My life in books

In Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada, his 1997 collection of essays focussing on aspects of Black culture in Canada, Rinaldo Wincott, African-Canadian writer and academic, suggests that his readers “read the essays as an attempt to articulate some grammars for thinking Canadian blackness.”

He goes on to expand on what he means by “writing blackness”:

“Writing blackness after the civil-rights era, second wave feminism, black cultural nationalism, gay and lesbian liberation, the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill spectacle, the Rodney King beating and L.A. riots, the Yonge Street Riots, and the O.J. Simpson trials, is difficult work.Yet, writing blackness remains important work. Black postmodernity insists upon being chronicled as it makes fun of and spoofs the very notion of writing blackness. A certain kind of upheaval of blacknesses exists which makes apparent the senselessness of writing blackness even as we are compelled and forced to write it.

“In a Canadian context, writing blackness is a scary scenario: we are an absented presence always under erasure. Located between the U.S. and the Caribbean, Canadian blackness is a bubbling brew of desires for elsewhere, disappointments in the nation and the pleasures of exile— even for those who have resided here for many generations. The project of articulating Canadian blackness is difficult not because of the small number of us trying to take the tentative steps towards writing it, but rather because of the ways in which so many of us are nearly always pre-occupied with elsewhere and seldom with here. It seems then that a tempered arrogance might be a necessary element of any grammar that is used to construct a language for writing blackness in Canada. A shift in gaze can be an important moment.

“The writing of blackness in Canada, then, might begin with a belief that something important happens here. If we accept this, finally, then critics can move beyond mere celebration into the sustaining work that critique is. A belief that something important happens here would mean that celebration could become the site for investigating ourselves in critical ways. We can begin to refuse the seductions of firstness and engage in critique, dialogue and debate, which are always much more sustaining than celebrations of originality.”

Thus, the act of discussing and critiquing black literature, music, film, art, becomes a declarative and profoundly political act - it announces that Black Canadian culture and art exist, that they are situated here, in and among other Canadian cultures, and that they are important, worth not just noting, but debating, being taken seriously. In writing these essays which deal with themes, aspects and artefacts of Black Canadian culture and history, Wincott asserts their value and importance and announces the necessity of acknowledging that these subjects are every bit as central to the Canadian cultural identity as the subjects written about by white critics. It is a revolutionary declaration.

The essays that follow cover a diverse range of subjects, from the complexity of Black Canadian culture in relation to African-American culture within the context of the Black diaspora, to the poetry of M. Nourbese Philips and Dione Brand to the films of Clement Virgo and Stephen Williams. With his essays, Wincott asserts the centrality of exploring blackness in the works of black Canadians, and the importance of this to Canadian culture as a whole. Black art is a part of Canadian art, and discussions of messages about blackness must be recognised as a legitimate topic in Canadian cultural criticism.

And the great Heinlein reread continues. This post finishes off the primary (first reprint) collections of Heinlein’s shorter fiction that have been in print recently enough for me to acquire them. I’m not bothering with secondary collections, or modern omnibuses, and there’s one collection, Off the Main Sequence, which contains some stories not collected anywhere else, which I have been unable to acquire


Rereading the collection of Heinlein stories containing the novella “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” which has been published both under the title of that novella, and as 6 X H, served double duty, as part if this reread project, and as part of my reading for the 1943 Retro Hugo nominations.

The novella is quite a neat, if occasionally terrifying, piece of prose. I enjoyed the combination of mystery and horror, the sense of discovering a secret, occult history of the world, the image of the world as art, compete with Critics who assess its virtues - though given their ability to decide on changes to the work, perhaps they are better viewed as editors (either way, labelling Jonathan Hoag’s profession as an unpleasant one is a delightful writerly in-joke). As usual, Heinlein’s gift for character and dialogue is strong, and his ability to pull off a complex and baffling plot yields considerable entertainment.

Heinein could write stories that make you cry as easily as he could change his shoes. The Man Who Travelled in Elephants is a n unsurpassed love story. Not just the story of Johnny, who travelled in elephants and his beloved Martha, lost and then found, but the story of an America that was passing, an America of spectacle and circus and county fairs and amusement parks. The small, intimate details of Johnny and Martha’s life together as they travelled the country, first fir work, later for their own joy, are delightful, bittersweet, familiar to any family that creates its own secret shared mythology. The growing anticipation of the reader once the truth of the tale becomes clear and you know that somewhere in the vast carnival crowd, Martha is waiting for her Johnny, that’s what starts the tears, slowly brimming, finally flowing at the end. It’s a beautiful love story.

—All You Zombies— is a tale that, oddly enough, treats intersex/transgender realities very sympathetically but can’t seem to imagine a role for women in space that doesn’t involve sexually servicing men. It’s the story of a temporal agent who is his own father and mother... or his own son and daughter, depending on what part of his timeline you’re looking at. Heinlein seemed to enjoy the time paradox theme, he wrote several of them. This is perhaps the best one.

They is an interesting piece of psychological fiction. Wr’ve all felt, at times, that we are alone in the world, different, that no one understands us. We know that in some people, at some times, this feeling intensifies, slides into a kind of delusion in which all the world is united in some strange kind of manipulative conspiracy. We call this madness. But what if it were the truth?

Political satire is a tricky thing to write well. Heinlein’s satire was usually well-disguised, but in Our Fair City, he gives us a very funny look at corrupt municipal politics, thanks to an unlikely alliance between a newspaperman, a parking lot attendant, and a playful sentient whirlwind named Kitten with a penchant for collecting pretty bits of paper and string and other sorts of things.

The final story, —And He Built a Crooked House—, is just plain fun. An architect tries to build a house modelled after an unfolded tesseract... but then an earthquake causes the house to fold up through a fourth spacial dimension and the architect and his clients are trapped inside. The set-up requires a certain degree of spacial perception to begin to visualise it, but the story itself is mostly an interesting but throw-away idea.


The Man Who Sold the Moon is a collection of short stories from Heinlein’s Future History sequence, most of them strongly focused on technological advances that form the background to the later, space-faring novels. Included here is Heinlein’s first published short story, “Life Line,” about Dr. Pinero, a man who develops a scientific method of determining the date of a person’s death. The apparatus is destroyed when Pinero is murdered by the insurance companies,and the only reason it’s part of the Future History sequence is that Lazarus Long will later mention meeting Pinero. What is of interest is Heinlein’s dark perspective on the ethics of corporations, a theme continued in “Let There Be Light,” in which a pair of scientists discover a means of generating cheap energy, heat and light, and encounter interference and threats from representatives of the power industry - a problem they decide to sidestep by giving away their methods for a minimal licensing fee to anyone who wants access. This story also introduces the classic Heinlein woman, beautiful, sexy, intelligent, with multiple degrees in science and engineering, and more than ready to be the male protagonist’s wife.

The theme of emergent technologies continues in “The Roads Must Roll” and “Blowups Happen” - both stories about adapting society to new technology, and adapting the technology to the needs of human society. In “The Roads Must Roll,” reliance on the automobile as the means of transportation has become untenable, due to rationing of oil and massive traffic congestion in cities. The technological fix is to build ‘rolling roads’ - giant conveyer belts large enough to transport not only millions of people, but also service establishments, across the countryside. In response, cities spread out, building both factories, homes and amenities along the roadways. A person can wake up, head to the nearest roadway, have breakfast in a restaurant on the road itself, get off at his place of work, and return home the same way, possibly having that afterwork drink, or picking up some necessities for the household, while the road carries him along. In the story, the dependance of the new social and economic structure on the roads leads to a revolt among a small group of roadway technicians who believe that those who control the means of transportation should also control the government. At its heart, it’s a critique of the idea that those who can cut off access to a service that society depends on should wield power simply because of that fact.
“Blowups Happen” addresses dual, linked issues - how to balance need against risk in a society, and the shortsightedness of corporations who willingly ignore long-term risk for short-term gain. It also plays on fears of atomic reactions we now know to be overstated, which dates the specifics of the story. In this story, the need for energy has finally exceeded the ability of the process introduced in “Let There Be Light” to provide it, and atomic power has been brought into the energy mix. However, the potential dangers of a nuclear plant exploding are sufficient to slowly drive anyone working on the plants into states of profound anxiety - the stress of knowing one slip could destroy a whole city, or more, becomes unbearable. And then, a close examination of atomic theory reveals that one slip could destroy, not just a city, but half the planet. The ultimate solution - move the plants into space - reduces the risk enough that people can now stand the stress, and everyone is happy. One interesting theme that underlies both stories, and can be found in a number of other instances of Heinlein’s work, is the idea that psychological testing can determine who is stable enough to work in certain professions, and who is not. There’s a naive faith in the ability of psychology to accurately determine who is capable of what.

The last two stories in the collection, “The Man Who Sold the Moon” and “Requiem” tell the life story of a Moses figure, D. D. Harriman, financial genius who all his life wants only to go to the moon, builds a massive corporate empire to get the money and connections to do ir, then risks it all - only to be shut out of the trip himself, until, in the short story “Requiem” he is dying and all his money can’t legally buy him a waiver to risk his life to do the only thing he’s ever wanted. Frankly, “The Man Who Sold the Moon” has to be the most boring thing Heinlein ever wrote - it’s financial wheeling and dealing from start to finish, with a few engineering hitches thrown in here and there. “Requiem” is by far the better piece, and it really tells you everything you needed to know about Harriman. And it takes the Future History to where it really begins to take off, to the point where man begins to explore space.


In 1966 The Worlds of Robert Heinlein was published. By this tine, Heinlein was no longer writing short stories, he’d moved on to sprawling novels and there he would stay. This was the last collection of Heinlein’s work that included short stories not previously collected elsewhere. In 1980, Heinlein took the stories from this collection, added a massive number of essays, rants, and contextual pieces, and released it as Expanded Universe. Some of the stories can also be found in previous collections - “Life-Line,” “Blowups Happen” - but most pieces, fiction and non-fiction, are not collected elsewhere.

Of the stories not collected in other volumes, it’s sometimes easy to see why. “Successful Operation” is a message story, and it quite lacks any of the qualities that distinguish Heinlein’s writing. In the forward to this story, he notes that he wrote the story because he had not yet learned to say ‘no,’ and it shows. It is an anti-racist, anti-fascist, revenge fantasy, but the merits of the theme do not hide the wooden characterisation, the simplistic plot, or the lackluster writing. “Solution Unsatisfactory” on the other hand, is vintage Heinlein at his best. This is the story that is essentially a parallel universe story about the Manhatten Project, the development and first use of a radioactive weapon of mass destruction, and the conceptualisation of the Cold War and the MAD culture - although Heinlein’s unsatisfactory solution of a global military dictatorship sidesteps the reality of the latter two events. It is interesting to note that even then, Heinlein doubted that America would be able to refrain from turning the world into its own private empire if it had the opportunity. “Free Men” revisits the concept behind Sixth Column, depicting a single incident in the struggle of an underground resistance fighting an unnamed conquering nation. “On the Slopes of Vesuvius” returns to Heinlein’s deep fear of an impending nuclear war. “Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon” is a Boy Scout themed story about a young Eagle Scout from Earth on his first scouting trip on the moon. “Searchlight” is a tech-heavy short short about searching for a blind child with perfect pitch lost on the surface of the moon.

And there are a fair number of non-sf stories - “They Do It with Mirrors,” a murder mystery set in a strip joint run on the lines of the famous Windmill Theatre - full nudity allowed if no one moves a muscle; “No Bands Playing, No Flags Waving,” an exploration of the nature of bravery; “A Bathroom of Her Own,” a quite realistic story about the nitty gritty of politics and dirty tricks and fighting a corrupt electoral machine; “Cliff and the Calories,” a rather typical Heinlein writing female viewpoint story which is notable for its appreciation of women who have good appetites and are not emaciated;

The essays included in Expanded Universe reflect some of Heinlein’s basic concerns. “The Last Days of the United States” and “Pie From the Sky” argue that the only way to prevent and eventual global atomic war is through the creation of a legitimate world government, while “How To Be a Survivor” is a fear-based guide to living through a nuclear attack on the US (or any other country, for that matter) - the underlying message being that it’s better to do what’s necessary to prevent an atomic war than be forced to survive after it’s over.

One article struck me as particularly worthy of comment. “Where To?” was originally written in 1950 and was a speculative article that attempted to look forward and see the shape of society in 2000. And so much of it is so very very wrong. He gets some little bits of technology fairly close - mostly personal telecommunications devices. But his middle class family lives in a ‘smart’ house well beyond anything that’s available to the ultra rich early adopter, and cities have been decentralised, with commutes if an hour or longer by personal helicopter. And there are colonies on the moon, where older folks can retire in peace and low gravity. One area where he was very close - and later edits brought him even closer - was the revolution in family structures and the development of non-traditional families of choice. He was close on medical research, far off on investment in space travel, and in general thought that science would achieve more to improve global conditions than it has. But prediction is hard, and not really the role of a science fiction author. “The Third Millennium Opens,” while framed as a fictional piece about a person writing in 2001, looking back at the past century and forward to the next, is far more daring, suggesting the scientific development of telepathy and the technology of FTL travel is waiting in the wings.

Many of the essays, and the forwards for the various pieces, make clear Heinlein’s ever growing concern with nuclear war, and Russian domination. He becomes almost fanatical in his opposition to communism - which includes anything that involves socialising any sphere of public life, or anything resembling that American shibboleth, the ‘welfare state.’ Like many Americans, Heinlein confused communism with Russian imperialism - and now that Russia is the worst kind of capitalist state in all but name, we know that it was never about an International Communist Revolution, and always about Russia’s desire to be a world dictatorship. Heinlein visited the USSR, and wrote several scathing essays about how Intourist deals with foreign visitors, managing what they see, who they talk to, where they go. These are also included here.

Heinlein also gives much attention to matters such as the decline in education and the rising interest in astrology, witchcraft, religious cults and other things that detract from what he values above all else - science and engineering, with a side order of history. There’s a lot of material in the essays to make a modern social justice advocate like myself boil with anger, though it’s clear that he wants a society in which people don’t face discrimination, he would shudder at the idea of identity politics or critical race theory.

Essentially. Expanded Universe is Heinlein’s statement of principles, and there’s a lot that’s interesting, and sadly, a lot that just doesn’t hold up well.

I’ve always intended to read something by John Crowley, but somehow until now I’d never got around to it. But when PM Press decided to include him in their Outspoken Authors series, it finally seemed the right time to make a start. Said volume, titled Totalitopia, is a collection of short fiction and essays by Crowley, augmented with an interview and bibliography.

The first story in the collection, This Is Our Town, was in itself enough to make me happy I’d decided to read it. It is a fascinating and multilayered exploration of childhood, faith and memory, set in a small American mining town that has seen disasters and, possibly, miracles. The narrator is a young girl from a relatively poor Catholic family, who converses with her guardian angel and believes that prayer, free will, and God’s omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience can be reconciled in such a way that, somehow, good will prevail - and who, in looking back as an adult, longs for that childhood certainty of faith.

What if, when the aliens come, they offer to do your chores? Why might they do such a thing? What would be their ulterior motive - for as everyone knows, aliens always have an ulterior motive. The short story Gone suggests one possibility.

And Go Like This is a story inspired by a quote from Buckminster Fuller: “There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world’s population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.” Crowley writes this as if it happened, all the people in the world painstaking transported to NYC, assigned spaces, and then, when all are accounted fir, the music starts on a hundred thousand records players and the world twists. But the twist is also a psychological one, for what would it mean, that for a brief point in time, the whole of the world were neighbours?

The title piece, Totalitopia, is an essay - serious in intent for all its lightness of tone - on the predictive tendencies of science fiction. Crowley advances various approaches to predictive SF, notes that many futuristic utopias and dystopias are actually commentaries n present conditions rather than serious attempt to forecast the future, and discusses a few of the classic texts, even advancing his own ‘prediction’ - which bears certain resemblances to my own ideas of utopia, something which disposes me to think I may enjoy more of this author’s works - before concluding:

“It will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature. Of course holding the mirror up to nature is what Hamlet insisted all playing, or pretending, must do; but—as Lewis Carroll knew—the image in a mirror, however scary or amusing or enlightening, is always reversed.”

In the essay “Everything that Rises,” Crowley gently critiques the transhumanist movement - which he links to a strain of primarily Russian scientifically-inspired mysticism known as cosmism. Immortality, the transference of mind to mechanical rather than biological substrates, the transmission of the human data stream at the speed of light, the development of the superintelligent AI - all these speculations on the future of mind are part of this movement, and come under Crowley’s eye.

The concluding essay is a review of the works of another author I’ve never read, Paul Parks. Here Crowley does the work of a reviewer well, for in Paul Park’ Hidden Worlds he makes me think quite seriously about looking into some of the books he discusses.

The volume ends, as all of the books in this series do, with an interview conducted by Terry Bisson. Between the sentiments expressed in the interview, and my feeling of profound delight with both fiction and essays collected in this volume, I have the distinct sense that I have missed out on something I would have enjoyed very much in not reading Crowley earlier, and despite the clamourings of thousands of other books demanding to be read, I really must find space for more of his work in the never-ending queue.

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.

Aqueduct Press has released a collection of reviews and essays by Liz Bourke. This fascinating collection, Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy, is must reading for anyone interested how intersectional feminist analysis of media products should be done. Bourke’s readings of science fiction and fantasy novels, and her essays on such things as how literary canons are created, are both fun to read - Bourke has an engaging, easy style - and important to understanding where the genre, which I love dearly, has been and where it needs to go.

I have a certain fondness for reading collections of book reviews. Even reviews about books I haven’t read. There are two fundamentally wonderful things about reading good essays about books. The first is that, if one has read the book in question, it often gives you a deeper understanding of what you’ve read, which adds greatly to one’s enjoyment. The second is, that, if one has not read the book, it can lead you to a new friend, a new reading experience. Both pleasures were to be had in the essays of this volume, and considering the breadth of texts Bourke explores, I think most people will be able to say the same.

Bourke’s essays have reminded me of the brilliance of writers like Barbara Hambly and Kate Elliott, Nicola Griffith and Melissa Scott, reminded me that I’ve been meaning to read the books by authors like Jaqueline Koyanagi, Stina Licht, and Kameron Hurley that have been sitting in my TBR pile for far too long, and introduced me to authors whose work I’ve somehow missed entirely, like Violette Malan, Nicole Kornher-Stace and Susan Matthews. As I read, I found myself making notes to look online for a certain volume to acquire, or to move another one to a higher position on my TBR list, and if you decide to indulge yourself with this book, I think you will find yourself doing much the same.

Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, edited by Barbara Gurr, Assistant Professor in Residence in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Connecticut, is a fascinating collection of essays for anyone interested, as I am, in how these issues are presented in science fiction, and in the post-apocalyptic vision in particular.

I have always been rather a fan of the post-apocalyptic subgenre of speculative fiction, I think in part because it mirrors the worst fears of our society - how the world ends, which of the classical horsemen, or some other, newly imagined devastation, predominates our nightmares - and partly because it offers the opportunity to suggest what might follow if everything we know has been torn down. Will we recreate current social structures, classes, institutions, or will we strike out in new directions?

This is a collection of essays that look at our visual media and try to explore some of these questions. As Gurr says in her Introduction, “The writers in this volume are interested in the ways in which post-apocalyptic fictions interact with—produce, reflect, interrogate, accommodate, and resist—hegemonic notions of race, gender, and sexuality.”

Early post-apocalyptic imaginings tended to focus on the reconstruction of society after a devastating, often nuclear war, or as the result of science gone wrong; such narratives were heavily influenced by the experiences of WWII. The Cold War introduced the apocalypse brought about by stealthy invasion, the infection and spread of disease or mind control agents - The Invasion of the Body Snatchers being the classic film example. Infection of the body, and the body politic, and fears of immigration blend in both alien invasion and zombie narratives, which have become increasingly popular after the events of 9/11. All these scenarios and more are explored from various perspectives in these essays, which address works as varied as the Hunger Games films, Firefly, The Walking Dead, Falling Skies, Battlestar Galactica (the remake), True Blood, the Resident Evil films and others.

What many of these essays make clear is that despite the opportunities for change of all kinds inherent in the post-apocalyptic scenario, many of these works fail to really challenge contemporary gender, race and class relations. Even with the presence of major characters who are people of colour or white women, the societies being recreated remain patriarchal, male-centred, and white-dominated, and perpetuate existing stereotypes about race and gender. Through analysis of the social milieus in series such as Firefly and films such as Hunger Games, it becomes clear that simply having a female action hero does not necessarily imply a break with traditional gender roles - the presence of an exceptional woman serves merely to divert attention from the ways in which the status quo is maintained.

The post-apocalyptic narrative is, above all, a narrative of survival. Its tropes tell us what are the threats humanity fears will threaten its survival, and the parts of our culture that we believe are essential to our survival. It shows us what we fear and what we value, and lets us question whether our fears and values are indeed the ones that will affect whether we as a society will indeed survive.

The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward, is a collection of writings in response to the racism that is an integral part of North American, white supremacist society. The title is a reference to James Baldwin’s classic writing on the same issues, more than 50 years ago, a reference that Ward makes explicit in her introduction.

“I read Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son” while I was in my mid-twenties, and it was a revelation. I’d never read creative nonfiction like Baldwin’s, never encountered this kind of work, work that seemed to see me, to know I needed it. I read it voraciously, desperate for the words on the page. I needed to know that someone else saw the myriad injustices of living while black in this country, that someone so sharp and gifted and human could acknowledge it all, and speak on it again and again. Baldwin was so brutally honest. His prose was frank and elegant in turn, and I returned to him annually after that first impression-forming read. Around a year after Trayvon Martin’s death, a year in which black person after black person died and no one was held accountable, I picked up The Fire Next Time, and I read: “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it.” It was as if I sat on my porch steps with a wise father, a kind, present uncle, who said this to me. Told me I was worthy of love. Told me I was worth something in the world. Told me I was a human being. I saw Trayvon’s face, and all the words blurred on the page.

It was then that I knew I wanted to call on some of the great thinkers and extraordinary voices of my generation to help me puzzle this out. I knew that a black boy who lives in the hilly deserts of California, who likes to get high with his friends on the weekend and who freezes in a prickly sweat whenever he sees blue lights in his rearview, would need a book like this. A book that would reckon with the fire of rage and despair and fierce, protective love currently sweeping through the streets and campuses of America. A book that would gather new voices in one place, in a lasting, physical form, and provide a forum for those writers to dissent, to call to account, to witness, to reckon. A book that a girl in rural Missouri could pick up at her local library and, while reading, encounter a voice that hushed her fears. In the pages she would find a wise aunt, a more present mother, who saw her terror and despair threading their fingers through her hair, and would comfort her. We want to tell her this: You matter. I love you. Please don’t forget it.”

Every piece in this collection is important in what it says, and what it asks the reader to contemplate. These are powerful pieces, poems, personal narratives, essays, examinations, exhortations, accusations, inspirations. They talk about growing up black. About walking while black. About the history of black people. About the deaths of Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, and Rekia Boyd, and the Charleston church worshippers and Sandra Bland and too many others. About white rage and black mourning. About knowing your rights, and knowing how to behave when you’re stopped for breathing while black. About being a black parent, knowing what you must say to your black child, in the hopes of keeping them alive. About being black in America.

In Feminist Erasures: Challenging Backlash Culture, editors Kumarini Silva and Kaitlynn Mendes have collected essays from a range of feminist scholars aimed at addressing - and countering - the growing belief in North America and the United Kingdom that we are living in a 'post-feminist' society, where the goals of feminism have been achieved and the movement is no longer needed. It is true that I - and many other feminists - would agree that feminism needs to change, to become a movement that recognises intersectionality and decentres the specific experiences of white women, in order to become a meaningful movement that addresses the needs of all women. Nonetheless, it has become painfully obvious in the past year, under the presidency of Trump, that sexism, like racism, is alive, well, and making a serious comeback in the public discourse arena - and that neither has ever been absent in the lives of people of colour and white women.

In their Introduction, Silva and Mendes talk about feminist erasure and an apathetic approach to feminism that threaten the gains made to date, and the potential of future gains.

"For us, what is at stake is the erasure of feminism as a completed project before its work is done. That the current circulation of postfeminist discourses, in both popular and political culture, creates a sense of ‘after’ that we, among other feminist scholars ..., feel is inaccurate. The apathetic approach to understanding the importance of feminism and its genea- logical history makes us immune to the systemic backlash against women that has become part of everyday culture. Here, let us take a moment to explain what we mean by an apathetic approach to feminism: for us, it’s a condition where the progress made by feminists and women’s rights movements, on a global level, are presented as a fait accompli and any ongoing activism or commitment to feminism is seen as outmoded and unnecessary. It is the simple belief that ‘women have arrived’ in spite of significant evidence to the contrary. This contrary evidence can be seen in the continued use of sexualized imagery and violence against women to sell products, in the legislative practices that are routinely enacted which negatively affect women’s health benefits, the continued double- burden that is placed on women who work both within and outside the home, the continued debates around welfare mothers and the general judgment placed on single mothers, just to name a few. In spite of these realities, women are continuously and relentlessly encouraged to believe that there is nothing more to be done. That women’s liberation has arrived and triumphed. But, as the chapters in this anthology suggest, such a declaration is not only inaccurate, it can also have significant drawbacks for continued activism and engagement with issues of gender, class, race, and sexuality that are much needed in contemporary culture."

The collected essays address a broad range of issues. Beginning from their personal contexts as scholars and feminists, the editors open the volume with a selection of essays addressing feminist issues in academe, from becoming a feminist scholar and in turn teaching feminism to conducting research within the modern academy and developing feminist methodologies. Subsequent sections look at the implications of postfeminist assumptions and the erasure of feminist history and analysis in discourse on popular culture, the relationship of femininity, motherhood and the workplace, and activism.

Identifying the overall impact of these very disparate essays and topics takes some contemplation, but my takeaway is that postfeminism creates certain dangers. It erases not only the recognition that there remains much work to be done, but also the history if what has been done and how that connects to present issues facing women. Without feminism, there is no fabric to connect isolated concerns, no awareness of systemic conditions which produce multiple points where resistance and change are needed - and thus no basis for co-ordinating resistance and creating alliances. Postfeminism is here revealed as a trap, a way of undoing the solidarity and structural understanding that supports collective and revolutionary action.

Me Funny, edited by Ojibway playwright and humorist Drew Hayden Taylor, is a collection of meditations and ruminations on the subject of Indigenous humour. Many of the contributors are Indigenous Canadians, writers and playwrights engaged in the creation of the very art which is the subject of the collection.

I found this collection among the Toronto Public Library's online ebook offerings. I was browsing their Indigenous section and somehow it seemed that after reading two books in quick succession that focused on the oppression of Indigenous peoples, I wanted to read something from the other side, something that looked at Indigenous survival - and what speaks more to the survival of a people and their culture than their laughter.

I was not completely unfamiliar with the territory when I chose this book - I've read some of the work of Drew Hayden Taylor, and Tomson Highway, and Thomas King before now, enough to have gotten a glimpse of what indigenous comedic writing can be like, and know that it makes me laugh, and makes me think. As did many of the contributions to this volume.

Among the working comics, writers and playwrights who share their perspectives are Ojibway stand-up comic Don Kelly, who offers thoughts on the nature of Indigenous comedy within the context of the Canadian comedy circuit, interspersed with excepts from his routines, and playwright Ian Ferguson, who talks about the differences between Indigenous humour intended for mixed audiences, and "our jokes" - humour by and for Indigenous peoples.

In "Whacking the Indigenous Funny Bone," Taylor provides some of his own perspectives on the nature of Indigenous humour, with particular focus on what has been one of the recurring themes of his own work, relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

In "Ruby Lips," Louise Profeit-LeBlanc, a Northern Tutchone storyteller, offers a poignant story, sour and sweet, about her characters Johnny Silverfox and Mary Malcolm, who embody both the tragedy and the drive for survival that are so often interwoven in Indigenous life and literature.

Janice Acoosta (Cree/Métis) and Natasha Beeds (Cree/Afro-Caribbean) discuss "Cree-ative" comedy - with notable emphasis on the Trickster figure - in the form of a two-handed play/dialogue that veers wildly between interpersonal humour, satire, and detailed analysis of the comic writing of Cree writer Paul Seesequasis.

Cherokee writer and scholar Thomas King interleaves a discussion of the difficulties of defining Indigenous humour with passages from his popular CBC radio comedy show, The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour.

In "Why Cree Is the Funniest of All Languages," an elegiac meditation on language and mythology, Tomson Highway talks about the soul - and the gut-level presence - of Indigenous humour.

Mohawk academic and parent Karen Froman, in "Buffalo Tales and Academic Trails" talks about her own uses of humour in teaching, both at the university level, and as a volunteer resource person on Indigenous issues at her children's school.

In one of the few pieces to address visual comedy, Alan J. Ryan's "One Big Indian," analyses both the creative process in Bill Powless' satirical paintings of Indigenous people, and the nature of public reaction to the paintings and the questions they raise about Indigenous representation for the white gaze.

Métis scholar Kristina Fagan's essay "Teasing, Tolerating, Teaching - Laughter and Community in Canadian Literature" examines the ways in which Indigenous writers have portrayed and used humour to strengthen community and cohesiveness - both by ambiguous example, and by teasing, even humiliation, as a form of coersion. She illustrates this through a discussion of the prevalence of the joker or jester figure - often an elder, but hardly a serious and sage advisor - who simultaneously defuses tension, transmutes fear or tragedy to laughter, and provides multiple lessons, sometimes contradictory or self-subversive, to be teased out of his or her words and actions.

As Mirjam Hirch notes in "Subversive Humour - Canadian Native Playwrights' Winning Weapon of Resistance," it has only been in recent decades that white observers were aware of the existence of Indigenous humour. Early writers on the subject depicted the indigenous peoples of North America as serious, placid or warlike by turns, but never funny. This view, however, has been thoroughly discredited with the emergence of a body of Indigenous humour, much of it expressed through theatre as the literary form closest to traditional storytelling forms. Hirch traces the roots of Indigenous humour from pre-colonial sacred rituals involving reversals and 'tricksters' and notes, as other contributors have, the importance of teasing in Indigenous cultures as a means of social control. She also talks, as others have, about how Indigenous people have used humour as a way to cope with and heal from trauma, and as a way of 'retaliating' against their oppressors without incurring punitive reaction.

Sprinkled throughout the volume are a series of jokes that the editor has written/collected/curated under the collective title "Astutely Selected Ethno-Based Examples of Cultural Jocularity and Racial Comicalness."

I don't know if I could do any better defining Indigenous humour now than I could before reading this, but I certainly enjoyed it, and more than one passage left me smiling, even laughing. Maybe that's the best reason for reading it.

​Revealing ​Ancestral ​Central ​America, edited by Rosemary ​Joyce, is one of those museum books intended for slow grazing, on both images and text. As are many such books, it was prepared for publication to accompany an exhibition - the Cerámica de los Ancestros: Central America ́s Past Revealed, a joint project of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the Smithsonian Latino Center.

The images are primarily of artefacts found in the Central American collection of the NMAI. The texts were written by diverse experts and scholars and have the stated intention of revealing "the lives of the ancestors of the indigenous, mestizo, and afromestizo peoples of Central America." In a Foreword penned by NMAI Director Kevin Cover, of the Pawnee nation, and Eduardo Diaz, Executive Director of the Smithsonian Latino Center, say that:

"Herein we honor the enduring, economically and politically stable cultural traditions of pre-Hispanic Central America through their exceptional material culture. Sharing this cultural patrimony and acknowledging its value is both our challenge and our responsibility, and we gladly take up the charge."

I've long been interested in both the art and the way of life of cultures not my own, past snd present. The artefacts presented for display in this volume give us (a modern, Western museum-going audience) a look at these aspects of Central American peoples, and the accompanying articles an overview of what is known or theorised about them. These contain fascinating discussions of art, government, trade, industry, everyday life, religious life, and other elements of the various Central American cultures. The artefacts chosen for presentation in this volume range from household items to decorative pieces and ritual objects, and represent a number of different cultures and time periods. There is much to engage the eye as well as the mind here.

Some of the articles are also valuable for discussions of how scientists and scholars do their work - the practices and paradigms of archeology and anthropology - and how artefacts such as these are collected and curated. The articles that discuss acquisition do not shy away from acknowledging a past of looting, theft, reckless excavation and other issues, but give only cursory consideration the the question of who has the right to collect, display (and benefit from) the cultural artefacts of indigenous peoples.

Unanswered questions: how many of these artefacts were in essence stolen? How many have sacred or culturally significant importance that would, if respected, mean they should not be publicly displayed? Are there people who can be considered as legitimate inheritors of the cultures represented, and if so, have they asked for the return of any of these artefacts to their native environment? Has anyone approached those inheritors and asked permission to retain these artefacts on display?