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How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens
How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens explores the immigrant experience in a science fiction setting, with exciting fiction and poetry from some of the genre’s best writers.
In these pages, you’ll find Sturgeon winner Sarah Pinsker’s robot grandmother, James Tiptree, Jr., Award winner Nisi Shawl’s prison planet and Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Award winner Ken Liu’s space- and time-spanning story of different kinds of ghosts. You’ll find Bryan Thao Worra’s Cthulhic poetry, and Pinckney Benedict’s sad, whimsical tale of genocide. You’ll travel to Frankfurt, to the moon, to Mars, to the underworld, to unnamed alien planets, under the ocean, through clusters of asteroids. You’ll land on the fourth planet from the star Deneb, and an alternate universe version of Earth, and a world of Jesuses.
This is not a textbook. You will not find here polemics on immigration policy or colonialism. The most compelling fiction articulates the unsaid, the unbearable, and the incomprehensible; these stories say things about the immigration experience that a lecture never could. The purpose of this book is, first and foremost, to entertain the casual and the sophisticated reader, but its genesis is a response to the question: Who do we become when we live with the unfamiliar?
In these pages, you’ll find Sturgeon winner Sarah Pinsker’s robot grandmother, James Tiptree, Jr., Award winner Nisi Shawl’s prison planet and Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Award winner Ken Liu’s space- and time-spanning story of different kinds of ghosts. You’ll find Bryan Thao Worra’s Cthulhic poetry, and Pinckney Benedict’s sad, whimsical tale of genocide. You’ll travel to Frankfurt, to the moon, to Mars, to the underworld, to unnamed alien planets, under the ocean, through clusters of asteroids. You’ll land on the fourth planet from the star Deneb, and an alternate universe version of Earth, and a world of Jesuses.
This is not a textbook. You will not find here polemics on immigration policy or colonialism. The most compelling fiction articulates the unsaid, the unbearable, and the incomprehensible; these stories say things about the immigration experience that a lecture never could. The purpose of this book is, first and foremost, to entertain the casual and the sophisticated reader, but its genesis is a response to the question: Who do we become when we live with the unfamiliar?
384 pages, Paperback
First published February 16, 2015
About the author
Joanne Merriam
11 books43 followersJoanne Merriam is a speculative fiction writer, poet, and editor. Her debut novel
Aether and Ego
will be released by Inanna in September 2026.
Her poetry has appeared in The Glaze from Breaking (Stride Books, 2005) and dozens of magazines and journals, including Astropoetica and Strange Horizons while her fiction has appeared in journals like The Baltimore Review, Escape Pod, and Per Contra — see her website for a complete list.
From 2011–20, she was the Publisher at Upper Rubber Boot Books, which is now on permanent hiatus with only one book still in print: the first English-language anthology of solarpunk, Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk & Eco-Speculation (eds. Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Wieland).
Her poetry has appeared in The Glaze from Breaking (Stride Books, 2005) and dozens of magazines and journals, including Astropoetica and Strange Horizons while her fiction has appeared in journals like The Baltimore Review, Escape Pod, and Per Contra — see her website for a complete list.
From 2011–20, she was the Publisher at Upper Rubber Boot Books, which is now on permanent hiatus with only one book still in print: the first English-language anthology of solarpunk, Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk & Eco-Speculation (eds. Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Wieland).
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 18, 2015
(Full disclosure: I recevied an ARC of this book from the publisher. It's not related to what I usually review, but it was a book I really wanted to read, so I decided to review here instead of on my blog.)
Anyway, the book did not disappoint. I am by no means an immigrant nor an expert on immigration, but the stories and poems (all reprints, but many I hadn't seen before) are fairly consistently of high quality, and the way they are put together is thoughtful and skillful. The overall impression one gets from the stories is one of great variety. The immigrants in the stories are from many different places, some real, some imaginary, and go TO many different places in the same way. Some, being second-, third-, or fourth-generation immigrants, technically don't go to anywhere from anywhere at all. There is a pleasing variation in tone, from bleak to light-hearted to intellectual or impressionistic, which keeps the themes from becoming repetitive. Some stories are "about" immigration, others are "about" related issues such as the complexities of how racism affects families, while still others have the theme of immigration present only as one factor in backstory which affects a character's actions, or in an entirely fanciful manner. What ties all these disparate stories together is, as the introduction suggests, a pervasive sense of not quite belonging in one's surroundings.
If I had to pick a favourite story, it would be Zen Cho's "The Four Generations of Chang E", which says an impressive amount about generational change among an immigrant family in very little space, and in a pleasingly fanciful setting (the moon! With moon aliens and talking rabbits, even!)
Immigration doesn't get as much press as racism or sexism, yet it is an axis of marginalization that profoundly affects a very large number people. For those interested in well-curated diverse speculative fiction, I would definitely recommend this.
Anyway, the book did not disappoint. I am by no means an immigrant nor an expert on immigration, but the stories and poems (all reprints, but many I hadn't seen before) are fairly consistently of high quality, and the way they are put together is thoughtful and skillful. The overall impression one gets from the stories is one of great variety. The immigrants in the stories are from many different places, some real, some imaginary, and go TO many different places in the same way. Some, being second-, third-, or fourth-generation immigrants, technically don't go to anywhere from anywhere at all. There is a pleasing variation in tone, from bleak to light-hearted to intellectual or impressionistic, which keeps the themes from becoming repetitive. Some stories are "about" immigration, others are "about" related issues such as the complexities of how racism affects families, while still others have the theme of immigration present only as one factor in backstory which affects a character's actions, or in an entirely fanciful manner. What ties all these disparate stories together is, as the introduction suggests, a pervasive sense of not quite belonging in one's surroundings.
If I had to pick a favourite story, it would be Zen Cho's "The Four Generations of Chang E", which says an impressive amount about generational change among an immigrant family in very little space, and in a pleasingly fanciful setting (the moon! With moon aliens and talking rabbits, even!)
Immigration doesn't get as much press as racism or sexism, yet it is an axis of marginalization that profoundly affects a very large number people. For those interested in well-curated diverse speculative fiction, I would definitely recommend this.
March 21, 2019
The range and depth and sheer freaking quality of these stories and poems, dammit.
September 12, 2016
I was pleasantly surprised to find poetry interspersed with the stories in this anthology. The poetic interludes smoothed the transition between stories and helped me refocus on the overall theme of immigration, with their concentrated treatments of the topic.
Editor Joanne Merriam presents an expansive definition of immigration in her selected stories. Sometimes I questioned how/if a story really fit the immigration theme, but the quality of stories is generally very good. Several pieces were reprints that I'd already read elsewhere, so my list of stand-out stories might differ from that of a completely fresh reader.
Nisi Shawl's "In Colors Everywhere," is set on a prison colony planet (I believe it is part of a series) where all-too-familiar notions of gender, race, and incarceration play out to their science fictionally convoluted ends. Lisa Bolekaja's "The Saltwater African," set in slave era Mississippi, was vividly terrifying, in a way I never saw coming.
In "Found" by Alex Dally MacFarlane, a community stranded among asteroids rejoices at the prospect of reuniting with the parent civilization, but the young narrator is more concerned with relocating the one person who understands gender as they do. In "Ohkti" by Dean Francis Alfar, the hot-tempered, foul-mouthed narrator mourns the sister she never got along with, and tries to ward off the lover who offers emotional support and the prospect of a future.
Perhaps my favorite was the final story, "Blood Blood" by Abbey Mei Otis, in which a pair of high-school friends make money by fist-fighting in front of ever-curious aliens. The narrator, Damia, describes their relationship: "A cross section of how we are, George and I. My blood, my skin, some air, his skin, his blood.... During sex: blood, skin, skin, blood. As close as we can get. Seeking closer. But that final, perfect closeness? Blood, blood? That's not a place we can get...We strain against the boundaries of skin. Except, sometimes, when we fight. My knuckle into his lip...The gouge in his elbow knocking off the scabs on my ear. Blood, blood. We get there."
Otis's story is a beautiful, raw crystallization of teen yearning that brings the antho to an ambivalent conclusion. As, maybe, all immigration stories end.
Editor Joanne Merriam presents an expansive definition of immigration in her selected stories. Sometimes I questioned how/if a story really fit the immigration theme, but the quality of stories is generally very good. Several pieces were reprints that I'd already read elsewhere, so my list of stand-out stories might differ from that of a completely fresh reader.
Nisi Shawl's "In Colors Everywhere," is set on a prison colony planet (I believe it is part of a series) where all-too-familiar notions of gender, race, and incarceration play out to their science fictionally convoluted ends. Lisa Bolekaja's "The Saltwater African," set in slave era Mississippi, was vividly terrifying, in a way I never saw coming.
In "Found" by Alex Dally MacFarlane, a community stranded among asteroids rejoices at the prospect of reuniting with the parent civilization, but the young narrator is more concerned with relocating the one person who understands gender as they do. In "Ohkti" by Dean Francis Alfar, the hot-tempered, foul-mouthed narrator mourns the sister she never got along with, and tries to ward off the lover who offers emotional support and the prospect of a future.
Perhaps my favorite was the final story, "Blood Blood" by Abbey Mei Otis, in which a pair of high-school friends make money by fist-fighting in front of ever-curious aliens. The narrator, Damia, describes their relationship: "A cross section of how we are, George and I. My blood, my skin, some air, his skin, his blood.... During sex: blood, skin, skin, blood. As close as we can get. Seeking closer. But that final, perfect closeness? Blood, blood? That's not a place we can get...We strain against the boundaries of skin. Except, sometimes, when we fight. My knuckle into his lip...The gouge in his elbow knocking off the scabs on my ear. Blood, blood. We get there."
Otis's story is a beautiful, raw crystallization of teen yearning that brings the antho to an ambivalent conclusion. As, maybe, all immigration stories end.
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October 28, 2015Review here: http://sciencebookaday.com/2015/10/15...
January 8, 2017
I can't recommend this book enough. This sci-fi anthology of stories and poetry are not only well crafted stories, but also try to look at different types of immigration and what it means to be an alien. Some of these are more overt and others are more subtle, but reading this collection will ensure you never look at immigration, travel, and aliens the same again. This is a collection you don't want to miss.
March 16, 2015
Excellent, excellent, excellent.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews