#Space opera unbound worlds plus
#Space opera unbound worlds tv

#Space opera unbound worlds plus

Perhaps the biggest shift is that Binet comes from literary fiction rather than SFF, plus he's the son of a historian, so there's much made of the allusions to genuine historical sources, both in terms of style and content. This isn't the most radical of ideas: I've read similar forays in the form of Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt. Maybe our postcolonial profs oughta start teaching this stuff rather than pledging allegiance only to VS Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and EA Markham?Ĭheck it out! It's a 2019 French alternate history novel, imagining a timeline in which the Native Americans colonised Europe! Makes me realise that there's way more complexity than I thought among poets who choose to publish in SFF journals rather than university presses. In all of these, he’s experimental in form, language, and perspective, referencing a breadth of texts (more pop culture than dead white men, but hell, more than I can grasp), deep with soul and belonging. In works like “Hastur Asks for Donald Glover’s Autograph” and “Cthulhu Asks for Kendrick Lamar’s Autograph”, he imagines the Great Old Ones enthralled by hiphop celebs, by Black suffering and Black creativity-after all, he writes in an afterword, “even if we were as ants to such gods, you would imagine they respond the same as we do when we learn that ants can carry so many times their own weight, and withstand forces many times greater still.” He’s also drawing on Caribbean and Black lore in “the lagahoo speaks for itself” and “tar baby”, faux academese and the magical sci-fi of eroticism in “The Metaphysics of a Wine, in Theory and in Practice”, the raw ache of losing a gay lover in “time, and time again”.

Nevertheless, he’s found a way to embrace cosmic horror in these poems. He’s a Trinidadian guy who's in love with the Cthulhu mythos but thoroughly aware of HP Lovecraft's racism and the way notions of monstrosity have been used to dehumanise Black men. I discovered this poet during this year’s Flights of Foundry online SFF festival, when he was featured on the panel “Black Speculative Poetry: Afrofuturism, Afrofantasy, and More”. Any further recommendations from wherever you call home? So here’s a sampling of some of the world SF I’ve been reading recently, from Singapore and beyond.

#Space opera unbound worlds tv

“They have the awards and the hardcovers in the bookstores and the film and TV deals.”

“Between them, now, these writers are science fiction,” he says. Lavie Tidhar writes a bit about this in his introduction to The Best of World SF: Volume 1 (which I’m included in): how he once struggled to convince publishers to include Aliette de Bodard, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Nnedi Okorafor. As a result, it’s become way more international.

If this is the case, poor you! You’re sabotaging yourself with your snobbery! Even poorly written SFF can stimulate and expand the imagination, and the good stuff is out there in abundance, often drawing from the vast wealth of non-Western folklore and tradition.įurthermore, over the past decade the spec fic scene’s been the site of some of the most dynamic and urgent debates about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

(Not just speculative fiction-I’ve got a poetry collection listed below!)Ī few readers among you might still cast aspersions upon the traditionally low genres of sci-fi and fantasy. By Ng Yi-Sheng / again, I’m shifting gears with my column! This month, rather than focussing solely on Asian literature, I’m casting my gaze upon the wide, wonderful world of global speculative writing.