This Mind and Body Cyborg as a queer figure raises its head in Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s 2019 epistolary novel This Is How You Lose the Time War, as two Cyborg bodies shed their previous subjectivities in order to find a queer understanding of one another.
By engaging the vampiric archetype, Butler and Gomez write black queer lives into an eternal future where we can continue our coalition building, our resistance of hegemony, and the creation of chosen families.
Reading “Good Hunting,” which fuses Sinology with speculative fiction, makes me feel something I can’t quite articulate, between the Eureka spark of insight and the quiet thrill of winning a game.
Orcs are a species—more commonly labeled a “race”—of wicked, dangerous humanoids found en masse in JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth as well as most of analog and electronic gaming. But Tolkien derived their ugly appearance and savage temperament, like almost all orcish traits common across different media, from a long and painful history.
Now it feels like a lag is happening. A disconnect between the writers and the people the books are written for. In an ideal world, YA books would be written for current teen readers, but they’re not.
The structures of Clytemnestra and Essun’s societies are built upon a foundation of subjugation and control of people like them: women and orogenes, respectively.
Yeah, the horizon is broad for African SFF, maybe too broad I fear. Like you intimated, the light is on AfroSFF and us writers are defining and redefining its boundaries every day.
