Writers Laurie Penny, Leigh Alexander, RJ Barker and Mazin Saleem got together with articles editor Eli Lee for a roundtable on emotional labour, and how it's explored in SFF.

Nisi Shawl's letter comes from Australian publisher and champion of under-represented voices in fiction, Twelfth Planet Press, and is published in their upcoming collection of essays and letters dedicated to SFF pioneer Octavia Butler, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler.

For some, it is enough to replicate problematic characterisation of the past with a simple romantic gloss – a key example of this would be Meyer’s Twilight series, in which the werewolves remain troublesome and animalistic natives, with the white invaders recast as suave and attractive vampires. For others, the female werewolf comes to represent an opportunity for reclaiming power; she is the ‘underdog’ who can fight against patriarchal/colonial power, a super-powered rebel who can overturn the hegemony (male werewolves are also cast in this light in some contemporary fiction and film).

The crux of cultural appropriation is about power and the ability to represent one's own community in a space where one's own community is misrepresented and is actively oppressed as a result of that misrepresentation.

Articles editor Joyce Chng sat down with Australian speculative fiction writers and editors to discuss the state of SFF down under.

I want the audience to feel almost both the feeling of not wanting to look at the image, but somehow not being able to look away.

"If change is inevitable, predictable, beneficial, doesn't logic demand that you be a part of it?"

I see many pencil stubs, spent Wacom nibs, and an alarming amount of coffee in my future.

The worse the situation becomes, the more necessary to imagine something better.

I want the viewer to feel the piece even if they don’t understand it.