Djibril al-Ayad is general editor of The Future Fire, an online magazine of social-political speculative fiction. In the past, TFF published themed issues on Feminist SF and Queer SF, and two guest-edited, themed anthologies are currently in development:Outlaw Bodies, themed around trans, queer and disability issues with a cyberpunk flavor, edited by Lori Selke; and We See a Different Frontier, which will publish colonialism-themed stories from outside of the white, anglo, first-world perspective, edited by Fabio Fernandes, who also interviews.

Fabio Fernandes: First of all, Djibril al-Ayad is not your birth name. I’m not going to ask you your former name, but I’m curious to know why you chose this particular name, and what meaning (linguistic, social, political) it has in your life?

Djibril al-Ayad: Yes, “Djibril” is the nom de guerre I use in speculative fiction publishing and campaigning. I use another pseudonym as a horror/cyberpunk writer and a third (almost my original name) as an active academic historian. I use three names primarily to keep my web presence distinct, for convenience, rather than trying to hide my identity or anything. (Having said that, I do prefer not to cross the streams!)

In fact “Djibril” is pretty close to being my own name; it’s a regional variant of my given name, and Ayad was the family name of my Algerian grandfather. My (French) grandmother died when my father was a small child, and her relatives took him away to be raised in a vile orphanage run by sadistic nuns rather than let his poor and foreign father keep him, so my family has no real Algerian roots, we never learned Arabic, etc., and my grandfather is long dead. In a way my reclaiming the name is a reaction against the injustice of that story, which has always made me angry, although no one else on either side of the family seems to see it that way.

FF: How the idea of creating The Future Fire came to you? And, speaking of names, how did the magazine get its name?

DA: I’ve always liked the idea of running a science fiction magazine. I grew up with this romantic image of the pulps and of xeroxed fanzines produced at home, and the idea of putting something out there full of weird fiction, surreal art, political agendas and baffling juxtapositions appealed to my love of collage and recycled scrap art. It wasn’t until I was working in digital publication myself that I realised I could actually do this, and so in 2004 I got together with a bunch of friends in Scotland, Switzerland and the USA, bought some webspace, and started writing a “manifesto” (really a call for subs).

The name was the hardest thing. Twenty years ago when I thought about putting out a 12-page xeroxed pamphlet, I was going to call it “Ya God, it’s a…” The idea was for each month’s theme to add a different word to the end of that phrase—but the juvenile humour was in the fact that yagoditsa is apparently the Russian word for “buttock”. (So clever. So glad we didn’t have the internet then.) I think The Future Fire name was more or less random, or the result of a brainstorm between the five original editors or something. It worked because of the alliteration, the dystopian connotations, and the environmental postapocalypse feel of it too. I think we all thought this was mostly going to be an Eco-SF magazine in those days.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards
PO Box 64128, Sunnyvale CA 94088-4128 USA

info@sfftawards.org; http://www.sfftwards.org/

For immediate release – May 21^st, 2012

Finalists for the 2012 SF&F Translation Awards

The Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation (ARESFFT) is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2012 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (for works published in 2011). There are two categories: Long Form and Short Form.

Long Form

Good Luck, Yukikaze by Chohei Kambayashi, translated from the Japanese by Neil Nadelman (Haikasoru)

Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti (Bloomsbury Qatar)

The Dragon Arcana by Pierre Pevel, translated from the French by Tom Clegg (Gollancz)

Midnight Palace by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves (Little, Brown & Company)

Zero by Huang Fan, translated from the Chinese by John Balcom (Columbia University Press)

Short Form

“The Fish of Lijiang” by Chen Qiufan, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #59, August 2011)

“Spellmaker” by Andrzej Sapkowski, translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel (A Polish Book of Monsters, Michael Kandel, PIASA Books)

“Paradiso” by Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin (Liquid Imagination #9, Summer 2011)

“The Boy Who Cast No Shadow” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, translated from the Dutch by Laura Vroomen (PS Publishing)

“The Short Arm of History” by Kenneth Krabat, translated from the Danish by Niels Dalgaard (Sky City: New Science Fiction Stories by Danish Authors, Carl-Eddy Skovgaard ed., Science Fiction Cirklen)

“The Green Jacket” by Gudrun Östergaard, self-translated from the Danish (Sky City: New Science Fiction Stories by Danish Authors, Carl-Eddy Skovgaard ed., Science Fiction Cirklen)

“Stanlemian” by Wojciech Orliński, translated from the Polish by Danusia Stok (Lemistry, Comma Press)

The nominees were announced at Åcon 5 <http://aconfive.wordpress.com/>, a joint Finnish-Swedish convention, over the weekend May 19-20. The announcement was read by Guest of Honor, Catherynne M. Valente.

The winning works will be announced at the 2012 Finncon on the weekend of July 21-22 <http://2012.finncon.org/>. Each winning author and translator will receive a cash prize of US$350. ARESFFT Board member Cheryl Morgan and jury member Irma Hirsjärvi will be present to make the announcement.

ARESFFT President Professor Gary K. Wolfe said: “I think this list proves that once you start looking for it, the diversity and quality of translated science fiction and fantasy are considerably greater than most of us had suspected, and I hope the nominations list calls attention to works too often overlooked by the usual awards processes.”

The money for the prize fund was obtained primarily through a 2011 fund-raising event for which prizes were kindly donated by George R.R. Martin, China Miéville, Cory Doctorow, Lauren Beukes, Ken MacLeod, Paul Cornell, Adam Roberts, Elizabeth Bear, Hal Duncan, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Peter F. Hamilton, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, Nalo Hopkinson, Juliet E. McKenna, Aliette de Bodard, Nicola Griffith, Kelley Eskridge, Twelfth Planet Press, Deborah Kalin, Baen Books, Small Beer Press, Lethe Press, Aeon Press, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Kari Sperring, Helen Lowe, Rob Latham and Cheryl Morgan.

The jury for the awards was Dale Knickerbocker (Chair); Kari Maund, Abhijit Gupta, Hiroko Chiba, Stefan Ekman, Ekaterina Sedia, Felice Beneduce & Irma Hirsjärvi.

ARESFFT is a California Non-Profit Corporation funded entirely by donations.

Contact

info@sfftawards.org; http://www.sfftwards.org/
Cheryl Morgan

This is the story’s first publication.

The Portal Plague

Dinesh Rao

I

Ganesh had chanced on the job advertisement in the back pages of a science magazine. The requirements read like the universe had sent him a personal message. Experience in mapping. Check. That time surveying stream boundaries in Southern India. Experience in navigation. Check. Two years studying the migratory habits of dragonflies in Spain. Experience in robotics. A one-year side project working on applying bee navigation techniques to develop autonomous flying machines in Australia. Fluency in English and knowledge of Spanish. Among others. He’d applied for the job and in a couple of months his life was about to change again.

Ganesh looked around the room, took a deep breath and allowed the familiar sensation of impending departure to wash over him. It had been a great time, but two years in the same job was already the longest he’d spent in any particular place, other than his childhood in India. He finished packing his bag in half an hour, felt its heft and waited for the taxi.

On the ride to the airport, he started reading a paperback novel but failed, his mind was too full of the future. A new project, a new country, and most of all, a new problem: the Portal Plague.

There was no one to receive him at the airport in Mexico City, and the hubbub prickled his ears. It had been a long time since he’d last used his Spanish, but the blur of words swirling around him were gradually coming into focus. A kindly stranger helped him get to the overnight bus to Xalapa. As the city receded, his previous life did as well, and he settled into the new one. The first days were the best, when everything was shiny and interesting, and the game was to find connections; similar and dissimilar things. Windows and mirrors.

II

The Portal Plague of Xalapa started a few years ago. No one knew exactly when or how. At first the portals were all over the news, tons of researchers studying them, daily newspaper accounts, dramatic stories. But the reports had tapered off. When the news of people dying started to spread, the government cut off access to the portals, all foreign visitors to Xalapa were screened, and prestigious projects and contracts were given only to Mexican researchers and Mexican institutions. The world protested, but there was little they could do. The bulk of the projects went to a team from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, but there were a few teams here and there around Xalapa. Everybody wanted in on the action, even though they had no idea what they were up against. A few research organizations found a loophole and advertised for seemingly innocuous research assistants and post-docs, in order to get at least some experts on the problem, but it was slow going. Meanwhile, while the politicians and the scientists squabbled, daily life in Xalapa turned into a nightmare.

The portals were invisible and borderless flattened orbs. They appeared and disappeared in highly unpredictable ways. Some were small, the size of coins, and others were large enough to swallow buses. The portals could be in the middle of roads, in cafes and on walls. So far the only way to detect a portal’s presence was a faint sulphurous smell in the air, but it was usually too late because by the time you noticed it you were already through. Normal city life had become impossible. One might be heading to an appointment at the bank and end up on the outskirts of the city in a coffee plantation. People stepping out of their houses ended up plastered in the middle of a traffic jam. There was no way to know when or where the next portal would turn up. The death rate started climbing. The government decided to tackle this by training an ad hoc army with sniffer dogs to detect the telltale portal stink. The army wandered the city looking for portals, and once one was detected they would stand in front of it waving a red rag. The portaleros, as they were called, were given red t-shirts, a convenient way for the government to advertise its party colours ahead of next year’s election. It was very much a local low tech way of dealing with the crisis, and the politicians knew that the mere appearance of doing something would be enough to keep the people from rebelling. When the portal appearances finally stabilized, the smaller ones became less frequent and, on any given day, there would be as few as twenty portals scattered all around Xalapa. Life went on, but Xalapa still felt like a city under siege.

III

Ganesh met his new boss at the cafeteria in front of the Institute. He was trying to get a cup of coffee before the meeting, but was unable to convey to the lady at the counter just how much milk he wanted in the coffee. Finally he gave up and asked for an express and milk on the side. He turned around and there she was. He recognized her from her photo on the Institute’s website. Not trusting his Spanish anymore, Ganesh introduced himself to Dr Araceli Mendoza in English. Dr Araceli was a slim, silver haired woman who spoke in rapid fire sentences. Her accent disconcerted Ganesh at first, but her manner put him at ease instantly. They may have been worlds apart, but he already knew that he would get along fine with his new boss. They small-talked their way through the coffee, and then Araceli led him to her office, perched high on the seventh floor of the building. The cloud forests surrounded the Institute, and from her window one could see all the way to the neighbouring volcano, its gleaming white tip shimmering in the clear morning air. Araceli saw him gawking and said,

-That’s the Pico de Orizaba.

Ganesh started out of his involuntary reverie.

The next hour passed in a blur of introductions — the PhD students, Raul the lanky lad from a small neighbouring town called Coatepec, exotically attired Sophia from Tlaxcala — and finally ended at the desk assigned to him. No view of the volcano for him, but it was good to have a place to put his stuff. Araceli dropped in to hand him a bunch of scientific articles, and Ganesh was left with a curious sense of dislocation. The new life was beginning, but he felt like he was still travelling, rather than having arrived.

Life soon settled into a routine. A few minutes’ walk everyday from his room in the city centre, a morning coffee at an old fashioned cafe, the bus to the Institute, climbing up the hill to the building, and catching up on his reading. Xalapa quickly started to feel like home, from the familiar sense of crowdedness to the blending in; people kept assuming he was a local and asking him for directions and such. The occasional seminars, and lab discussions, and evening explorations of the city. He started noticing the portaleros, and recognizing the smell of the portals. Every morning, he checked the newspaper, skimming over the headlines, but focussing on the daily portal report. Previous studies, done in part by Araceli’s group, had established that now the Portals were persistent for an average of 13.5 hours, and this allowed the newspaper to collate information about the latest sighting. And since citizens were keen on informing the newspaper about new ones, it was getting easier to spot and track a portal. Ganesh knew that he could just as well use their specialized software for tracking portals, but there was a sense of shared endeavour in reading the reports in the newspaper. Some portal news was always present on the front pages, usually dramatic stories, like a maid who stepped out to buy maize flour and ended up on the balcony of the Governor’s Palace downtown, or the cyclist who almost drowned when he inadvertently emerged in the lakes around the University.

Ganesh’s first encounter with the portals was almost an anticlimax. One morning, on the way to the bus, he smelled the sulphurous stink, but failed to react in time to avoid the telltale orb of blurry air. A click, a snap and a whirr later he was standing on the road in front of the Institute. He took one step, caught his breath, stilled his crazily beating heart with a long deep breath, and looked behind him, and there it was. The telltale smell and the blurry air. He pulled out a page from his notebook and wrote in big letters, PORTAL AQUI! CUIDADO!, and affixed the warning on a tree next to the portal. The whole group later visited it to take some measurements, and this portal was assigned a code bearing his initials. Ganesh found this gesture gratifying. At the end of the day, he took a chance. He decided to save himself the bus ride back home by travelling via portal. Telling no one, because that would be crazy, he waited till there were no people around, and stepped into the blurry orb. The same suddenness enveloped him, and when he focussed his eyes again, he was standing on the side of the road in the tunnel under the Parque Juarez, about to be hit by a scooter. Indian instincts, long honed in the art of avoiding insane traffic, saved him. He leapt out of the way, reaching the side of the tunnel just in time, but not fast enough to avoid the scooter’s mirror, which dinged his elbow hard.

The next day, Ganesh excitedly recounted his experience to Araceli, and got an earful in return.

-What! Are you crazy? How could you do such a thing? You could have been killed! Maybe I didn’t warn you enough, but I never imagined you would take such a risk.

Ganesh stood dumbfounded.

-Read this article, maybe then you’ll understand what we’re facing here.

She rummaged through her desk and produced an article written by the UNAM team, collating the fates of the hundreds of people who had been through the portals. Thirty-five per cent ended in death or accident. Ganesh felt a flush spreading across his face, and a much delayed adrenaline rush.

He stammered,

-I won’t do it again. I don’t know what I was thinking.

-Yeah, it’s my fault, I didn’t warn you enough. I will assign one of my lab people to watch over you.

-No that won’t be necessary, I think I get it now.

Araceli looked unconvinced. An awkward pause followed, her angry words still ringing in his ear.

Suddenly she said,

-But you know, that’s really interesting. We had assumed that the portals connected one region of Xalapa to another, and that they were two-way. You’ve shown very dramatically that they are not. Which changes everything. In fact you just about managed to ruin an ongoing project, but in a good way. Now we have some tangible evidence that the portals function very differently. Let me… give me a minute…

She turned to her computer and launched the portal-modelling software, and started fiddling with the parameters. Ganesh stood there for a while, but Araceli paid him no attention. Ganesh watched her manipulate the program, she fluently swooped and soared between the panels and the sub-panels, clicking and clacking, flitting around the options so fast that it was almost impossible to follow. Finally she leaned back in her chair, took a short breath and pressed RUN. The computer wheezed.

She turned to him and said,

-This will take a while, but the problem now is much more complicated. The mapping will have to be reconsidered entirely. I think our next step is to finish the probes as soon as possible. How’s it coming along?

Ganesh had started reprogramming the probe software based on the insect flight work he’d done earlier.

-So far so good. I don’t know if the tracking will work when the probe is within the portal though.

-Only one way to know. Tell me when it’s done, we’ll organize a pilot study.

IV

A few weeks passed, the incessant dripping rain – the famous chipi chipi – eased slightly, and it was time to test the probe. Araceli, Ganesh, and the rest of the lab went to a known stable portal and, with the help of the portalero, set up their equipment. The portal hovered just outside a famous local baker’s shop, whose owner was annoyed that he could smell the portal stink over the aroma of fresh bread. They knew where the probe would end up, just a couple of blocks away. Araceli and Ganesh stayed at the entry point, while Raul and Sophia headed off to the purported exit point. Araceli busied herself with the laptop, checking and rechecking the parameters, and finally seemed to be satisfied with the preparations.

Ganesh said,

-I hope it works.

-It should. I can’t think of what might go wrong, at least from our side. We need to get this project going very soon.

Ganesh knew that Araceli was under a lot of pressure to produce some results. The funding agency demanded monthly reports and, to add to the stress, the UNAM team kept firing out papers in rapid succession. He said,

-The UNAM team had another paper out yesterday.

Araceli nodded,

-Yes, I saw the title, but haven’t read it yet. I’m sure it’s another cookie cutter article, rehashing the same stuff. They must have a paper writing machine stashed away somewhere.

-How come I never see them around here? They must be here somewhere.

-They do quick visits, mostly, and besides most of their work is theoretical stuff, so why leave the comfort of the lab?

* * *

The walkie-talkie crackled. They heard Sophia’s voice, over the sing-song cry of a tamale vendor,

-We’re at the exit portal, we got two portaleros to chase away people, and we’re ready.

-Alright then, keep in touch.

* * *

Ganesh turned on the probe. It hovered just in front of his face. He directed its movement with a hacked radio-controller, and Araceli confirmed with her laptop that the probe was indeed being tracked.

Ganesh slowly walked behind the hovering probe to the edge of the portal, and with a final glance backward pushed it into the blurry air. The portal made a tiny popping noise, and the probe disappeared. Immediately, even before Ganesh could turn to Araceli, Sophia buzzed them excitedly,

-GOT IT! IT WORKS!

Araceli looked up from the laptop, and said,

-OK, that’s really good. Let’s wrap up and meet at the cafe.

* * *

Sophia later recounted how the probe hadn’t flown through but rather crashed through. Falling down, as if it had run out of batteries. They would review the data later, but it seemed like the batteries were almost instantly drained when the probe passed through the portal. Araceli was very pleased; they had a tangible result, and now it was simply a matter of scaling up. They started downloading the probe’s data feed, and it was then they noticed the irregularities. The internal clock showed that the probe had been active for five hours. The GPS tracker showed hundreds of data points. The housing of the probe was showing wear and tear even though it was brand new.

The team discussed the pilot study all morning, and it was apparent that even the single probe had generated a wealth of hypotheses. They argued over the irregularities, but it was too soon to say anything. However, Araceli was now more convinced than ever that the portals were some sort of terrestrial wormhole.

Ganesh added,

-And the inside bigger than the outside?

-Yes, we really have to get a camera on the probe. And start the mapping. And fast. We really need to get some data out before the government decides that the UNAM team needs the money more.

Araceli and Raul stayed back in the lab, and Ganesh and Sophia headed back home. Sophia lived quite close to where Ganesh was staying, and she offered him a ride in her old VW Beetle. Sophia was a bit of an amateur linguist, she learnt languages with ease. She spoke some English, and jumped at the chance at practicing. They stopped at a cafe.

Sophia asked,

-How long have you been away from home?

-Oh, around ten, fifteen years or so… Ever since my parents passed away, I’ve found fewer and fewer reasons to go back.

-No family back home?

-Well, I have a brother, but we haven’t spoken in a while. I haven’t even been to India in years.

-That is very sad. You must be always leaving, never staying.

-I suppose it is. But I quite enjoy being a modern nomad, I don’t think I can put down roots anywhere.

-What about Xalapa?

-I really like it here, but then I’ve also really liked the other places I’ve been. But what about you? I know you’re from a different city, what was it…?

-Tlaxcala. It’s to the west, but very close. Maybe we can go there one day, it would be fun to show you around. We normally get tourists from rich countries here, and they always say the same things: the traffic is crazy, everything in disorganized. But you see things differently, no?

Ganesh laughed,

-This is very easy after India. It’s comfortable here: not so organized, not so chaotic.

They chatted into the night, sharing stories and histories, tracing their trajectories through time and space and probabilities. Ganesh relaxed and opened up, as if the recital of experiences made him more assured. All his life he’d felt that his varied history was leading up to something, and he wondered again if this was what he was meant to do.

While saying goodbye, Ganesh discovered that it was much later than he’d realized, and the time spent with Sophia had felt just like a few minutes. Always a good sign, he thought, as they parted reluctantly.

V

The weeks passed by in a blur. Those days of leaving the lab at 4pm to wander through the city and take in the sights were over. Ever since the pilot study, Ganesh and the others had been putting probes in portals, retrieving them, downloading the data and mapping the portals’ locations and the interior distance of the transits. While it sounded simple in theory, they had no idea where the portals would send the probes to, and so they mostly worked on the reported ones. They scanned the portal report in the local newspaper and assembled a list of portals that they could use. They chose the easiest ones, since they had no way of accessing the portals that were hovering above the lake or high up next to the seventh floor of a building. Meanwhile the death toll increased, despite an increase in the number of portaleros. Election fever was heating up, and the governor was getting very nervous that his management of the portals would affect his party’s chances in the elections. More and more money was suddenly poured into the problem. Some of it did trickle down to Araceli’s group, but not enough to change the scale of the investigation.

And then everything changed. The portals changed. And people started disappearing frequently. Probes started disappearing. The pressure on the government grew intense, and Xalapa’s governor started haemorrhaging money, but mostly to fund advertising campaigns to show that he was doing something about the problem. There was talk that the military would get involved, but nobody expected any good to come out of that. The disappearances were very worrying, and the situation took a sharp turn for the worse when a prominent politician disappeared. The politician’s family started raising hell, and suddenly the Portal Plague was back on the front pages of the newspapers. Many countries offered their support and aid, but were always refused, the government saying that this was an internal matter.

Araceli’s lab now looked like a military command post; maps were strewn all around, one entire side was scattered with cameras and probe parts. The walkie talkie crackled from time to time, and people were always walking in and out. Araceli called an emergency lab meeting and everybody assembled around a table.

Araceli said,

-I have some news. One of the portals is stable. I mean really stable. It hasn’t changed since we started tracking them. It’s the only one that we know that hasn’t disappeared, so we’re going to focus our attention on it. I also have bad news. Well, bad for us. The rumours are that the UNAM team is very close to making a breakthrough, so it’s now a sprint. No more leisurely make-hypothesis-and-test-it kind of science.

Raul said,

-What kind of breakthrough?

-I’m not entirely sure. They’ve been very hush-hush from the beginning, but their last paper made me think that they are trying to predict where the next portal will appear.

They all laughed at that. Everybody had seen the giant portal map that was updated daily; trying to predict the portals was like trying to predict where raindrops would fall.

Araceli continued,

-I’ve decided to enter the stable portal. I’ve done all the analyses I can think of, and it seems that the probes entering the stable portal always end up in the corner of the street Callejon del Diamante. The time taken to traverse is negligible. It’s a very quick mission, we go in, measure all we can and come out. Raul and Sophia, you two can monitor me from the outside.

Ganesh was instantly alarmed,

-But what if the portal changes again?

-That’s why we have to do this now, as soon as possible. Of course there is a risk that the portal would send us elsewhere, but the probabilities are on our side. Ganesh, you must also help Raul and Sophia monitor us.

Both Raul and Sophia insisted on going in with Araceli, and finally they decided that only Ganesh would stay back. The meeting broke up in a flurry of activity. They started gathering all their equipment in preparation for the transit.

Ganesh helped them get ready and they decided to meet early next morning, at dawn, to minimize any interference from casual onlookers.

VI

Early next morning, Ganesh got a sudden glimpse of the suntipped Pico de Orizaba as he rounded a corner on the way to the Plaza Xallitic. He hadn’t seen the volcano since his first day; the horizon had always been cloudy. Seeing it reminded him that he was here, in Xalapa, in Mexico. He felt a twinge at the thought of being in such a dramatic landscape, and it simultaneously reminded him that he was so far from India. It had been years since he had any normal connection with his hometown, but even his many years of scientific nomadism couldn’t take away the feeling that no matter how far or how comfortable he was in a foreign country, it would never be home. After so many years outside, even home was no longer home: his city had grown in the meantime, and every trip back felt like visiting an old friend who had had plastic surgery done.

Lost in thought, Ganesh arrived at the rendezvous spot in the small fog-encrusted plaza. Araceli was already there, tapping away at her laptop. Sophia and Raul arrived soon after. They exchanged pleasantries shivering with the morning chill. Or nervousness, thought Ganesh.

Araceli took a look around, checked her laptop one last time before handing it to Ganesh, picked up her bag, and said,

-Alright, everything ready? OK – let’s go. Ganesh, we’ll meet you at the Callejon del Diamante.

They stepped up to the portal and one by one entered the blurry orb. Ganesh watched them disappear, and the tracking program came to life. He watched the three dots on the screen, moving this way and that, and then settling down. He knew that they would have already arrived at the exit. He packed up the bag, and started walking towards the Callejon at a brisk pace.

Xalapa was coming alive with activity. Joggers brushed past him, the gas truck went by playing its distinctive jingle. The portaleros had already taken their positions, their red shirts dotting the roads. Ganesh arrived at the exit point, expecting to see a portalero, but there was nobody there. He looked around, thinking he had mistaken the location, and saw that the portalero in question was just arriving at his spot. But the team was not there. Ganesh looked around anxiously, his heart beating faster with every passing minute. He pulled out the laptop and checked the tracker, but it was of little use: the dots had disappeared.

Not knowing what to do, he waited the whole morning at the Callejon del Diamante, stared at by curious onlookers and the knickknack sellers who were setting up their stalls. And then, after a few hours, it was clear that something had gone wrong. Ganesh tried calling them on the cellphone, and the walkie-talkie, thinking maybe they’d ended up at a different exit point, but he got no answer. The team was trapped inside. Sophia was trapped inside.

Ganesh made his way back to the Institute. He greeted his acquaintances mechanically. The lab looked large and empty, still strewn with maps and equipment. He turned on the main computer, and waited for the portal-modelling program to load. To his relief, he saw that the stable portal was still stable, which meant there was a chance that Araceli and the others could be reached. He re-ran the analysis of the probes that had been introduced into the stable portal. All of them made it out through the expected exit. Something must have changed. Some new factor, some parameter. If only there was a pattern. Ganesh knew, even if he did not want to admit it yet, that he would have to go in himself, but he wanted to be sure that there was no other option. He printed out the locations of the latest portals, he ran an animation of all the portals, trying to see a pattern in their appearances; he tried locating the tracking device; and, finally, when the sun was already low and the famous Xalapa fog was enveloping everything in its gloom, he pushed back his chair and closed his eyes in exhaustion. This was getting nowhere.

In the next couple of days, Ganesh tried everything he could think of. He re-read all the papers he could find. He even contacted the UNAM team, only to be met with complete indifference. He ran and reran the data from the probes, and puzzled over the data points of the trackers. He had to tell the director of the Institute what had happened, and fielded anxious calls from the relatives and friends of Araceli, Raul and Sophia. He pushed a probe into the stable portal, and it ended up as expected in the Callejon del Diamante. Ganesh realized that the stable portal had a stable entry but not a stable exit point. So he reran all the analysis focussing on exit points, and printed out a huge map.

The days seemed to fly by, but Ganesh felt like he was running flat out on a treadmill. One night, on his way back, he stopped at a cafe, and scanned the local newspaper. He finished skimming the latest portal news, and by chance turned to the cultural section, where there was an article on rangoli, of all things. Seeing the familiar drawing flooded his mind with childhood memories of helping the maid draw the auspicious intricate chalk mandalas on the floor in front of his house. He stared at the illustration for a while, finished his coffee, and headed home. He was about to turn the key in his lock, when the answer flashed in his mind, almost without conscious effort. The portals were not discrete, they were all connected, like rangoli. And he had the data to prove it.

VII

Ganesh adjusted his backpack, crammed with supplies. He’d done all he could to tell people what he’d found out, left enough detailed instructions that anyone could follow. He knew that once the pattern was found, it would only be a matter of time before the portals would be thoroughly studied and modified for human use. The human race was on the brink of a completely new transportation system.

The rangoli scheme he’d come up with had solved the problem. When Ganesh played all the portals’ appearances and disappearances as an animation over time and space, it was apparent that the portals swirled in time, and the connections were plain to the eye. It took a little more time to figure out a general scheme to predict where a person entering the portal would exit, and a little longer to plug in the special equations for the stable portal. In the end, Ganesh had a fairly good idea on how to catch up with the missing team. They must be stuck somewhere in between portals, or stuck in a loop of entering and exiting. But he knew now that he had to enter the stable portal, not early in the morning like last time, but at four in the afternoon, and there was a chance their trajectories could be synchronized.

He arrived at the portal, stood in the shelter of a doorway and readied himself for the entry. He had a probe in his backpack, a small computer, and a camera in his hand. This time it would be well documented. At 4pm exactly, he stepped into the stable portal. Everything blurred for a moment, and instead of popping out on the other side, he experienced a series of fast changing landscapes. Sunlight, daylight, night and cities and villages sped past him almost too fast to be seen. He flashed by towering black buildings that gleamed, and wide unbroken forests, a sandy beach and hills, and finally after a series of heart lurching moments popped out into a small square. He had made it through – to somewhere.

Ganesh looked around. Everything looked awfully familiar, but he couldn’t place the memory. It must be a part of Xalapa he had never been in before, but everything looked different, as if it was a different state or even country. There was a market in front of him, and he walked up to one of the corn sellers and asked her what the name of the place was. She looked up, a blank expression on her face and spoke something. He failed to understand her.

Ganesh’s Spanish was not great, but he knew he had made immense strides in the last few months. Bewildered, he asked again, but the lady spoke gibberish to him. Finally he realized,

Ah, she doesn’t speak Spanish.

Which was very weird.

He turned away, and approached a guy sitting behind towering piles of multi-coloured beans. Waiting a moment to get his attention, he spoke as clearly as he could.

-Excuse me, could you tell me how to get to Parque Juarez?

referring to the city centre, thinking that once he made it to downtown, he could find his bearings easier.

The man turned to him, and spoke a few words, and it was clear that he had no idea what Ganesh was saying. Again, the man spoke in a fast sing-song voice filled with TZs, TNs and TLs.

This was not working. Ganesh decided to wander around, camera in hand, recording everything. He turned a corner and lo, in the distance the Pico de Orizaba stood, all lit up by the evening sun. But something was wrong: the tip of the mountain was gone. The perfect peak of the volcano had been replaced by a flat top. He struggled to understand, he felt tired with the mental calculations. But even before he finished the thought he realized where he was. He was right in the centre, right where Parque Juarez should have been. Except, the city looked nothing like Xalapa. Instead of a paved leafy park dotted with Haya trees, he was in a plaza that ended in a small stepped pyramid. The square was packed with temporary stalls, hundreds of people thronged around. They were all dressed in bright colours, some wearing feathered headdresses. A loudspeaker filled the air with music, but it was a kind of pop music dominated by whistles and bells. He could not understand a single word. He wandered around the square, bumping against the people, attracting stares everywhere. His Indian skin no longer provided him with camouflage, he now stood out among the paler skinned people.

On top of the small pyramid, a ceremony seemed to be in progress, and people climbed up the steps snakelike, swaying side to side. A big cauldron of fire burned at the top, and the people went right up to it. He joined the line, fending off queries, miming his lack of knowledge of the language. Right at the top, just before the line of people went into the small temple, he was stopped by two burly men, clad only in loin cloths, their oiled muscles gleaming. He understood that he was barred from entry. Ganesh turned away in good grace. He’d often seen foreigners denied entry into temples, back in India; this was no different. But being at the top of the pyramid gave him a great vantage point to survey the city and video everything he could.

The familiar narrow lanes were still there, but the houses had changed. Xalapa’s trademark tiled roofs were gone, and the colours were curiously uniform. Most houses were painted in a few main colours, and the cityscape was oddly harmonious. The ceremony went on behind him, and loudspeakers carried the hymns out into the plaza, and people milled around, trying to get in, trying to get out. The thick fruity aroma of copal filled the air, and hawkers and knickknack sellers kept bumping into him. Ganesh decided to head down. He went around the temple, past the cages of Xoloitzcuintle dogs, and headed down the pyramid on the other side, taking care with each step, so as to not topple down into the line of people. A few of the people were dressed in a sort of western fashion, but the majority wore brightly coloured robes and shawls. Ganesh reached the bottom of the pyramid, and wandered slowly through the city.

The streets were narrow, and small alleys led off from time to time, with corners often etched with the name of the street and a representation of some god or other. Ganesh noticed shops in unexpected locations, and people sat on stools in front of snack sellers. He rounded a corner and there, in a cafe of sorts, spotted Araceli, Raul and Sophia, sipping some hot chocolate, their bags piled around them, trying not to attract attention. He went up to them, a big grin forming on his face. Sophia spotted him first, and rattled the table as she got up and hugged him. A flurry of greetings later, Ganesh heard their story. They’d shunted from portal to portal before ending up here.

Ganesh asked,

-But is this Xalapa?

Araceli replied,

-Yes, it’s Xalapa, alright, but it feels like Xalapa in a Mexico where the Spaniards never arrived. They’re mostly speaking Nahuatl, and some Totonac, but it looks like Nahuatl is the dominant one. Look at the signs.

Ganesh looked at the names of the stores. They were written in Roman script, and below the big names, there was something else, written in the same script.

Araceli continued,

-They are using both languages.

-You can speak Nahuatl?

Araceli shook her head,

-Sophia does. Apparently it’s a very weird form of Nahuatl that she speaks, and everybody is very amused with her accent, but we have been managing to communicate. Somewhat.

Raul and Sophia were furiously arguing about something, but the Spanish was too fast to follow.

Araceli said,

-They are debating how to get back to our Xalapa. Again. But tell me, Ganesh, how in the world did you find us?

Ganesh briefly recounted his investigations, and his findings. He pulled out the laptop, and showed them the portal patterns. Araceli looked impressed.

Raul suddenly exploded,

-We need to go back. Somehow. This is a crazy haunted place. I’m not even sure we’re alive.

An awkward silence, and the team retreated a bit from the stares of the people around them.

Araceli nodded,

-OK, we must be going.

She pulled out her purse and looked closely at a few oval coins, consulted with Sophia, who haltingly asked a passing waiter how much to pay. She clinked the coins into a bowl made of a gourd. Ganesh picked up one of the coins; they were heavy, and decorated with Aztec motifs.

Araceli said,

-We sold some stuff at a shop earlier. Mexican pesos are no good here.

They packed their bags and headed out to the plaza. They found a quiet spot under a fantastic sculpture of Tlaloc, the Aztec god of rain, and took stock of the situation. Raul said,

-We have GPS coordinates of the portals, maybe we can find the one corresponding to the exit point in Callejon del Diamante?

Araceli said,

-But how can we be sure that the positions are valid? We could end up in a place even more bizarre.

Ganesh said,

-I’m not even sure there are portals here.

Sophia was busy scribbling in her journal.

They argued back and forth for many minutes, and Ganesh could sense the anxiety in their voices. The argument was starting to get heated when Sophia interrupted them.

-I think there’s somebody coming to talk to us.

A man wearing a ceremonial robe arrived at their group, looked at them intently, and spoke to Ganesh, evidently deciding that he was their leader.

Sophia interpreted,

-He says he is worried about us, or angry, I’m not sure, but he wants us to go meet someone. I think someone important, because he used the word for god.

The man made follow-me movements, and so they followed him.

VIII

They were asked to wait in a leafy covered courtyard of a large house, well hidden from the outside world. The bright yellow walls seemed to emanate sunlight. They sat on huge chunky wooden chairs, and looked around. Soon they heard voices, and Araceli looked at Sophia, but she just shook her head and said,

-No. Totonac. I think.

A slender bald man came in, did a curious gesture with his hands, and spoke fluid French to them.
The team looked around, but none of them knew any French. The bald man switched back to Nahuatl then, and Sophia provided a simultaneous translation.

-I know that you are not demons, I mean, foreigners… You are visitors from another world; we have had a few of you, but they all die or disappear, but you are the first who speak the language of the gods, so we are… I don’t know the word… You must return, the balance is being hidden, no, lost, and it is very dangerous, I cannot hold them back? I don’t know who he means… I will show you how to get out of here, but I cannot tell you how to get back to where you came from… It is very important that you must go… our world is getting polluted with your world’s problems… you must try to stop it before the summer? No, he said solstice, or it will be too late… I don’t understand that sentence at all.

-Keep going, said Araceli.

-Meet me here at midnight, I will tell the guards to expect you.

The man abruptly got up, did the hand gesture again, and left.

* * *

At midnight, they returned to the house. They were ushered inside. The bald man was waiting for them. He silently led them through the strange but familiar streets towards the central plaza. It was a cold gloomy night, the fog had descended, enveloping everything; the street lamps had a halo of blue. They walked along the narrow streets until they arrived at the base of the pyramid. The bald man pulled out an aerophone, a small clay bird-shaped flute, and blew it twice. When he heard an answering trill, they proceeded to climb the pyramid. Ganesh surreptitiously turned his video on. At the very top, they rested, breathing heavily, knees twinging. Another man came from within the temple, and the bald man spoke to him quickly. Sophia strained to hear the words, but she didn’t catch anything.

Then both of them turned to the team and the bald man spoke,

-This way, follow me.

They entered the temple at the top. The temple was dark, with only a few oil lamps casting strange shadows everywhere. The walls were covered with etchings, and even in the darkness Ganesh could make out vast vistas of colour. They proceeded to one room at the side of the temple, and lo, a familiar smell, the stink of the portal. The bald man lit a small lamp, and they could see the blurry orb. It was obvious what the bald man wanted them to do, return to wherever they came from. But Ganesh and the others knew that the portal might send them anywhere, and they couldn’t take the chance. Not without checking it first. They huddled around the laptop, took some co-ordinates and ran Ganesh’s program for calculating trajectories. If the portal locations matched, then they should emerge right on the bridge over Xallitic Plaza. If the portal took them back to their Xalapa and not some other destination. They decided to go through. One by one they flickered into the orb, and their last view of the other Xalapa was the bald man’s lamp-lit impassive face.

IX

Sudden daylight, and they blinked to see that the calculations were exact. All four of them were standing on the bridge, the hubbub of Xalapa surrounding them.

-But is this Our Xalapa? asked Raul.

—I don’t know, said Araceli, but I have a quick way to find out. She pulled out her phone and made a call. A brief conversation later, she turned back to the team and smiled.

-Yes, it is! We’re back.

They hugged briefly and, almost without a further word or goodbye, they all scattered in different directions.

The next few days passed in a blur. There were relatives to contact, to reassure, and paperwork to tackle and data to analyse. The team spent long hours in the lab, lost in a haze of intense concentration. Sophia was in charge of transcribing all the conversations they’d recorded, and she was brushing up on her Nahuatl, while Raul assisted Ganesh with the maps and trajectories. They adapted Ganesh’s rangoli-inspired pattern seeker program to the new data, and Araceli collated the results into a rough manuscript form. She contacted anthropologists, archaeologists and ethnomusicologists: this was going to make her name.

Ganesh briefly thought of calling his estranged brother, punched in the numbers and then hung up. He thought,

-He’s probably closing some business deal in China or something…

Xalapa seemed to be getting worse. People were more and more afraid to leave their houses, the streets were deserted. Passing by downtown one day, Ganesh felt like the city was under curfew. Armed soldiers wandered the streets holding huge guns and chatting idly. The governor declared a state of emergency, and international pressure was starting to bend the government to allow in outside help. Helicopters flitted about and, since the portals were never detected at that height, it became the safest way for politicians to travel.

More portal investigation teams started arriving in Xalapa. Soon the only people on the streets were the scientists and the military. Unable to survive, there was a mass exodus of people to the neighbouring town of Coatepec, which became jammed, and quite unable to cope with the influx. Almost overnight, Coatepec lost its fame as a sleepy coffee town. The government had already transferred itself to the port of Veracruz, and it looked like Xalapa would soon go back to a sleepy mountain town as it was before it became the state capital.

In the Institute, more money was thrown at Araceli’s team, even though nobody outside of the team knew what they’d found. Araceli made everyone swear to secrecy; she knew that the slightest hint of an “Other Xalapa”, without a proper presentation, would doom their efforts. She was also anticipating the impact the paper would make, and decided to host a press conference once the analysis was ready.

And, finally, almost a month since the day they got out of the portal system, Araceli declared that she was ready to present the results to the public. She set up a date, booked a conference room in the Institute, and then contacted the major Xalapa newspaper, the Diario de Xalapa. The reporter who dealt with her advised her to change the date, there was another press conference that day, at almost the same time.

Araceli was about to agree, when something made her inquire what was going on.

The reporter said, almost offhandedly, that the UNAM team were holding a session, and no, he didn’t know about what; but apparently it was going to be a big one.

X

After the UNAM team’s press conference, Araceli and Ganesh stood outside the building, too shaken to speak, smoking furiously. For Ganesh, it meant that he could see the end of yet another project, but Araceli looked devastated.

The UNAM team had triumphantly demonstrated a technique for collapsing the portals. They’d set up their equipment in front of one of the portals and, with the flick of a switch, and a sudden sharp explosion, the stench of the portal faded and the blurry orb disappeared into a haze of bitter smoke. One of the technicians walked through the spot where the portal was, to show that Xalapa could now be made safe again. They had already assembled a team of portal defusers whose job was to go around Xalapa and get rid of the portals.

The governor was ecstatic, the press were fawning, and the people of Xalapa were relieved that their long nightmare year was finally coming to an end. There was talk of special honours for the UNAM team, and the next day every newspaper would scream HEROES! The governor declared a day of celebration. All day long the sound of blowing up portals filled Xalapa.

Ganesh asked Araceli,

-What will you do now?

-I don’t know. I think I can still get the paper published, but it will be difficult. I feel like an animal researcher whose subject has just become extinct. I think I will wrap up loose ends as best as I can, and move on to something else.

-Do you think they’ll leave a few, just to study them?

-No chance, Araceli said bitterly. The portals have always been viewed as a menace. Everybody will be happy to see the end of this plague.

Later, at the Institute, the lab was in mourning, all their maps and probes mocking them. Sophia was packing away her Nahuatl books. Raul turned up late; he had been out watching the portal collapses. He reported that the stable portal was gone; Ganesh felt a pang at hearing that. Araceli took one look around, and told everyone to start getting the lab back into shape, and they began clearing things away, silently, each lost in thought, and each object they moved triggered memories.

By the end of the day, the lab looked completely different and, as they stepped out, the setting sun filled the surprisingly clear sky with a pale orange light, and the faint silhouette of the volcano faded into the dusk.

Ganesh looked at the volcano, and told the others that he would stay and watch the sunset. Sophia looked up sharply and said she would stay as well, and the others left.

For many minutes, they watched the sunlight dissipate, and the first stars emerge. Sophia said,

-Are you going to leave?

-Probably. I will find another project somewhere and start all over again. It’s like I cannot possibly stay in one place for more than a year.

-Have you any ideas?

-Not right now, but there is an opening in Sweden that I might apply for, even though the thought of going to a cold place scares me. But the thing is to keep moving…

-Don’t go, Sophia blurted.

Ganesh turned to face her; Sophia was looking at him intently, eyes unwavering, voice trembling.

-Don’t go? But what will I do here now?

-You can always find something. Or someone.

Don’t go. The very thought was alien to him. With no ties anywhere, no family to go back to, the idea of staying, of resting, suddenly grew alluring, like a virus infecting his mind, spreading with breakneck speed.

Don’t go. Stay.

He held out his hand experimentally, and Sophia took it unhesitatingly. It had taken him a decade, but he was finally finding a reason to stay.

THE END

Charlie’s debut novel APOCALYPSE NOW NOW, plus an untitled follow-up, has sold to Jack Fogg at Century for a very healthy five-figure sum in a deal negotiated by John Berlyne of the Zeno Agency. Century will publish in the UK and Commonwealth (Ex SA) IN SUMMER 2013. South African rights sold in a separate deal to Frederik de Jager at Random House Struik.

A sharp urban fantasy with a uniquely South African twist, APOCALYPSE NOW NOW has been described by fellow SA writer Lauren Beukes (author of the Arthur C. Clarke award winning ZOO CITY) as ‘… mad and dark and irreverent and wonderfully twisted in all the right ways‘. Here’s a taste of what you can expect…

‘Baxter Zevcenko is your average sixteen-year-old-boy — if by average you mean kingpin of a schoolyard porn syndicate and possible serial killer who suffers from surreal  nightmares. Which may very well be what counts as average these days. Baxter is the first to admit that he’s not a nice guy. After all, if the guy below you falls, dragging you down into an icy abyss you have to cut him loose — even in high school.

That is until his girlfriend, Esmé, is kidnapped and Baxter is forced to confront a disturbing fact about himself — that he has a heart, and the damn thing is forcing him to abandon high-school politics and set out on a quest to find her. The clues point to supernatural forces at work and Baxter is must admit that he can’t do it alone. Enter Jackie Ronin, supernatural bounty hunter, Border War veteran, and all-round lunatic, who takes him on a chaotic tour of Cape Town’s sweaty, occult underbelly.

What do glowing men, transsexual African valkyries, and zombie-creating arachnids have to do with Esmé’s disappearance? That’s what Baxter really, really needs to find out.’

John Berlyne said ‘When this one landed in my in-box I knew immediately that it was something special. It’s sly, iconoclastic, off-the-wall and full of the kind of energy that I hunger for in my reading. It’s also extremely well written – the kind of book that reads effortlessly. I’m very pleased indeed that Century – who’ve had such a success with Ernest Cline’s superb READY PLAYER ONE – will be publishing.’

Jack Fogg said ‘APOCALYPSE NOW NOW is one of those rare, generous novels which goes to incredible lengths to entertain the reader. I haven’t laughed so hard or flat out enjoyed a ride more in a very long time. Charlie is a fantastic writer, at the forefront of the nascent speculative fiction scene in South Africa, and I feel incredibly privileged to be publishing his unique novels.’

Charlie Human is a writer from Cape Town, South Africa. His short story, The Immaculate Particle, appeared in Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse, and Land of the Blind was printed in the UK version of ZOO CITY  by Lauren Beukes. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town.

Charlie’s story, Dance Dance Revolution, was published on the World SF Blog in 2011.

The first such magazine, however – the guys who inspired me to eventually edit The Apex Book of World SF and start the World SF Blog – is InterNova, edited by Michael Iwoleit from Germany. InterNova was first published in print, with only one – yet revolutionary – issue, but has since been relaunched as a web magazine.

It publishes a wide range of fiction and non-fiction from all over the world, and is looking to continue to grow. Michael writes:

The international science fiction e-zine InterNova (inter.nova-sf.de) is facing a major upgrade. In recent months the magazine has almost doubled its audience. To provide a better service for its readers editor Michael K. Iwoleit plans a design and functionality rework of the site and more regular uploads. To make the best of the magazine, however, InterNova is looking for further volunteer collaborators. Especially wanted are native English proofreaders who are willing to read two or three stories each months. There are also plans to open a Spanish and a French section of InterNova to provide part of the magazine’s content in these languages too. To make it happen, the support of volunteer English-to-Spanish and English-to-French translators and of proofreaders in both languages will be required. InterNova also appreciates contacts with correpondents who could provide news about the sf production in their country or region. If you’re interested in a collaboration please contact editor Michael K. Iwoleit at <mki@iacd.de>

Besides being a writer, you also offer translation services from German to English and English to German, and are a native German speaker. Do you feel this gives you a nearly unique perspective as a writer? Do you think it affects how you approach writing?

Well, I’m not completely unique, since there are a few writers who write in a language that is not their mother tongue, including a handful of Germans writing in English. And some of these writers are bound to be translators, since it’s a natural career choice for those who are fluent in two or more languages.

Regarding my translation work, I have done a bit of fiction, but the overwhelming majority of my translation work is non-fiction, business and tech translation, because that’s where the money and the work is. Even though it’s unfair that tech translation pays so much better than fiction translation, because fiction translation is very difficult to do well.

As for whether being bilingual and writing in a language that is not your mother tongue gives you a different perspective as a writer, it certainly does. First of all, being bilingual gives you a heightened sensitivity for language in general and improves grammar and vocabulary skills as well. There’s plenty of research to back this up. And since language transmits culture, being multilingual also heightens cultural awareness, which is extremely useful when writing about people (or if you’re an SF or fantasy writer, beings) that are different from yourself.

A curious side-effect of writing in a language that is not the language you grew up speaking at home and in school is that writing swearwords and the like won’t make you cringe. Because the sense of violating a taboo while swearing is something that we acquire in childhood and you only acquire it for whatever language the world around you is speaking during that time. But while I intellectually know which English words are considered very rude or even completely taboo, these words don’t evoke the visceral cringing that the equivalent German word would evoke.

Finally, writers are the sum of their influences. And due to having grown up in Germany (though I also spent part of my formative years in the U.S., the Netherlands and Singapore), I have a couple of influences e.g. British or American writers don’t have. I even wrote non-fiction articles on a few of those influences such as the Dr. Mabuse series, pulp heroes John Sinclair and Jerry Cotton and the German Edgar Wallace film adaptations of the 1960s. And of course these influences show up in my fiction, even though I have published only one story which is set in Germany (The Other Side of the Curtain, a spy novella set in 1960s East Germany) with another, a historical novelette set in the late Middle Ages in the Rhine-Moselle region, coming soon. – read the full interview.

Congratulations to them both! I am told submissions for this project may open in June.

I would like to recommend that, if you would like to support this project, do consider donating more (the peerbackers project is running for another 19 days), partly to help cover the additional peerbacker and paypal costs and partly to allow them to make the project even bigger and better. But even if not, this is a fantastic achievement and I look forward to seeing the finished product!

Participating: Aliette de Bodard (France), Joyce Chng (Singapore), Requires Hate(Thailand), Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (Philippines/The Netherlands),Ekaterina Sedia (Russian/USA), Rachel Swirsky (USA).

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Aliette: We talk about colonisation, which is mostly a phenomenon of the past (but which has left marks and scars everywhere that will take a long time to fade); but I think we need to bring up globalisation. It’s often lauded as a way which makes the world smaller so that cultures can meet. In reality, it’s immensely problematic, because what it has mostly done is homogenise everything to a common US/European framework and deny the values and identities of the people from outside that framework in, I think, a more insidious way than colonisation. Many people (especially in the West) suffer from the illusion that colonisation is dead; but it’s not. It lives on in its new incarnation; and it means we can talk about “universal stories” and “universal tropes” with such glibness–and forget that a large chunk of the world follows very different values and mindsets from the “default”, Western Anglophone one. Like requireshate says, there’s a really pernicious assumption that everyone is part of the mass and subscribing to the same “core” values, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. And there remains a fundamental power imbalance between the Western, English-speaking world and the non-Western countries–an imbalance that notably gets expressed in literature, and in the one-way street that means books get translated from English into pretty much every country in the world, but 0.3% of books published in the US are actually translated into English.

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Joyce: Oh yes, globalization is insidious. Everyone is equal. Shrinking world. Blah blah blah. Everyone holds hands and we are friends. No. The scars of colonization are still there. Many former colonies are left with the issues to deal with.

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requireshate: When I go to a bookstore, there are veritable shelves of translated fiction–a fair bit from Japanese and Chinese, but vastly dominated by English-language fiction in translation. It’s what a lot of kids grow up reading, and it’s pretty awful to see so many covers featuring white girls (localized YA fiction and paranormal romance: Vampire Academy, Sherilyn Kenyon, and so on). The same holds true for advertisements in cosmetics/hairstylist/etc sections in any shopping mall–chock-full of white women on display, even some black women, but starkly few Asian women! And then, only from brands that are Asian in origin anyway. Christian Dior, Lancome, whatever? All white ladies. And, again, clothes brands, lingerie, all white bodies. These western corporations didn’t even think of localizing their advertising materials. Why would they? White signals opulence, beauty, and desirability. White is good, attractive, and an ideal we should aspire to. All this without Thailand having ever been colonized.

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Joyce: Ditto in Singapore. A lot of white girls. Sooo… what does it say about the effects of colonization/colonialism? That Singaporeans have colonized minds?

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Aliette: it’s the same in Vietnam, at least in those few bookstores I went to: the bookshelves for fiction translated from Western English were larger than the ones for Vietnamese and Chinese fiction put together, and that’s not even counting Young Adult…

(and also the same, sadly, for beauty products displaying white models)

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Rochita: I think you can say the same about The Philippines. When I went home last year, I was struck once again by the plethora of fiction in English. They dominated the shelves. I was hard put to find books written by Filipino writers. True, there were some I hadn’t read before, but the imbalance was mind-boggling.

What worries me about globalisation is how easy it is to buy into that mantra of a universal narrative. Argh. Just as well say people all look alike.

Addressing the question of Western people writing about or of a borrowed culture (I think I prefer that term), I believe it is possible to avoid the pitfall of exotization. It will probably take a good deal of reading and a good deal of time and energy investment, but I believe it will be well worth it to the reader and to the author. It’s not enough to visit a country (the tourist writer who goes “oh shiny, I wanna write about that because it’s so cool and different”). I think, as Requires Hate has pointed out, it’s important to at least engage the literature of the country. It may be difficult but I think a lot of the heart of a culture is revealed in the work written by the people themselves.

Let me tell you what an American person established in the publishing industry told me: I should buy a thick book of American poetry and read these poems everyday until I get the nuance of the language. When  told this to visiting poet, JT Stewart, she said to me: No. You don’t need to do that because you write the language as you hear it in your ears. As you grew up hearing it and speaking it. Not as Americans do.

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Aliette: Yes, there’s a very deep-seated assumption that Westerners are the reference for the English language–whereas the largest Anglophone country in the world is India, and there are plenty more non-Western countries where English is an official language. That’s not even getting into the mechanics that mean most of the world has to learn English as a second or third language just to get by, whereas most English speakers can afford to remain monolingual.

Coming back to the subject of writing in another culture: I, too, think it’s possible to do it well (if not perfectly, and probably not as insider narrative). I’d add talking to actual people from the culture and visiting (with locals, not expats!) to reading the books.

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Rochita: I agree.

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Joyce:  Ditto.

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Aliette: Paraphrasing a 101 I gave to someone else about writing other cultures:

I think that, especially if you’re  a Westerner doing another culture, you have responsibilities to do the best darn research you can (and not just appropriate the cool bits). You must take care not to promote harmful stereotypes ; especially since, as a Western writer (especially, but not only, if you live in the West), you must be aware that your narrative is going to be privileged over that of locals. That gives you extra responsibility to get it as right as you can.

You have to accept that your narrative will always be that of an outsider. Sometimes a privileged or particularly well-documented outsider; but it won’t be 100% accurate. It doesn’t mean it’s worthless, it doesn’t mean it can’t be good; but it does mean you have to be aware of the issues in writing outsider narrative (mostly that a lot of other people have been doing it badly, badly wrong over decades); and thus be very careful of what you put on the page.

You might get called on what you wrote; you might be accused of getting things wrong. This is the frustrating part, because there really isn’t any other answer that you can give but “sorry, will do better”, even if you think the other person’s experience isn’t “representative” (whatever that hoary term means). You basically aren’t speaking in a position of authority about the culture, even if you researched it to death. (that’s the bit I struggle most with, incidentally. But I totally understand where it’s coming from).

But, honestly, when I see the mistakes that piss off people like requireshate, it starts with very basic stuff like getting names wrong, or over-exoticising the everyday. When I read a story about Vietnam or France, most of the stuff that makes me want to throw it at the wall is on the same basic level of wrong names, followed by wrong mindsets (I once read a story in which a 17th-Century Vietnamese struck his father and didn’t feel remorse about it. Not likely unless we’re talking psychopath). The mindset is a surprisingly faily one: people from a different culture are going to have vastly different values and assumptions, and you just can’t transplant, say, a modern British person and pass them off as a Vietnamese just through a little change of costumes! You have to understand what makes a culture’s bedrock, what is likely to make people tick, what they’re likely to value and hate–different cultures have radically different axes. To take just one example, the quintessential Confucian male is the scholar with great literary talent, wearing his hair long (because cutting one’s hair was a Barbarian thing), and not hesitating to weep tears when parting from friends. This is a far cry from the male ideal in, say, mainstream US society, where weeping is seen as a very girly thing, and there is deep-seated suspicion of people who are too smart.

And, finally, when you’re done writing your short story or book, get someone from said culture to read it; several someones if you can, that you can trust to give you an honest opinion of where you might have screwed up (always useful to not only have several pairs of eyeballs, but several people from different points of view within the culture can help identify issues).

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Ekaterina: Also, something Western writers often overlook or are not terribly concerned about: even though you are not speaking from the position of the authority, as Aliette said, you WILL be perceived as an expert and an authority of a foreign culture you write about. And that’s a serious risk.

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Joyce: I would like to follow up on Aliette’s point: Do ask people from that culture to have a look through/critique/beta-read the story. Please, please, please, do it.

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Rochita: Excellent pointers. And take note of the pointer where Aliette says that if someone says you’re doing it wrong from the reference point of their own experience, then you as an outsider writer just have to accept it and apologize or determine to try better/fail better. It bewilders me when people get defensive about criticisms leveled at their outsider work because isn’t that to be expected? I mean, as writers we already know that when we put something out there, not everyone is going to love it. That is just asking for the impossible. And that someone bothers to point out the fail is a sign that they wanted you to try harder or at least there was/is an expectation that you can do better than that.

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Ekaterina: Another point is that the insiders will disagree. Some will like it, some won’t, and some will hate it because it is by an outsider. And the lesson for the writer there is not to say “Well, screw it, haters gonna hate, I’ll just write whatever because you cannot please anyone”. You’re still responsible for doing as good a job as you can. And accepting that your best might not be good enough for some people, and their opinions are also valid. Don’t trot out the natives who loved your work, don’t tell people who dislike it that they’re wrong because another person from the same culture liked it. So really, if you want approval, stay out of other people’s cultures. Nations won’t get together to sign waivers that say that you are free to appropriate whatever and no one can say anything about it ever. People will be angry, and they will be right to be angry. If it upsets you, reconsider your motivation.

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Joyce: I agree with Ekaterina’s points here as well.

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Rochita: Ditto.

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Aliette: Yup, definitely agree!

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Rachel: As the token westerner…

It’s interesting to me that outsiders get so frustrated with the idea that insiders will disagree with each other about what constitutes a good representation. (In my experience, the same dynamic occurs along other axes of privilege as well.) Writers understand that when they are writing, for instance, a character, not all of their readers are going to agree with each other. Readers aren’t a monolith. If you can understand that two American white dudes can disagree on whether a character is well-written, then theoretically you can understand that two people from a non-Western culture can disagree on how well the representation is done.

Writers are also–well, I hope they’re also–prepared for the idea that no matter how much energy they put into making a piece of work as beautiful and wonderful as they can, people are still going to criticize it. For some reason, that understanding gets churned under as soon as the issues in question carry sociological weight; there seems to be a feeling that research or good intent should insulate the writer from criticism.

Most writers I know have prepared themselves for being critiqued about character, etc. When privileged people take on writing about people from non-privileged populations, they need to be prepared for that level of critique, too. It may be more heated, but the stakes are also higher.

I hope that writers who ask other people to beta-read their stories do so with care and concern for the people on whom they are imposing. Nisi Shawl recommends in Writing the Other that one should offer a meal or at least a drink. If you’re in a reciprocal critique relationship with someone, or hope to establish one, that’s one thing. If you’re talking to someone with whom you have a prior relationship, that’s another. If you are approaching someone you don’t know, it’s vital to bear in mind that you are asking for a favor, and to remember reciprocity.

Speaking as a western writer, and as someone who has attempted to engage in writing with other kinds of privilege, I am inclined to agree that it’s inescapable that a privileged person will write a narrative that is rooted in their privilege. One can minimize exoticism, I hope, but I don’t think it’s possible to erase it.

As a writer of science fiction, particularly, though, I see myself as having an obligation to present a future that is, as Joyce says, for everyone. As I should have said in the other roundtable, despite the American propensity (including mine) toward tunnel vision, reality is global, and (barring certain speculative scenarios), the future should be global or globally influenced as well. I think there’s an obligation for Western writers who work within science fiction to engage with both western and non-western cultures. Otherwise, we do end up with white-washed (western-washed) futures and I think that the effect of this on the cultural imagination is wholly negative; the future isn’t just for white westerners. I think it’s a particularly pernicious form of erasure.

Obviously, the tunnel vision problem can, to some extent, be fixed by providing more works in translation, and by providing greater publishing access to non-western writers, both those who write in English and those who don’t, but I also think that the western imagination of the future itself needs to be adjusted.

Honestly, I think part of the problem with Americans writing about non-western cultures-or reading about them, or engaging with work written within those contexts–is that we hardly talk about colonialism at all; it’s a tabooed subject, but I don’t think one can really understand the global political context without an understanding of colonialism.

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Aliette: I agree… to some extent. That’s another point I wanted to bring up: we’ve been focusing on narratives exclusively or quasi-exclusively set in other countries so far, but SF has a habit of large-scale narratives set all over the world. Well. All over the Western world. It is very problematic when the future space stations are manned only by white people, the future of the world decided jointly by America and Europe, and the non-Western countries are presented as hell-holes of poverty only fit to escape from. (though we can argue about the very notion of having a large-scale and global setting and deciding the future of the world, which feels a tad imperialistic to me…).

That said, for me, it rejoins some of the comments we’ve been making on different types of narratives: it would definitely be better to have visions of the future coming out of the Western Anglophone tradition that are genuinely multicultural, but having other narrations from non-Western countries would, I think, present radically different pictures of the future, and alleviate the issue of tunnel vision sometimes found in (Western, American) SF books. The best cure for tunnel vision is openness of mind

There is also a big problem with colonialism here in France. It is pretty much never talked about in polite society, and glossed over in school by saying “we did some morally reprehensible things, but it’s OK because we brought the gift of civilisation to the colonised countries”. The extent of the reprehensible things (destruction of said local civilisation, widespread repression, imposition of foreign ways of living and inferiority complexes) is just never brought up at all. I once started to talk about how France broke Vietnam by colonising it and separating it into three entities just as it was becoming a country, and other French people told me to stop–I can stop, sure, but it’s still true! (and don’t get me started on the “gift of civilisation” thing…)

From comparing notes with the UK (where I lived for a while), I suspect there’s a big tendency in the Western world to say that colonialism is over and done with, and that there is thus no need to talk about it or address it. Which is… disingenuous, annoying, and harmful because it perpetuates colonialist myths about the past and the present.

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Joyce: Why is colonialism a taboo subject? Is it because as Aliette has said, nobody wanted to talk about the “reprehensible things”? Westerners have to confront this particular demon if they want to really understand what’s going on. To say that it’s “over and done with” is just ignorance and damaging.

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Aliette: speaking only for France, I think we’re very bad at dealing with our demons. There’s been a lot of self-examination going on in the wake of WWII (and over the fact a lot of French people were collaborators), but I highly suspect this is because the faction that came out ahead in France fought collaborators–so we don’t have to admit, per se, that the *official* government sanctioned anything that was going on during WWII. Same thing applies to colonisation and its legacy; there’s no examination of the fact that the French government and the French people were arrogant enough to carve out huge chunks of countries and mostly ignore the people who were there in the first place; and are responsible for a lot of the current problems plaguing the developing world.

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Rachel: In the United States, we pretend that colonialism is something that other countries did and do not acknowledge the ways in which it influenced our global positioning.

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Aliette: bringing up another subject… Should we discuss the issues associated with genre definition and genre narratives? I have the feeling that “this story isn’t SFF” is very often used as an argument to dismiss non-Western SF on the grounds that it doesn’t adhere to a mostly Western definition of SFF–like having no novum, not being “realistic”, not having enough “science” or “defined rules of magic”. (it’s also used to dismiss women writers from SF, but that’s another kettle of fish altogether!)

There is a twin issue, which is the other problem Rochita raised: different cultures have different values and different narratives, and there is thus a tendency for the field to tell non-Western writers that their writing is flawed; that their narratives don’t deliver a satisfying ending, their characters are too passive; their story structures are weak (or too convoluted): in other words, to hold everyone to a narrow definition of story, very largely elaborated in the US/Western Anglophone world.

What do people think?

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Joyce: I think it all ties in with that mindset of the non-Western writer being ‘inferior’. That’s one dangerous (colonized) mindset.

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Aliette: Yes, colonisation v2.0.

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Rochita:  Yes. I remember a conversation I had with Chris Beckett at my first Eastercon where Chris was asking me if there were any SF narratives in The Philippines. I had been doing a lot of reading into native folktales and native myths, and I told Chris about certain stories that struck me as having a particular SF flavor. For instance, there is a story where a woman is carried away to the Skyworld in a basket. I could see the basket as a metaphor for flying saucer and the visitors from the Skyworld as possible aliens or future beings from the same world. But because these stories are not told in what we define or recognize as SF language, a reader used to the Western narrative would probably not identify it as SF.

I believe that we, as writers in the act of decolonizing, seek to break the expectations that are placed on our SF as we try to reconcile history and heritage and the way we look at SF. I read Aliette’s stories and I can see how this is a story that is uniquely Aliette and uniquely SF because it does not always conform to the SF narrative. The expectations of Western SF are very particular so much so that if we bring stuff to the table that just doesn’t compute with that expectation, the work we produce is shunted off as “oh it’s fantasy in space” or some such thing.

For me, the beauty of being a non-western writer is this: I don’t feel constricted by the demands of existing SF, because I do not see the body of Western SF as being the only true SF. My input into the great SF conversation is to say: look, I know you think of SF that way, but just put yourself in my shoes and try to see through my eyes because I am trying to show you what SF looks like from my point of view.

There was a time that I did feel pressured to conform, but I soon realized my inability to be truly creative inside those strictures. I believe SF as a genre is one that means for its inhabitants to be constantly trying the boundaries, shaking up conventions, and turning expectation on its head. So, to me the unexpected narrative is more beautiful because it expresses this spirit of openness. It’s frustrating when we get told that our characters aren’t proactive enough of they aren’t saving themselves or that things just happen. It’s like the colonizers telling the village people: Look, your Mumbaki, he doesn’t fit in with our model of what Christianized people should be like.

If we were equal, we wouldn’t have to be worried about our stories not conforming to narrative or fitting into the set paradigm.

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requireshate: With regards to being sellable and marketable–that requires playing to the western gaze, making your culture accessible to western readers, giving them a channel for literary tourism. Another tool of imperialism, frankly.

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Rochita: True. In a sense that’s like selling your soul. <g> I don’t think it’s sustainable and in the end, I don’t believe it makes for good fiction.

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Joyce: Ditto on “tool of imperialism”. It hurts the non-Western writer in the end.

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Ekaterina: Cultural colonialism, again — only certain kinds of narratives are acceptable. And Western readers and writers often forget that this is not a symmetrical situation! American culture as filtered through Hollywood/major book releases is so ubiquitous everywhere, they shape narratives all over the world. So it’s not only non-Western writers not being translated into English but also a form of cultural genocide where intrusions of Western narratives everywhere reshape stories as well. It’s such a self-perpetuating machine that feels very powerful. I mean, I have no idea how to deal with something so huge.

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Aliette: *nods* I agree with pretty much everything; and I wish I had a solution, but like Ekaterina I find the whole issue a bit daunting. Very huge and very pervasive–and so very insidious.

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Rochita: I’d like to share something from the Babaylan Files. Conversations-signs and symptoms of the decolonized Filipina in the US. My observation of American/European culture is how there is a very strong “I” orientation. Societies are individualistic and this also shows in the narratives that we get from the West. In returning to the indigenous, there is a stronger focus on community: we have the narratives of extended families, the strength of women bonded together, the role of culture bearers and the consciousness of history, which not all western writers are aware of, but which I believe the non-western writer is more keenly aware of. I’m sorry that I can’t point to a specific article as I didn’t realize we’d be having this conversation when I read it, but I remember this article that said reading history and getting very angry are the first steps towards decolonization. <g>

Fabio Fernandes has recently given Locus a prompt for a round table, above. The resultant round table discussion was notable for a near complete absence of non-Westerners – which is, in itself, a telling comment. Fabio is currently fund-raising for a new anthology of post-colonial science fiction.

With the lack of non-Westerners involved in the Locus roundtable, we’ve decided to run our own. The resultant conversation is fascinating and far-ranging. We are posting the first part today, with the second due tomorrow.

Participating: Aliette de Bodard (France), Joyce Chng (Singapore), the controversial blogger known as Requires Hate (Thailand), Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (Philippines/The Netherlands), and Ekaterina Sedia (Russian/USA).

Joining them in Part 2 will be Rachel Swirsky (USA).

We asked them: How do you feel about this idea of “Western narratives” and the problems of inclusion within the sf “field”? for that matter, what are the problematics of some Western writers tackling non-Western settings for their novels, and do they result in exoticism? Fabio is currently raising funds for a fiction project on science fiction and colonialism. How do you see the two intersecting – both in fiction and in the world of publishing today?

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Joyce: That is a lot to cover. I am sure others would chip in regarding the problematics of Western writers writing non-Western settings for their novels. Exoticism, cultural appropriation… are the mine-fields they have to tackle.

I encountered such an issue when I wrote “The Basics of Flight”, a steampunk novella featuring a white protagonist. I was told that my writing seemed forced and unnatural, the white characters stilted – and I felt the implicit assumption that an Asian like me shouldn’t be writing white characters. Therein lies the problem. Am I supposed to write solely Asian characters? And given my postcolonial background (Singapore was a British colony), am I supposed to write about a) angst regarding my neither-or-there or b) mother-daughter relationships (ala Joy Luck Club)?

Being a postcolonial writer both labels and pigeonholes me in that category. But I cannot deny the fact that I was born in Singapore and schooled in an education system left behind by the British. I am also the descendant of immigrants from China. I grew up thinking that I spoke fluent English and bam! the harsh reality hit when I ventured out into the real world. I am still identified by my skin color and that the assumption that I should be speaking English as a second or third language.

I support Fabio’s project and even wrote a blog post for it. It is difficult – sometimes, most of the time – to discuss about me being a Southeast Asian/Chinese SFF writer. People in the West tend to have fixed ideas of how and what we should look like or behave. The East is exotic. The East is mysterious. The East is hot jasmine tea/white rice/chopsticks and stir-fries. The East is martial arts and kung fu. The East is the Yellow Peril. The East is scary, but exhilarating.

We are not all of these. To us, they are commonplace, part of our lives. To us, it’s how we grew up and will continue teaching our children about our cultures and traditions. These “Western narratives” hurt us at the end and have damaged perspectives regarding non-Western narratives. The dominance of Western narratives has silenced non-Western voices, reducing us to nothing else but something out of a travel guide. Unfortunately, Western publishing continues to perpetuate such misconceptions and have created problem after problem for people outside the (white) fence.

I have always feel that SF is universal, kind of like Star Trek’s philosophy of IDIC. Oh I am proven so wrong at times. What I have encountered are clear instances where only a select type (white, male, but mostly white) is allowed to write SF. Only that select type is allowed to publish.

My question: Is diversity only lip service?

And as for postcolonial SF – I have written – and am writing – worlds where humankind has colonized and terraformed planets. Yet my roots weave their way in. Instead of fighting the indigenous/alien race, the characters form an alliance. However, the alliance is often fraught with concerns, because as colonizers, something will be lost in translation, no matter how well-meaning or well-intentioned they are. How about the voices of the colonized? I am learning about that myself, about the deep-seated issues within me. Have I internalized the colonizer’s point of view? Why am I behaving and reacting like this? What space does the colonized occupy? Is the space freely given or is it a privilege?

I recognize my ability to write as a privilege and that my Anglo-Saxon education has given me that opportunity to write. For that, I am grateful and humbled and terrified. I think about class issues. I worry about gender issues. What kind of legacy has my postcolonialness given me? What am I giving my daughters at the end?

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requireshate: Here’s something knee-jerky (but, I think, not unjustified): I don’t think it’s possible for white westerners to write about any non-dominant cultures–and this includes, for example, Eastern Europe–without being exotifying, appropriative, and perpetuating western/first-world supremacy. Ekaterina Sedia articulated it fantastically here: http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/guest-post-seeing-through-foreign-eyes-by-ekaterina-sedia-author-week-1/ Specifically that an outsider looking in will seize on elements an insider takes for granted. Something that’s everyday to me will be shiny, exotic, and unusual to a westerner: and it is this thing that they will grab and run away with, hooting that it’s beautiful and awesome and so weird, as one might do over an alien artifact. And that’s what it will be to such a person–alien. I’ve seen this over and over even from writers who mean well, who have lived in Thailand, but who nevertheless continue to write and think in the western outsider mode, in short owing their allegiance to their culture, readers who think and consume and behave as they do.

Another particular I’ve to deal with is: there are very few Thai writers working in the Anglosphere, and as far as I’m aware, none at all working in western SFF particularly (apart from maybe Somtow, of whom the less is said the better). Due to this lack, it’s a challenge to be asked “which Thai writer would you recommend?” (often with an implied “so I can fact-check authenticity against this project about Thailand I’ve got”): I very simply am unable to point to many writers. My culture is presented to the western hegemony almost entirely through the eyes of tourists, the eyes of outsiders. This is why I don’t believe that a love of my culture can be expressed by writing about it in your fantasy or SF or whatever–that way lies appropriation; a genuine love can only be expressed by learning my language and translating existing Thai works. As Joyce says, our voices have been silenced, drowned out. More outsiders writing about Thailand? Not the thing we need, and far likelier to contribute to the problem than helping to alleviate it.

I want to respond to a few things Joyce brought up–the expectations for people like us to be exotic. I’m often questioned as to the authenticity of my identity, because to westerners I appear to be writing “just like them,” steeped in “North American culture” (when in truth I know almost nothing about North America!). This assumption comes about because the hegemony is so huge and pervasive that it becomes, itself, an invisible mass and the default assumption. Mostly, if you write in English and aren’t breaking into malapropisms or broken syntax constantly, you’re immediately assumed to be “one of them,” part of the western paradigm.

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Aliette: I wouldn’t be quite as radical as requireshate, but I definitely think we need to differentiate between insider and outsider narratives–two modes of narration that come from vastly different backgrounds and vastly different concerns. I do think that, at the moment, the field a distinct tendency to laud outsider narratives as “authentic” (a fraught word I’ll come back to!) and to enshrine them as more valuable and valid than the insider ones.

I’m not saying that outsider narratives have no worth, or that it’s impossible to do them well (see below!); but I do think the current development is problematic on several levels.

There are lots of factors at play that explain why outsider narratives are more popular; but one of the main reasons is one of audience: as Ekaterina mentions in her blog post: at this junction in time, the dominant audience in the field is Western (of US/European culture), and outsider narratives have a better grasp of how to present (ie exotify) elements of a setting in a digestible manner for the mainstream (White) audience. This is very much regrettable, and I really do wish that people would stop using the word authenticity altogether, as it’s either used as an exclusionary factor, to police who within a community has the right to write about the culture (something I find utterly fraught with problems); or as a well-meaning but somewhat hollow reassurance that the writer’s world feels real (the only ones equipped to judge authenticity of, say, a story set in Brazil are Brazilian people, and I certainly would never dream of qualifying someone’s story set there with that word!).

The problem with this whole state of things, as has already been pointed out, is that if outsider narratives are enshrined and taken as gospel truth, then this not only drowns out insider narratives, but also makes them lose value when their writers are criticised for not adhering to the (sometimes harmful) clichés or exoticism perpetuated by the outsider narratives. Like Joyce and requireshate say, non-Western writers easily become accused of not being exotic enough–Vietnamese writers get accused of, say, not getting across the feel of Ho Chi Minh City because it doesn’t jibe with the exoticised description of the city some Westerner made. Indian people are told their stories set in Bangalore are not “authentic” enough because they don’t feature enough description and “sights and smells”–but really, when you’ve lived in a city your whole life, are you really going to pause and describe in minute detail every single fruit on the fruit-sellers’ stand?

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Rochita: Oh, I have to laugh reading what Aliette is writing because I had to think of one instance where I critted a work of someone I was in a workshop with and being told that my insight couldn’t be right because history and reference books said it was so. This was on crit about a story which makes use of Chinese culture. Now, I am no expert in Chinese culture, but I did have a number of extended family (this is a very Filipino concept) who were part of the Chinese community and what was written just didn’t compute with what I knew or what I had absorbed of it. I shut up at that point because my immersion was more tribal and I found myself doubting my own experience of the culture.

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Aliette: ha ha ha. I once had someone (non-Vietnamese) argue with me about how I’d got Vietnamese history all wrong because it was in the (American) history books. I’m much less pacifist than you, and I basically fought an urge to strangle the person at that point…
(the extended family is also a Vietnamese concept, I think–and one that is very lacking from a lot of genre books. I really should do stats on which protagonists have living parents and/or siblings, and move from there to uncles and aunts and parents’ friends…)

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Ekaterina: Thank you guys for linking and mentioning my article. And yes, same experience with books about Russia by Westerners being lauded and preferred over Russian narratives. Russia does have a well-developed SF/F tradition, and it creates an interesting situation: when something DOES get translated into English (not too frequently, I may add), they are often chastised for not being rooted in their own culture enough — which is, not being exotic enough. Heck, I read reviews of my work when readers expressed disappointment that I missed a chance to teach Western audience about my culture. Because apparently it is my job to make Russia-based narratives as surface-alien as possible (inside, of course, they should speak to Western sensibility). Also, when Western writers choose Russia as their setting, they more often than not are unfamiliar with the existing Russian-language literature — that is, they write into the tradition they are not familiar with. They are writing into American/Western tradition, which presents its own narratives of Russia, and THIS is what feels authentic (I hate that word too) to the Western reader.

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Rochita: For many writers coming from colonized nations, the act of putting words on paper is fraught with certain matters. In this, I speak from my own experience of Filipino literature, how it was taught to me and how I absorbed what Filipino literature means to the Filipino.

When I write SF, I am fully aware of the history of my people and our history of colonization. I carry this sensibility with me into my work and I see this as continuing on in a conversation with the poets and writers and activists who struggle against the impositions of colonization. At the same time, I hope to contribute to the ongoing conversation which leads to understanding between cultures.

I think that the non-western writer brings something different to the field of SF not just because of the insider perspective, but I also think it’s difficult to say that this is a true story of the culture without having been immersed in it yourself. But as Requires said, these things have been exoticised and appropriated so that the reader comes to expect the exotic and doesn’t understand why our stories don’t match preconceived ideas of how our stories should look like.

I admit to being automatically suspicious of work that is set in a non-dominant setting using non-dominant culture when the work is written by a writer from the dominant culture. I question the motivation of the work in the first place and until I find evidence of sincerity (it’s not just being used because it’s pretty but because it really is integral to the story) I tend to carry on being suspicious. I guess, this is my anti-colonialist bias setting in.

I have mentioned this to Aliette before and it is a concern that still plagues me because I do write mostly in the context of my own culture: I don’t want to play tourist guide to the reader and yet I also want to write about what is most beautiful and most precious to me. And that is my culture.

Regarding narratives: I want to point to Aliette’s post http://aliettedebodard.com/2011/08/31/on-the-prevalence-of-us-tropes-in-storytelling/

I think it’s very clear that a person coming from a colonized nation would have a very different perspective of story as compared to a person coming from a nation that has been the colonizer.

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Rochita: I want to address something that was raised during the Locus Roundtable with regards to the effects of colonialism and how learning to write and to think in English has affected/influence the cultural narrative. There was also a comment made about the true narrative being only that which is translated from the original language into English.

I have issues with these statements because it negates the work of poets, writers, activists and artists who have struggled in order to reclaim culture. I was reading a book by Manuel Dulawan, probably the most prominent of Ifugao culturebearers, and he writes about how the imposition of the English language was part of the campaign to suppress/erase indigenous culture. In practice, the culture bearers have often been demonized (their rituals are anti-christian). That the rituals and the narratives of the original culture have been preserved speaks of the resilience of these culture bearers and of the people around them.

If we sat down and talked about colonialism and the resistance to colonialism, I could go on and on. <g>

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Ekaterina: That English-language comment gave me pause too: in a general sense, we live in the world of cultural dominance of Anglophone cultures, English is the international language, and many people HAVE to speak it, and write in it. It’s a remarkable move, really: write in your own language, and we’ll ignore you; write in English and we’ll doubt your authenticity. Failure to acknowledge the cultural hegemony of the English language and WHY many non-Anglophone writers might choose to write in English is disingenuous. Not to mention, are we saying that only monolingual folks have a grasp of their own culture?

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Joyce: Ironically, when I added in dialect or Mandarin Chinese as a form of pidgin in my SFF, I got comments stating they didn’t understand or that something was lost in translation.

By the way, a lot of postcolonial writers are able to code-switch. I do that a lot myself. I use English for communication but when I am at my parents’, I use Mandarin Chinese or Cantonese (for my mum – when I want to describe something, but only Cantonese could express it better).

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Aliette: I code switch a lot too, but I wonder if it’s not a multilingual thing rather than a post-Colonial one ? (I do it between English and French at my parents’, with the odd smattering of Vietnamese for food items)

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Rochita: I had to think about a comment my brother made when he my work. How reading the story and then coming across a word or a phrase that is so obviously Filipino to the Filipino reader gave him that jolt of recognition. And I think this is something people forget. Readers from non-western places read SF too. It’s not something that’s confined to the West.

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requireshate: Aliette sez: “but really, when you’ve lived in a city your whole life, are you really going to pause and describe in minute detail every single fruit on the fruit-sellers’ stand?”

Yes, this very much. I become very impatient with this kind of writing by outsiders, and one particular book begins on this very note: at a fruit-seller’s stall! The description is of course of reeking durians. As well, white western writers are rarely charged with inauthenticity: outside of a charge from peculiar national-supremacist groups, no one’s likely to say a book is not “American enough” or “British enough” (unless perhaps it’s an American writing about the UK). There’s no obligation pressed upon a white westerner to pander, no expectation that what they write will be representative of so-and-so. There is no “single story” for them, as Chimamanda Adichie pointed out. They are under no pressure to sell their culture, and if they write something negative about say the white middle-class American life (or, indeed, a white American serial killer) it won’t be used against them or against their culture: nobody will say “Oh, what a shame it is that all young US men are serial killers!” to again paraphrase Adichie. They don’t have to think of what they write, or even how they conduct themselves, will shape outsiders’ view of all white westerners.

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Joyce: THIS. I have folks remarking that Wolf At The Door isn’t Singaporean enough and that the descriptions of the city could well describe other cities in Asia, like Taipei. In other words, not authentic! I am not your travel guide, white reader. I do not want to educate you. I am not obligated to turn my novels into tourist attractions.

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Rochita: Yes. This. You say it so very well. I had to think of how for most writers from the dominant (white/european) culture, commerciality of the work becomes a primary concern. Whereas for the non-white/non-western writer, there is a consciousness of expectation as well as awareness of the baggage you carry with you. Not that we aren’t thinking about the commercial aspect, but there are other things that supercede that concern.

To be continued in Part 2 Tomorrow!

In the March issue,  ”All our contributors this month are women of color, of various ethnic backgrounds”. It includes Apex Book of World SF 2 contributor (and World SF Blog correspondent!) Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

The May Issue has also been released, a double issue “by authors from the USA, Japan and the Philippines,” including stories by Nikki Alfar and An Owomoyela.