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This was solidly good; a wide variety of stories and styles, well-arranged to speak to larger themes of displacement, assimilation, cultural memory and resistance. This book is one of the reasons why online fundraising is a great thing--so glad Seattle Public Library purchased it for their collection. Recommended.
A criticism that I think can be leveled at the science fiction community is that when it comes to diversity we are still not quite there. Sure there are lots of authors that include a more diverse range of characters in their stories but where I think we struggle is with supporting and promoting diverse authors. Paolo Baccigaluppi gets noticed for writing about Thailand, but what about Thai writers writing about Thailand using Science Fiction and Fantasy as the framework? I think that white west...
A truly remarkable collection. Many of these stories will be with me a long time.I heard about this obscure crowd-funded collection on The Writer and the Critic podcast and I'm so glad they convinced me to read it. There is not a dud story in the collection, though there were some that blew me away more than others. The theme of the collection is post-colonial spec fic written not from the perspective of the colonizers (or even "colonizer who is good or sees the error of their ways") but of conq...
Stuff I Read - We See A Different Frontier ReviewThis. I need more this. Really, I think collections like this, which take a much wider view of speculative fiction (dare I say, a worldly view), are few and far between. It's getting a bit better, maybe, but this is a great collection, a collection that really gets the brain working, that is uncomfortable in the best way possible because it confronts the reader with privilege and tries to foster empathy. It's not really an easy collection to read
I like the idea of a collection focusing on the other side of colonialism, especially when so much of SF is completely about colonizing. But I'm not sure that this collection accomplished what its editors set out to show. On the other hand, there's some marvellous stuff in here, anyway."What Really Happened in Ficandula" by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz is very good, but depressing. Are we really doomed to always repeat our history? Is this not just the colonized becoming the colonizers?Silvia Moreno-Garc...
...We See a Different Frontier is a fascinating piece of reading. It tackles a theme that is so hugely complex that there are countless of ways to approach it and the stories the editors reflect that. The diversity in these stories is stunning. The anthology offers no easy answers but makes the reader aware of issues that are rarely raised in science fiction. In her afterword Ekaterina Sedia mentions that the collection left her 'a bit whiplashed' and that is not far from how I experienced it. T...
I didn't have time to read all the stories in this collection, and unfortunately I hit a few duds, but there were also some great ones. One I particularly liked was called Them Ships, and is actually available online here: http://escapepod.org/2015/11/12/ep510...
This is a vital anthology and it pains me to suspect that it won't get the attention it deserves. There's been a lot of talk about diversity in SFF: well, here's a brand new anthology of stories by authors from around the world, writing post-colonial SFF. Sure, some individual stories are weak (it would be really great if Joyce Chng's "Lotus" explained how her characters drank from a still, low-lying body of water without boiling/sterilising it and didn't die of hideous infections, among other w...
So What’s It About?This anthology of speculative fiction stories on the themes of colonialism and cultural imperialism focuses on the viewpoints of the colonized. Sixteen authors share their experiences of being the silent voices in history and on the wrong side of the final frontier; their fantasies of a reality in which straight, cis, able-bodied, rich, anglophone, white males don’t get to tell us how they won every war; their revenge against the alien oppressor settling their “new world”.What...
I usually reserve 5 stars for books I can't stop raving about. I didn't love each of the stories in this anthology, but I do absolutely positively love that it exists. So it gets 5 stars because I loved the majority of the stories, and the theme is one that does not get enough attention in SFF.The introduction and afterward were also really helpful for me to process the anthology as a whole, not just as the sum of the individual stories. The different approaches to colonialism still had a lot of...
This was a really interesting collection of short stories. Some of the stories were pure speculative fiction, some wandered more towards science fiction, and others had a splash of magical realism, but the anthology really was very well put together around its common theme. Some of the stories worked for me more than others, but even when the writing left me flat, the creativity and diversity of it all made it a good read - shout outs to Old Domes, A Heap of Broken Images, Vector, and Forests of...
By and large the language of Science Fiction has always been English, its explorations of other worlds in the main tending to describe their exploitation. In literature (as in life) humans have generally gone off planet to seek things, either knowledge or possessions - and damn any natives. Long past time for a corrective? A “straight, white, cis, male” might feel loth to comment. The Arrangement of Their Parts by Shweta Naryan is a partly fabular tale of clockwork animals taken to pieces by an
This is an excellent anthology, one worth reading. Its stories explore the aftereffects of colonialism (in its broadest sense) from a variety of perspectives and concerns, and they generally do so quite effectively. Some of the stories here are very good, some are ok, a few didn't resonate with me at all, but almost universally these stories take on some aspect of the theme from a unique perspective. The anthology sustains unity of theme throughout without being too uniform (or too heavy-handed,...
This anthology of speculative fiction stories written from a post-colonial perspective is well worth reading, if at times acutely uncomfortable for the member of a colonising culture that is thoughtfully reading them. A brief concluding essay by Ekaterina Sedia summarises the recurrent themes of these stories far better than I could.
Being the editor, I must say I read it all, of course. This is just a disclaimer - I will neither rate it nor review it, but I'll be glad if you want to do it. Thank you!
lOVED THIS COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES! eSPECIALLY lOTUS. Hate caps lock, tho.
This is a strong collection.I think the ones that will stick with me most are "Old Domes" by J.Y. Yang (Singapore) and "Forests of the Night" by Gabriel Murray (Malaya and Britain).The book jacket says talks about centering the perspectives of those who are not "straight, cis, able-bodied, rich, anglophone, white males" (and the Introduction includes their call for submissions, which says, "We want to see stories that remind us that neither readers nor writers are a homogeneous club of white, ma...
"We See a Different Frontier" is wonderful. Every story tackles complex sociocultural issues in it's own unique and thoroughly engaging way and there's something to love about each and every one of them. The range of the authors, both in terms of style and imagination is staggering. It took me a while to actually finish it, simply because I had to pause after each story and reflect. If there's anything wrong with it, it's that I wished a lot of the stories didn't end at all - their worlds and ch...
I think this is, overall, the best multi-author anthology I've ever read. The writing and storytelling is of consistently high quality throughout. I usually like to pick out one or two stories that I particularly liked, but this time I realised that I would be listing nearly the entire table of contents if I tried. The stories represent several different situations and points of view, and are all fascinating (and enlightening) reads.
Leí este libro principalmente por la historia de Silvia Moreno-García "Them Ships", y aún cuando esa historia me encantó, terminé enamorado de "Old Domes" de J.Y. Yang, y aún no estoy seguro por qué se convirtió en una de esas narraciones que voy a recordar durante años, es simplemente hermosa. "Dark Continents" de Lavie Tidhar me pareció muy interesante así como "A Heap of Broken Images" de Sunny Moraine. Y creo que la más emocionante de las historias, para mi, fue "Vector" de Benjanun Sriduang...