So Long Been Dreaming

  So Long Been

  DREAMING

  NALO HOPKINSON & UPPINDER MEHAN eds

  SO LONG BEEN

  DREAMING

  Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy

  ARSENAL

  PULP PRESS

  Vancouver

  SO LONG BEEN DREAMING: POSTCOLONIAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

  Stories and essays copyright © 2004 by the authors, unless otherwise indicated

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical – without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  #102-211 East Georgia St.

  Vancouver, B.C.

  Canada V6A 1Z6

  www.arsenalpulp.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its publishing activities.

  Design by Solo

  Cover illustration by Ho Che Anderson

  Printed and bound in Canada

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  So long been dreaming : postcolonial science fiction & fantasy / edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan.

  ISBN 978-1-55152-158-9

  eISBN 978-1-55152-316-3

  1. Science fiction. 2. Fantasy fiction. 3. Developing countries – Literatures – 21st century. I. Hopkinson, Nalo II. Mehan, Uppinder, 1961-

  PN6071.S33S6 2004808.83'876C2004-900676-2

  Introduction Nalo Hopkinson

  SECTION I: THE BODY

  Deep End Nisi Shawl

  Griots of the Galaxy Andrea Hairston

  Toot Sweet Matricia Suzette Mayr

  Rachel Larissa Lai

  SECTION II: FUTURE EARTH

  Terminal Avenue Eden Robinson

  When Scarabs Multiply Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

  Delhi Vandana Singh

  Panopte’s Eye Tamai Kobayashi

  SECTION III: ALLEGORY

  The Grassdreaming Tree Sheree R. Thomas

  The Blue Road: A Fairy Tale Wayde Compton

  SECTION IV: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ALIEN

  The Forgotten Ones Karin Lowachee

  Native Aliens Greg van Eekhout

  Refugees Celu Amberstone

  Trade Winds devorah major

  Lingua Franca Carole McDonnell

  Out of Sync Ven Begamudré

  SECTION V: RE-IMAGINING THE PAST

  The Living Roots Opal Palmer Adisa

  Journey Into the Vortex Maya Khankhoje

  Necahual Tobias S. Buckell

  Final Thoughts Uppinder Mehan

  Introduction

  Nalo Hopkinson, co-editor

  I met and became friends with Uppinder Mehan when he was still living in Toronto. A little later, he told me that he was about to have an essay published, entitled “The Domestication of Technology in Indian Science Fiction Short Stories” (in Foundation: the International Review of Science Fiction, No. 74, Autumn 1998). As a fiction writer, I myself was struggling with what seemed like the unholy marriage of race consciousness and science fiction sensibility, and I was hungry for any critical thought that might shed light on the topic. I got myself a copy of Uppinder’s essay, and there was light indeed. In fact, some of his ideas on the development of indigenous metaphors for technological progress influenced me strongly as I finished the novel Midnight Robber.

  A friend and fellow science fiction writer, Zainab Amadahy, once introduced me to a friend of hers, a black scholar who had recently completed his PhD. We got to talking about my short story “Riding the Red,” which does a jazz riff on the folk tale of Little Red Riding Hood. He listened to my description of my story, then asked, “What do you think of Audre Lorde’s comment that massa’s tools will never dismantle massa’s house?”

  I froze. Much of the folklore on which I draw is European. Even the form in which I write is European. Arguably, one of the most familiar memes of science fiction is that of going to foreign countries and colonizing the natives, and as I’ve said elsewhere, for many of us, that’s not a thrilling adventure story; it’s non-fiction, and we are on the wrong side of the strange-looking ship that appears out of nowhere. To be a person of colour writing science fiction is to be under suspicion of having internalized one’s colonization. I knew that I’d have to fight this battle at some point in my career, but I wasn’t ready. Hadn’t yet formulated my thoughts on the matter. I was still struggling to figure it all out for myself. “What do you mean?” I asked, stalling for time.

  He looked at me and said (I’m paraphrasing), “We’ve been taught all our lives how superior European literature is. In our schools, it’s what we’re instructed to read, to analyze, to understand, how we’re taught to think. They gave us those tools. I think that now, they’re our tools, too.”

  I found I was able to breathe again. And now I had plenty to think about. When I write science fiction and fantasy from a context of blackness and Caribbeanness, using Afro-Caribbean lore, history, and language, it should logically be no different than writing it from a Western European context: take out the Cinderella folk tale, replace it with the crab-back woman folk tale; exchange the struggle of the marginalized poor with the struggle of the racialized marginalized poor.

  And yet, it’s very different. When I rewrote my story “Riding the Red” in Jamaican creole, all of a sudden I could no longer have a peasant grandmother living in a cottage in Britain’s past in the middle of the English woods; how would a Jamaican farm woman have gotten there in the seventeenth century? Not inconceivable, but I didn’t want to stop and explain the how. So I brought my Jamaican granny home. She doesn’t live in a forest; we don’t call them forests, and besides, how is she to feed herself in the middle of a forest? So now she lives on a small hand-hewed farm with the tropical bush not too far outside her front door. Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t want to attend soigné Cinderellaesque balls; come Saturday evening, she want feh go a-dance hall. And the scourge of the little girl and her granny can’t be a wolf; no such thing in Jamaica. Instead, he becomes that boogie man from Caribbean folklore, Brer Tiger. These are changes that should be superficial, but that end up giving the story a completely different feel. Even the title had to change from “Riding the Red” to “Red Rider,” a creole phrase that evoked Caribbean music and sexual innuendo. In my hands, massa’s tools don’t dismantle massa’s house – and in fact, I don’t want to destroy it so much as I want to undertake massive renovations – they build me a house of my own.

  So, a little while ago, Uppinder approached me about co-editing an anthology of postcolonial science fiction short stories written exclusively by people of colour. The idea excited me. If I were to edit such an anthology on my own, I would likely have chosen to include white writers, since I feel that a dialogue about the effects of colonialism is one that white folks need to have with the rest of us, but I also understand and believe in the importance of creating defended spaces where marginalized groups of people can discuss their own marginalization. I wanted to see what would happen if we handed out massa’s tools and said, “Go on; let’s see what you build.”

  What you hold in your hand is the result; stories that take the meme of colonizing the natives and, from the experience of the colonizee, critique it, pervert it, fuck with it, with irony, with anger, with h
umour, and also, with love and respect for the genre of science fiction that makes it possible to think about new ways of doing things.

  Toronto, March 2004

  SECTION I

  THE BODY

  The first four stories in the anthology – “Deep End” by Nisi Shawl, “Griots of the Galaxy” by Andrea Hairston, “Toot Sweet Matricia” by Suzette Mayr, and “Rachel” by Larissa Lai – explore the close connections between body and identity. In “Deep End,” a black jailed woman struggles with questions of identity and community as she hurtles towards a new planet. Hairston’s story makes literal the figure of the griot as the embodiment of communal memory. Mayr appropriates an old Irish folktale in an attempt to address her postcolonial hybrid identity. And in Lai’s “Rachel,” a replicant’s attempt to understand her implanted memories racializes that neutral but somehow always white construction, the android.

  Most recently, Nisi Shawl’s stories have been published in Asimov’s SF Magazine and Strange Horizons; they also appear in Mojo: Conjure Stories and in both volumes of the groundbreaking Dark Matter anthology series. With her friend Cindy Ward, she teaches “Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction,” a class based on her thought-provoking essay “Transracial Writing for the Sincere.” A member of the board of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, she lives in Seattle, on a direct bus route to the beach.

  Deep End

  Nisi Shawl

  The pool was supposed to be like freespace. Enough like it, anyway, to help Wayna acclimate to her download. She went in first thing every “morning,” as soon as Dr Ops, the ship’s mind, awakened her. Too bad it wasn’t scheduled for later; all the slow, meat-based activities afterwards were a drag.

  The voices of the pool’s other occupants boomed back and forth in an odd, uncontrolled manner, steel-born echoes muffling and exposing what was said. The temperature varied irregularly, warm intake jets competing with cold currents and, Wayna suspected, illicitly released urine. Overhead lights speckled the wall, the ceiling, the water with a shifting, uneven glare.

  Psyche Moth was a prison ship. Like all those on board, Wayna was an upload of a criminal’s mind. The process of uploading her had destroyed her physical body. Punishment. Then the ship, with Wayna and 248,961 other prisoners, set off on a long voyage to another star. The prisoners cycled through consciousness: one year on, four years off. Of the eighty-seven years en route, Wayna had only lived through sixteen. More punishment, though it was unclear whether it was oblivion or the time spent in freespace that constituted the actual punishment. Or maybe the mandatory classes they took there really were intended to be rehabilitative, as Dr Ops claimed.

  Now she spent most of her time as meat. When Psyche Moth had reached its goal and verified that the world it called Amends was colonizable, her group had been the second downloaded into empty clones, right after the trustees.

  Wayna’s jaw ached. She’d been clenching it, trying to amp up her sensory inputs. She paddled toward the deep end, consciously relaxing her useless facial muscles. A trustee had told her it was typical to translocate missing controls.

  Then the pain hit.

  White! Heat! There then gone – the lash of a whip.

  Wayna stopped moving. Her suit held her up. She floated, waiting. Nothing else happened. Tentatively, she kicked and stroked her way to the steps rising from the pool’s shallows, nodding to those she passed. At the door to the showers, it hit her again: a shock of electricity slicing from right shoulder to left hip. She caught her breath and continued in.

  The showers were empty. Wayna was the first one from her hour out of the pool, and it was too soon for the next hour to wake up. She turned on the water and stood in its welcome warmth. What was going on? She’d never felt anything like this, not that she could remember – and surely she wouldn’t have forgotten something so intense. She stripped off her wet suit and hung it to dry. Instead of dressing in her overall and reporting to the laundry, her next assignment, she retreated into her locker and linked with Dr Ops.

  In the sphere of freespace, his office always hovered in the northwest quadrant, about halfway up from the horizon. Doe, Wayna’s honeywoman, disliked this placement. Why pretend he was anything other than central to the whole setup? she asked. Why not put himself smack dab in the middle where he belonged? Doe distrusted Dr Ops and everything about Psyche Moth. Wayna understood why. But there was nothing else. Not for eight light-years in any direction. According to Dr Ops.

  She swam into his pink-walled waiting room and eased her icon into a chair, which automatically posted a request for the AI’s attention. A couple of other prisoners were there ahead of her; one disappeared soon after she sat. A few more minutes objective measure, and the other was gone as well. Then it was Wayna’s turn.

  Dr Ops presented as a lean-faced Caucasian man with a shock of mixed brown and blond hair. He wore an anachronistic headlamp and stethoscope and a gentle, kindly persona. “I have your readouts, of course, but why don’t you tell me in your own words what’s going on?”

  He looked like he was listening. When she finished, he sat silent for a few seconds – much more time than he needed to consider what she’d said. Making an ostentatious display of his concern.

  “There’s no sign of nerve damage,” he told her. “Nothing wrong with your spine or any of your articulation or musculature.”

  “So then how come –”

  “It’s probably nothing,” the AI said, interrupting her. “But just in case, let’s give you the rest of the day off. Take it easy – outside your locker, of course. I’ll clear your bunkroom for the next twenty-five hours. Lie down. Put in some face time with your friends.”

  “’Probably?’”

  “I’ll let you know for sure tomorrow morning. Right now, relax. Doctor’s orders.” He smiled and logged her out. He could do that. It was his system.

  Wayna tongued open her locker; no use staying in there without access to freespace. She put on her overall and walked up the corridor to her bunkroom. Fellow prisoners passed her heading the other way to the pool: no one she’d known back on Earth, no one she had gotten to know that well in freespace or since the download. Plenty of time for that onplanet. The woman with the curly red hair was called Robeson, she was pretty sure. They smiled at each other. Robeson walked hand in hand with a slender man whose mischievous smile reminded Wayna of Thad. It wasn’t him. Thad was scheduled for later download. Wayna was lucky to have Doe with her.

  Another pain. Not so strong this time. Strong enough, though. Sweat dampened her skin. She kept going, almost there.

  There. Through the doorless opening she saw the mirror she hated, ordered up by one of the two women she timeshared with. It was only partly obscured by the genetics charts the other woman taped everywhere. Immersion learning. Even Wayna was absorbing something from it.

  But not now. She lay on the bunk without looking at anything, eyes open. What was wrong with her?

  Probably nothing.

  Relax.

  She did her body awareness exercises, tensing and loosening different muscle groups. She’d gotten as far as her knees when Doe walked in. Stood over her till Wayna focused on her honeywoman’s new visage. “Sweetheart,” Doe said. Her pale fingers stroked Wayna’s face. “Dr Ops told a trustee you wanted me.”

  “No – I mean yes, but I didn’t ask –”

  Doe’s expression froze, flickered, froze again.

  “Don’t be – it’s so hard, can’t you just –” Wayna reached for and found both Doe’s hands and held them. They felt cool and small and dry. She pressed them against her overall’s open V-neck and slid them beneath the fabric, forcing them to stroke her shoulders.

  Making love to Doe in her download seemed like cheating. Wayna wondered what Thad’s clone would look like, and if they’d be able to travel to his group’s settlement to see him.

  Anticipating agony, Wayna found herself hung up, nowhere near ecstasy. Doe pulled back and looked down
at her, expecting an explanation. So Wayna had to tell her what little she knew.

  “You! You weren’t going to say anything! Just let me hurt you –“ Doe had zero tolerance for accidentally inflicting pain, the legacy of her marriage to a closeted masochist.

  “It wouldn’t be anything you did! And I don’t know if –”

  Doe tore aside the paper they had taped across the doorway for privacy. From her bunk, Wayna heard her raging along the corridor, slapping the walls.

  Face time was over.

  Taken off of her normal schedule, Wayna had no idea how to spend the rest of her day. Not lying down alone. Not after that. She tried, but she couldn’t.

  Relax.

  Ordinarily when her laundry shift was over, she was supposed to show up in the cafeteria and eat. Never one of her favourite activities, even back on Earth. She went there early, though, surveying the occupied tables. The same glaring lights hung from the ceiling here as in the pool, glinting off plastic plates and water glasses. The same confused noise, the sound of overlapping conversations. No sign of Doe.

  She stood in line. The trustee in charge started to give her a hard time about not waiting for her usual lunch hour. He shut up suddenly; Dr Ops must have tipped him a clue. Trustees were in constant contact with the ship’s mind – part of why Wayna hadn’t volunteered to be one.

  Mashed potatoes. Honey mustard nuggets. Slaw. All freshly factured, filled with nutrients and the proper amount of fiber for this stage of her digestive tract’s maturation.

  She sat at a table near the disposal dump. The redhead, Robeson, was there too, and a man – a different one than Wayna had seen her with before. Wayna introduced herself. She didn’t feel like talking, but listening was fine. The topic was the latest virch from the settlement site. She hadn’t done it yet.

  This installment had been recorded by a botanist; lots of information on grass analogs and pollinating insects. “We know more about Jubilee than Psyche Moth,” Robeson said.