leader in Nigeria is often an academic exercise, due to the election rigging, violence, and intimidation of the general public, particularly by those in power, but also by those with the means—the rich and influential. There is also the unpleasant factor of the violence associated with partisan politics that is often designed to keep balanced, well-educated, fair-minded Nigerians away. So it can be said that the masses—the followership we are concerned about—don’t really have a choice of leadership, because there’s not a true democratic process.”

Achebe sees some hope for Nigeria, in its youth, who he believes are tired of the corruption and anarchy around them. But he does not see change coming quickly or easily. This book is not just a memoir of Biafra, it is a lament for a country that could be great, but has not risen to the challenge of modern statehood.

Lara Elena Donelly’s Amberlough is a secondary world spy novel, a mashup of cold war intelligence narratives and Weimar Republic society, sources which Donelly explicitly acknowledged by taking chapter epigrams from John Le Carré novels and the musical Cabaret. There’s no other fantasy or science fictional elements, just an imaginary world with pre-WWII technology and a complicated political history, not unlike Europe of our own timeline and space.

The novel’s main character, Cyril DePaul, is an agent in the Amberlough intelligence service. He’s been out of the field for a year, following a traumatic mission which resulted in serious injury; his nerves are still shot, but a mission has come up that he’s uniquely suited to.

Amberlough is one of four loosely federated states that make up the nation of Gedda. Up until recently, this has suited everyone fairly well. However, a new political power, the One State Party (colloquially referred to as the Ospies) is on the rise and threatens to take power in the upcoming elections in the state of Farborough. The OSP is quite clearly a fascist-trending political movement, and with Amberlough being a place of rather profound liberal tendencies (sexual freedom, some degree of racial integration, along with a fair amount of smuggling and corruption, all politely conducted with an eye to tradition and balance), the powers that be in Amberlough are concerned. They’ve found hints that the OSP is planning to interfere with the election, and DePaul’s mission is to pose as a wealthy potential moneyman while he tries to uncover exactly what their plans are.

The mission goes wrong, and DePaul finds himself in a deadly game, forced to become a double agent for the OSP. Survival also means giving up the man he loves, Aristide - a cabaret drag queen and underground smuggler and drug dealer, at least until he can find some way to get out of the trap he’s caught in, and take Aristide with him.

But nothing works out as hoped. Unable to be open with each other, DePaul and Aristide end up working at cross purposes, tangling even more of their respective colleagues and contacts in the web of deceptions, the most vulnerable of whom is Cordelia, a burlesque artist and sometime drug runner, who Aristide persuades to act as DePaul’s beard. And through it all, the OSP moves inexorably toward power in Amberlough.

It’s a good thing this is the first book in a trilogy, because if the story were over at the end of this volume, I would be a very unhappy person. As it stands, I’m a very impatient person, waiting for volume two.

Ronald Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore is a history of Asian-Americans. I wish I could find something similar that deals with the history of Asian communities in Canada, because one thing I do know is that while some of the patterns of immigration and exclusion are the same - from the early use of East Asians as a cheap, expendable labour force, to the incarceration of Japanese immigrants in interment camps, and much that happened in-between - the shared Commonwealth membership of Canada and some Asian nations made for different immigration patterns, and the overall proportion of people of Asian background in the general population is greater in Canada than in the US (around 12 percent, compared to around six percent).

But there are many books I want to read about Canada that haven't been written, or if they have been, aren't accessible. Back to Ronald Takaki's study of Asian-Americans.

Takaki begins by noting that Asian-Americans have been left out of the popular concept of what it means to be American. For many people, "American" means white; it may be accompanied by "African-American", but rarely does it encompass the notion of "Asian-American." Nor does the popular immigration narrative of Asians in American match that of the European immigrant - the first sight of Lady Liberty, the arrival at Ellis Island. As Takaki stresses, Asian Americans are strangers from a different shore - the countries of the Pacific Rim and South Asia - but they also arrived at a different shore - some in Hawaii, some the West coast. And unlike many European arrivals who assimilated, often within a generation, Asian Americans remain in some ways strangers in the land they have been born in.

Takaki's project is a large and complicated one - looking at the immigration of so many diverse groups - Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, and others - across American history. But even among the differences, some threads connect the experiences of most groups.

The early history of Asian immigrants in Hawaii and the Western states is one of being seen as the answer to a growing demand for cheap labour. Not only could Asian workers be employed in agricultural and other areas where many whites would not work, they could be paid far less than white labourers. White farm owners and other large-scale employers used Asian immigrants to discourage union organising among white workers, and hired Asian workers (along with Mexican and Puerto Rican workers) from different nations to discourage solidarity: "...the California Department of Industrial Relations reported that growers preferred to employ 'a mixture of laborers of various races, speaking diverse languages, and not accustomed to mingling with each other. The practice [was] intended to avoid labor trouble which might result from having a homogeneous group of laborers of the same race or nationality. Laborers speaking different languages [were] not as likely to arrive at a mutual understanding which would lead to strikes.' "

White landowners often used the ethnic diversity of the agricultural labour force to manipulate workers. They would pit Japanese crews against Korean or Chinese crews, playing on traditional animosities to encourage competition in worker output. They would hire Mexican workers as strikebreakers when Filipino workers tried to negotiate better pay.

Takaki continues: "...coming from 'a different shore,' Asian immigrants constituted a unique laboring army of 'strangers,' to use Georg Simmel’s term: of alien origin, they were brought here to serve as an 'internal colony' - nonwhites allowed to enter as 'cheap' migratory laborers and members of a racially subordinated group, not future citizens of American society."

Another common thread that surfaced with almost every new wave of immigration from Asia was the issue of interracial relationships. Immigration laws often separated families or favoured single men as immigrants. In some cases, the ratios of men to women immigrating was as high as ten to one. Men alone, without their wives or without any chance if finding wives from their own backgrounds, frequented brothels and sex workers. And some formed long-term relationships with white women, even though in many states, interracial marriages were against the law. Fear of Asian men as sexual predators surfaced at regular intervals; like blacks in America, Asian immigrants were often portrayed as dangerous to the safety of white women and the purity of the national bloodlines.

Changing immigration laws over time made it sometimes possible for entire families to come to America, at other times, only men were allowed, specifically as labourers. Sometimes they were able to gain citizenship and bring wives and children to join them, at other times the path to citizenship was difficult, and even citizens could not sponsor non-citizens. In some cases, Asian immigrants who had at ine time been able to acquire citizenship, such as immigrants from Indus, had their citizenship taken away when exclusion laws were extended to include them. The laws changed based on the economic needs and racial prejudices of white America, and patterns of immigration among Asians of different nationalities changed with the laws.

The early stories of different waves of Asian immigrants are fairly similar - most came to America to find economic success, hoping to either return home as wealthy men, or to bring their families to join them in a land of prosperity. While some did achieve one of these goals, for many, the dream was never realised. They faced discrimination, back-breaking work for low wages. They were seen as an expendable labour force, but not as prospective citizens. They build the railways, planted and harvested the food, worked in service industries across the country, but were never accepted as ‘real Americans.’ And then things changed with the involvement of the US in WWII, which had very different meanings and consequences for different groups of Asian Americans.

For Filipinos in America, the war in the Pacific was a direct threat to the families they had left behind. Many enlisted and fought with white soldiers against Imperial Japan, and many hoped that fighting for American interests would result in them being seen, finally, as Americans.

For Koreans, the war rekindled hope for Korean independence in the aftermath of a possible destruction of Imperial Japanese military power. Although the US government viewed Koreans as Japanese subjects and classed them as “enemy aliens,” many became involved in the war effort as best they could, joining the National Guard and serving as translators.

Indian and Chinese immigrants benefitted from wartime alliances. Allied strategy called for an accommodation with India as a potential block against Imperial Japan’s plans in southeast Asia, while China allied with the US and declared war on Japan. Chinese communities in America contributed extensively to the war effort and enlistment was high among Chinese men. By the end of the war, the Exclusion Act had been repealed, opening doors for immigrants from both countries.

Japanese Americans living in the western states were confined in internment camps as potential enemy combatants, their property confiscated. In Hawaii, where Japanese had been integrated into the mainstream community, and where large proportions of key tradespeople necessary to the war effort were Japanese, wide-scale internment did not take place. Despite the internments, 33,000 Japanese Americans served in the US military during the war.

In the postwar era, many veterans in all these groups used their status to become citizens and to finally bring their families to the United States. Despite the lowering of immigration bans against Chinese, Indian and Filipino immigrants, quotas were set at very low levels which remained until the 1960s, when race-based immigration policies were (technically) ended and all Asian nations assigned quotas in line with those for European countries. This resulted in yet more shifts in the patterns of immigration, and changes in the class and educational levels of those immigrants, although it did not necessarily make it easier for Asian immigrants to find jobs and social acceptance once they arrived. While many immigrants from Asian countries now arrive in the US with advanced degrees, business capital, or both, others are refugees from wars, poverty and environmental disasters and arrive with almost nothing.

In telling the story of Asians coming to, and living and working in, America, Takaki alternates between a remote and academic historical narrative of facts and events and legislation, and a more #ownvoice narrative that relies heavily on letters, journals, interviews, songs and poems to convey the experiences from the perspectives of the immigrants themselves, which he explores and expands on. In these sections, he closes the distance even further by including, where appropriate, details from the experiences of his own family.

In this well researched and well organised study, Takaki covers much ground, from the experiences of early Chinese laborers to refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the post Vietnam war era. Written in 1989 and revised in 1998, the more recent stories of Asian peoples in America are missing, but as a historical survey, it is an excellent resource for anyone seeking to understand issues of diversity in the US. Takaki concludes his work with this summation:

“...throughout history, Asian Americans have been transforming America and also finding themselves being transformed by America. Since the arrival of the first Chinese during the 1849 gold rush, the interaction between Asian Americans and the larger society has been dynamic and dialectical. Exploited as agricultural and industrial workers, they fought for justice through labor unions and strikes. Victims of the “white”-only provision of 1790 Naturalization Law, they organized campaigns that culminated in its nullification in 1952 — a victory that made political membership more inclusive and the Statue of Liberty a more democratic symbol. Forced into segregated Chinatowns and internment camps, Asian Americans joined the U.S. military during World War II and fought as “one people” against fascism abroad and for equality at home. Excluded by racist immigration laws like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1924 National Origins Act, they helped end this discrimination with the 1965 Immigration Act. Denied their cultures in a Eurocentric society, Asian Americans sought to preserve their heritages by creating communities like Chinatowns as well as Nihonmachis (Japantowns), organizing festivals, and founding language schools as well as churches and temples. Rendered invisible in mainstream history textbooks and courses, they established their own historical societies and museums and also organized exhibits for the Smithsonian Institution. And through a student activism that emerged in the sixties and resurged in the nineties, they innovated new curriculums in Asian-American studies at universities across America — from Berkeley and UCLA to Minnesota and Michigan to Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton.

These struggles of Asian Americans have been a continuous rebellion against the exclusive constructions of “we, the people” and a constant resolve to help make this “a more perfect union,” an ethnically diverse yet united society. The recovering and sharing of their stories can help all Americans understand why these immigrants who went east to America should have been viewed and treated not as “strangers,” but as Americans “from a different shore.” The history of Asian Americans offers all of us an opportunity to carry into the coming century a larger memory of America’s past.”

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My life in books

Books in my life

Recent Entries

Samuel Delany: Shorter Views

Anthology: Sisters of the Revolution

Martin Delany: Blake, or the Huts of America

Frances Hardinge: A Skinful of Shadows

Dorothy Roberts: Killing the Black Body

Mur Lafferty: Six Wakes

N. K. Jemisin: Dreamblood Duology

Peter Tremayne: Absolution by Murder

Hugo Finalists: Short Fiction

Collection: Luminescent Threads

Tanya Huff: The Future Falls

Marion Zimmer Bradley: Falcons of Narabedla

Marie Brennan: Monstrous Beauty

Cassandra Khaw: Assorted Novellas

Daniel José Older: Shadowshaper and Shadowhouse Fall

Jill Twiss: A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo

Essays: Whose Land Is It Anyway? A Manual for Decolonization

Chinua Achebe: There Was a Country

Lara Elena Donelly: Amberlough

Ronald Takaki: Strangers from a Different Shore