The world’s a mess. How do thoughtful people make sense of it all? In this series we’ve asked a number of our authors to suggest a book, philosopher, work of art – or anything else, for that matter – that will help to make sense of it all.
Some writers deny their work belongs in either fantasy or science fiction. Among them, ironically, Margaret Attwood, whose own 1985 “Handmaid’s Tale” time-travelled to the site of some of its own dystopian speculations when Donald Trump became US President in 2017. … because it doesn’t use the default gender pronouns, a lot of readers found themselves very aware of the fact that a default was being used, and it wasn’t the normal one… a really interesting experience.
Just as Okorafor in “Lagoon” and Thompson in “Rosewater” take us to Nigeria to illuminate the “what-ifs” of that society for Nigerians themselves, so the works of Liu Cixin, Xia Jia and multiple other Chinese speculative writers unfold Chinese concerns. Advocates of both sub-genres employ defences citing “realism”: war really is hell; people really are engaged in a Darwinian struggle for survival; white men really always rule.
For a writer such as Aliette de Bodard, of Vietnamese heritage, it’s Annamese dragons that pervade her steampunk, fin de siecle Paris. It’s emblematic of the corrupting history of French colonialism. Introducing such new tropes challenges conservative myth-making. She says:
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