Sweet Reviewing Goodness

August 31st 2004 at 9:56 am

Over at Emerald City So Long Been Dreaming got an outstanding review by Cheryl Morgan:

The featured book at the Liverpool convention was, naturally, concerned with colonialism. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan have put together an anthology of stories that they describe as “postcolonial science fiction and fantasy”. Precisely what “postcolonial” means is, of course, open to debate, but one of the joys of having an anthology is that the debate is played out in fiction rather than in essays.

She then goes on to pick out a few stories that struck her to dwell on, one of them being Vandana Singh’s excellent story (Vandana will be giving a most interesting talk at Worldcon that happens to coincide with my morning reading, so I can’t go to it, but you can, even it means ditching my reading… I’ll forgive you, really and the other being Greg van Eekhout’s entry (who the hell is that Greg dude anyway?).

One of the stories Cheryl takes a look at is ‘Necahual,’ and she did me the honor of twigging right onto a lot of what I was trying to do:

I want to end, as the book does, with the other standout story: “Necahual” by Tobias S. Buckell. This riffs exuberantly off classic SF while telling a tale about the liberation of a colonized planet. It begins in full Starship Troopers mode with soldiers from the human-based League dropping down onto a planet of Caribbean settlers who have reportedly been conquered by the alien Teotl. On arrival, however, the liberation forces discover that they are none too welcome, and that the book they are playing out is actually War of the Worlds.

In addition to saluting the genre and making a sly comment on the Iraq war, Buckell asks whether well-educated, middle-class colored people from free, democratic societies might not be in danger of themselves taking up the “white man’s burden” in trying to liberate their less fortunate cousins in other parts of the world. Being anti-colonial is a difficult business.

It’s interesting that she says I slyly commented on the Iraq situation, as I wrote the initial draft of this story in August 2000, but that’s okay, I like seeing what people read into fiction.

This makes my day, though, so I’m in a very good mood.

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