Is a film about circles that loops its ending into its beginning more than a gimmick? Is a story about boredom that’s intentionally boring a big deal? Is a sprawling book about the sprawl of existence doing anything interesting? By its nature, Always Coming Home contains a kind of resistance that other books by Le Guin did not, though maybe resistance is the wrong word.
I wanted humanity to lose its sense of exceptionalism and specialness. We’re just one species out of countless others, and we cannot survive without banding together and developing a more communal mindset.
I like to write from the point of view of monsters. I’m a Muslim-Arab man, and I think a lot about demonization—who gets turned into monsters and who gets viewed as monsters.
I look forward to reading more works of science fiction, especially space westerns, that can envision a future where tools of death, regardless of their shape or function, are not considered indicative of the “advanced” state of a culture.
"There’s something sterile to the environments so often preferred by hard and military SF, where everyone is in uniform without a hint of how they live outside of it, that forgets that, even in the far and dazzling future, people are still people."
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CONTENT WARNING: show warningsThis page contains: Ableism Abuse Child sexual abuse Mental health issues Rape/sexual assault Shaming
As a disabled immigrant with limited resources who is also a caregiver, I attend cons very sporadically. But at every single convention until just a few years ago, as well as online, I have had multiple versions of the following conversation:
Me: “Let’s discuss disability representation in SFF literature.”
Person: “Miles Vorkosigan!” or “You should try the Vorkosigan Saga!”
I explain that I have read all the books in Lois McMaster Bujold’s many-volume space opera epic, and reread the earlier ones multiple times so much that I can quote them verbatim, but I’d rather not have repeated discussions of the main protagonist Miles as the model of disability representation.
My focus is to illuminate the stories of queer Jewish women, to write us back into the stories that never mentioned us because we aren’t supposed to exist.
What I wanted, with this universe, was to capture the sense of wonder from the early days of computing. I mean, we sent people to the moon in a jiffy-pop spaceship programmed by women with pencils and pieces of cardstock.
