Our fantasy and science fiction structure exists in a system that tries to convince its inhabitants that the world is binary, that everything is the group that is Us, and everything else, which is Them.
Although the science fiction community has engaged in a significant, concerted, and necessary effort to correct for many of Campbell’s prejudices surrounding race and gender, there has yet to be a similar corrective effort on matters concerning class and labour.
For speculative fiction to become a truly inclusive and egalitarian space, every axis of exclusion must be interrogated, and every potential drawbridge turned into a gateway.
The stories and poem were accepted around the concept “What is the legacy and the future of Africa and the African Diaspora?” We wanted to create an open-ended anthology that wasn’t easily defined as horror, Afrofuturism, and any number of genres in between. It was, and still is, an ambitious goal.
"A Tale Of Truths was inspired by the European Baroque and Rococo eras, and thus a very stratified society seemed appropriate, with a little bit of class conflict. I was also inspired by the Japanese Heian and Feudal era, which had maybe even more minutely stratified societies than 1600s Europe."
"I should say that there were two issues of Journal of Palestine Studies (in Arabic) that asked writers, not only Palestinian writers, to imagine a future Palestine, using literary, but other genres too. But since these were in Arabic, they are not on the radar."
In place of fear that they will lose control, the posthumans accept that control was never in their grasp and that the natural world extends beyond their reach and that nature has a beauty that is beyond the human.
"Imagining alternatives is important. I think this is what drew me to writing speculative fiction. Speculative fiction has more flexibility and range than realism to not just to ask what-ifs but to paint a picture so lucid and so real of a probability or a future or a reimagined present."
