Robinson however is not ignorant but avoidant in a more complex way. He is approaching the apocalypse still seeking a saviour. Still anxious about the earth, even as he seeks to know, by personifying it. The apocalypse is not an event; it is a structure. This is the insight about settler colonialism coined by Patrick Wolfe.
I have a deep love for stories that tell new fairy tales in the old style, or that take the old tales, reimagine them, reshape them, and turn them into something new, whether it’s by putting a different spin on the characters or the setting or the point of view or something else. Luckily for me, and you, there is a lot of masterful and audacious fairy tale/folktale-inspired short fiction to feast upon.
There is danger in representing ourselves, in being seen. We are not necessarily equipped to have discussions describing experiences with systems of representation. In our eagerness to see more difference, we do not always take into account how difference is exploited and marketed. Within the discourses of multiculturalism many of us have grown up in, no matter what our ideological stance, we instantly become representatives for multiculturalism. It’s easy to encourage representations of the Other, because the Other is ourselves, and we often desire representations within the frameworks we were familiar with.
