sandra lindow

February 26, 2018

Nalo Hopkinson’s FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS is essential feminist science fiction

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized afrofuturism, alex brown, black panther, carla bataller estruch, fábulas estelares, falling in love with hominids, midnight robber, nalo hopkinson, nnedi okorafor, sandra lindow, The New York Review of Science Fiction, tor.com

On the Spanish site FÁBULAS
ESTELARES, Carla Bataller Estruch includes FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS and Midnight Robber among the essential title of feminist science fiction.

The list will be updated as you discover more works. It is personal, but transferable: you can write down all the titles and authors that you want. The staff part comes to that I will indicate what I have read and what I have not, what interests me more or less, what I think is complementary, basic or essential.

Andrea Blythe on her eponymous blog praises what she’s read of the collection.

The other book I’ve been working on is FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS, a short story collection by Nalo Hopkinson. I love her work and am enjoying the stories I’ve read so far.

Photo: David Findlay

At TOR.COM, Alex Brown mentions Midnight Robber in 8 Books and Comics for Your Post-Black Panther Reading List.

One of the best parts about the Black Panther cast is its pan-African diversity. Delve back into the Black diaspora with Nalo Hopkinson’s novel set on planets colonized by Caribbean space explorers. Corrupt Antonio Habib rules over Toussaint until he and his daughter Tan-Tan are driven off their planet and onto another filled with exiles and criminals. After years of abuse at his hands, Tan-Tan kills him and goes on the run. Pregnant with her father’s child, she seeks refuge with an Indigenous species out in the bush outside the town. She soon takes the moniker of the Robber Queen, doling out violent justice to protect the helpless and ease her guilt at her own crimes. Although Midnight Robber doesn’t have any strong thematic or character connections to the film, it’s one of the best examples of contemporary literary Afrofuturism, hints of which are all over the Black Panther movie.

In THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION piece on Nnedi Okorafor, Sandra J. Lindow namechecks Hopkinson several times.

Afrofuturism is a way of looking at the past and imagining a future where Africans, African-Americans, and other African diaspora can be equal participants in creating a sustainable, egalitarian future. It is a movement that has been significantly influenced by music and art. Like other writers of color such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemisin, and Nisi Shawl, Okorafor was informed by the Civil Rights Movement’s active reclamation of black history and culture that resulted in the Afrofuturist movement. Beginning with stories written in early creative writing classes, Okorafor takes contemporary problems such as bullying, racism, bigotry, ecological disaster, and out-of-control venture capitalism and moves them into the fantastic landscapes of Afrofuturism.

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By the beginning of this century, writers of color were beginning to draw considerable critical attention. Many of them were women. In 2002, Nalo Hopkinson was the first person of color to be a WisCon guest of honor. In 2010 Nnedi Okorafor shared the honor with writer/editor Mary Anne Mohanraj, and since then there have been six more Afrofuturist guests: Nisi Shawl, Andrea Hairston, N. K. Jemisin, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Sofia Samatar, and Nalo Hopkinson again. The WisCon web site has announced that the 2018 WisCon’s invited guests of honor are Saladin Ahmed, writer of Black Bolt for Marvel Comics, and award-winning novelist/screenwriter Tananarive Due, who teaches Afrofuturism at UCLA. The feminist sf community has embraced these writers, and they in turn have infused feminist sf/f with creative energy at a time when the original second-wave feminist sf writers are no longer in the forefront. Their popularity is based on their willingness to break the mold of traditional sf tropes and not be guided by the constraints of Western mythology.

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In addition to Yaszek’s questions, Okorafor joins Nalo Hopkinson in asking, “What role will the mythic supernatural have in human evolution?“ and like Octavia Butler before them, “What role will alien intervention play?” (Hopkinson interweaves mythology and the supernatural in her fiction often in transgressive ways as in her novel The Chaos where Baba Yaga and her flying chicken-legged house appear in downtown Toronto.

For more information on FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Chuma Hill

Design by Elizabeth Story

February 15, 2018

With WICKED WONDERS, Ellen Klages demonstrates a sensitive grasp of historical change and human development

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized eleanor farrell, elizabeth story, ellen klages, emily netterfield, John D. Berry, sandra lindow, the lesbian historic motif podcast, The New York Review of Science Fiction, wicked wonders

In THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION (January 2018), Sandra Lindow reviews Ellen Klages’ WICKED WONDERS.

WICKED WONDERS’s fourteen short stories similarly mix
the mundane and the magical. An “Introduction” by fellow
Motherboard member Karen Joy Fowler describes Klages’s
narrative style as “driving alongside, but never into, danger”. The danger is more often than not left to the imagination
of her readers. It is a technique that depends upon readers’
cultural and genre literacy, and the process is often facilitated
through the use of a naïve viewpoint character. More often
than not, her stories are thought experiments that combine
unrelated concepts. “Mrs. Zeno’s Paradox” concerns an intersection
in a cafe between a shared brownie, quantum physics,
and time travel. “Caligo Lane” combines time travel with
cartography and origami. “Goodnight Moons” deftly unites
tropes from Andy Weir’s The Martian (2011), Margaret Wise
Brown’s picture book, Goodnight Moon (1947), and Robert
A. Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars (1962) (unconstrained by
Heinlein’s limited ability to see a meaningful, self-actualized
future for Poddy). “Amicae Aeternum” describes the last
day two best friends can spend together before one leaves
on a generation ship. “Woodsmoke” is neither sf nor fantasy
but speculative, a truly gender-bending coming-of-age tale
set realistically in a summer camp for girls.

<snip>

Klages, whose debut novel, The Green Glass Sea (2006), won the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, shows a sensitive grasp of historical change and human development with a particular focus on that childhood time when children have agency but magical events can still be accepted, creating a semi-permeable membrane between the real and the fantastic. These are stories about love and loss but not the expected ones.

Photo: Scott R. Klein

THE LESBIAN HISTORIC MOTIF PODCAST hosts Klages.

In this episode we talk about

The long incubation for the ideas that became Passing Strange
Lesbian culture in mid-century San Francisco and the San Francisco World’s Fair on Treasure Island
The hidden interconnectedness of Ellen’s novels
The love of historic objects and texts
Historical fiction as “time travel” for the reader

Publications mentioned:

Passing Strange (tor.com, for signed copies: Borderlands Books, Amazon)
“Caligo Lane” (originally published in Subterranean Online, Winter 2014, available in the collection WICKED WONDERS Tachyon Publications, 2017, Amazon)
“Hey Presto” (originally published in the anthology Fearsome Magics by Jonathan Strahan, 2014, available in the collection WICKED WONDERS Tachyon Publications, 2017, Amazon)
The Green Glass Sea (Viking Children’s Books, 2006, Amazon)
“Time Gypsy” (originally published in Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel (Overlook Press, 1999), also available in the collection PORTABLE CHILDHOODS Tachyon Publications, 2007, Amazon)

For more info on WICKED WONDERS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

For more info on PORTABLE CHILDHOODS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Ellen Klages

Design by John D. Berry

For more info on TIME GYPSY, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Emily Netterfield

Design by Eleanor Farrell

September 9, 2015

The engaging FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS is triumphant

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized afro-caribbean, callista mcrae, chuma hill, elizabeth story, falling in love with hominids, fantasy, LBGTQ, nalo hopkinson, nyrsf, review, sandra lindow, science fiction, The New York Review of Science Fiction

In the August, 2015 issue of THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, Sandra Lindow and Callista McRae each deliver a separate review of Nalo Hopkinson’s brilliantly envisioned FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS.

Callista McRae:

Hopkinson’s sense of humor and her dazzling imagination hold this variegated collection together. (Its stories were written over the last dozen or so years and were published in a wide range of places—as collaborations, in anthologies of dystopic fiction or gay-themed horror, in a literary magazine volume devoted to new wave fabulists.) Humor also seems to spark the imagination of these stories at times.

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The collection moves all over. One story has not only aliens but talking animals, from a “moving carpet of snails and slugs” to cassowary, oryx, and crake. The story that follows it, however, enacts how trauma, even when pressed to the back of one’s mind, keeps intruding in one’s periphery; if the story is fantastical at all, it is in that mind.

Where Hopkinson’s wit, imagination, and social engagement fuse is in her prose, which bears out that standard written English is not the only or best container for science fiction. The linguistic invention in this collection isn’t as
constant or far-reaching as it was in the carnivalesque Midnight Robber (2000), which was told in varying degrees of a hybrid futuristic patois. But Falling in Love with Hominids runs through a scale of brilliantly envisioned and carried-out verbal play, often with Afro-Caribbean language.

<snip>

The scope of Hopkinson’s world delights. Simultaneously she reminds us that the actual state of things is often smaller, pettier, more complacent, or more brutal than we think. The disparate nature of this collection itself speaks to these different realms, in different voices and different ways. It’s a hodgepodge, triumphant.

Sandra Lindow:

Nalo Hopkinson is a woman with an agenda. In the foreword to this, her second short story collection, she writes that she “didn’t used to like people much” for the obvious reasons: “evil, unhappiness, violence, and pain.” As a teenager, she believed humanity had spread across “the face of this planet like a fungus, altering and destroying whole ecosystems and species …” and like many ecologically minded teenagers she was “engulfed by despair.” However, she had family, friends, music, and books, positive influences that eventually caused her to consider humanity’s potential for “great good” as well as its “horrifying evil.” Now at “a mostly cheerful fifty-something” she has overcome her early sense of powerlessness to work towards positive change through her writing. In a paraphrase of Cordwainer Smith, she concludes that her life “has been a process of falling in love with hominids.”

The seventeen stories in this collection were written over a ten-year period beginning in 2004 and were initially published in anthologies and small press magazines. Unlike work by other Canadian writers such as Robert J. Sawyer’s Hominids (2003) or Sara Gruen’s Ape House (2010), no story here actually depicts a love relationship with either a prehistoric person or a great ape. Rather, the term “hominid” is carefully chosen to emphasize Homo sapiens’s membership in and connection to both the animal kingdom and the natural world.

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As in Skin Folk (her first collection, from 2001) and her novels Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), and The Salt Roads (2003), the supernatural regularly intersects with the natural, but these tales for the most part begin without the immediate cultural estrangement of the earlier works. The language is colloquial, and the characters accessible, drawing readers into the rhythms of word games, chicken coops, coffee pots, and daily life before taking a quantum shift into the unexpected and surreal.

<snip>

The luminous warmth of these opening lines indicates utopian possibility that stands in opposition to the icy winters of racism, sexism, and homophobia. To fall in love with hominids is the first step in creating a better world. The next step is to envision an eco-friendly community in which this love can be nurtured. As well as cautionary tales, Hopkinson provides hints of utopia-in-progress throughout this engaging collection.

Read the rest of both reviews in the August, 2015 issue of THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION.

For more information on FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Chuma Hill

Design by Elizabeth Story