Review
So Long Been Dreaming
Edited by Nalo Hopkinson & Uppinder Mehan
Arsenal Pulp Press, 270 pp.
Darth Vader may be black, but Star Wars is a white man’s galaxy. At least, that’s the claim made by editors Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan of the sci-fi anthology of short stories So Long Been Dreaming. They assert that the basis of sci-fi is the exploration of new worlds and new ways of thinking, but its familiar distillation is this: the protagonist travels to a distant world and colonizes the natives. Well, says Hopkinson, that’s not science fiction – that’s history, baby. And the wrong end of it if your skin is tinted.
"To be a person of colour writing science fiction is to be under suspicion of having internalized one’s colonization," Hopkinson writes. This anthology of postcolonial sci-fi is, in her words, meant to "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… and with love and respect for the genre…." Fair enough: the idea is fresh and a little bold. Does it work?
Yes, for the most part. The stories read best when they’re actually embedded in sci-fi, and don’t fly too far into literary fiction. Nisa Shawl’s "Deep End" makes sci-fi inherent to her plot: a jailed black woman’s mind is downloaded into the body of someone she rebelled against. It asks how mind and body form identity. But Suzette Mayr’s "Toot Sweet Matricia" is a literary exercise – it merely appropriates Irish folklore and gives it a speculative, postcolonial twist. Eden Robinson’s "Terminal Avenue" works better. It tackles a future in which First Nations people are increasingly marginalized. Its protagonist indulges in sadomasochistic sex to find some awareness of the present, because his mind is jumbled with memories of a free past.
"The Forgotten Ones" by Karin Lowachee is a classic alien encounter with a twist. The Rumi are a tribal people of whom only the children survive, but they’re the same species as the aliens they encounter. The Rumi refuse the aliens’ – their ancestors’ – invitation to come home. The Rumi insist they are home.
And that’s what So Long Been Dreaming is about – the conflict between belonging and not belonging. With its troop of literary authors in sci-fi armour, the stories present quality explorations of dispossession of mind, of body, of home – evils more subtle than Darth Vader by a hundred parsecs.
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