New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color

by Nisi Shawl

“There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” Octavia E. Butler

for those sitting way in the back, consider this: we continually create the world we occupy—in our imaginations first, and only afterwards do we make those visions manifest in this world. So it stands to reason that a healthy society is one that respects and honors the voices of ALL of its components.

The exploration of space and our eventual close encounters with other intelligent species will require us to leave our “colonizer” mentality behind and embrace an attitude of openness and humility we have yet to cultivate, let alone master. When a world leader advocates for the creation of a militaristic Space Force to exercise “dominance” in the heavens, we are moving further than ever from Gene Roddenberry’s United Federation of Planets. Instead, our exploration into the unknown should cause us to examine who we are as sentient beings, and science fiction as a tool for social change makes for a most welcome companion on our journey.

THE GRAND PHILOSOPHER Ancient Leaf once expounded that a man who kills another out of passion or greed is condemned as a murderer, and one who kills ten people is reviled as a maniac, but one who causes the death of hundreds of thousands in pursuit of personal glory is often revered as a great personage.

Silver Mirror opined that a country that has reached the age of wisdom would stop building monuments to the warmongers of its history, but rather erect them for its peacemakers, those who saved lives by preventing the course of events from descending into a time of sword and fire.

My true and dear beloved, how well you have weaved the story together from so many disparate documents across the ages, in different scripts and genres. How you have rendered the invisible visible, how you brought clarity to the obscure, and how you shed light on the hidden.

My true and dear beloved, could you really only have told the secret history of the unfaithful translators from the point of view of the man? I already know what your response to that will be. As you point out more than once, the events took place during a historical period that was a particularly low time for women, when they were subjugated, marginalized, and rendered invisible to such an extent that it is almost impossible for historians to gather much reliable information about their lives. This was true even for women of the highest status families, who were forbidden from learning, restricted to their quarters, and kept away from the social life of the larger community. Having made forays into research myself, I understand the difficulties involved. But I must ask you, my true and dear beloved, have you tried hard enough? Or did your knowledge of the paucity of historical evidence on women of the Primal dynasty make you give up too quickly? Did you even attempt to read around the absence of information? To put it in another way, were you not bothered enough by the question of who Upright Lotus was to look further in search of her identity? Even her name is one that was given to her by a man.

You have done well, my true and dear beloved, but you can do better and you must do better. We all must, in our never-ending task of rendering the invisible visible, bringing clarity to the obscure, and shedding light on the hidden.

Like, in that one psych class I took at the community college back in Lafayette, Mr. Charm taught us about how other people in dreams aren’t really other people, they’re just also you representing people and other stuff to yourself. It makes sense because can you imagine if all the things and places you dreamed about were real? Where would they go when you wake up? Who would be responsible for clearing them away and storing them like the sets for high school drama productions and stuff?

THERE ARE NO obsidian blades in the camp. The Dawncomer guards have learned enough to make sure that no ritual knives get smuggled in. Without obsidian, Quineltoc can’t spill blood properly—he can’t keep the law, can’t observe the rites of the Living Lord as a man of God must. The ghost-colored invaders who came from beyond the rising sun trust in their vigilance and in their cold technology to protect them. It does. The People make do. They’ve had to, for over a decade now—ever since the Dawncomers laid aside any pretense of friendliness and openly usurped the Emperor’s power. But there is always the Lord. Quineltoc keeps faith.

In other camps, other wisewives do the same. None have any pretense that this is anything other than necromantic abomination, perhaps even an invitation to the skeletal Dead Sisters to come and claim them all. But it must be done if any of the magebloods—the sacred heart of the People—are to survive and make the People whole again. The Emperor has abandoned them, and the Living Lord has abandoned them, and the lawspeakers would rather the magebloods die unprofaned than take this step. But the women all spoke together through the night wind and the power of their own blood, and although a few wisewives dissented or abstained from condoning the plan, they concur: if God will not understand, what good is God?

Once there was a body politic that, through happy geographic accident, had avoided any number of devastating wars, and was thus left the most powerful government in the world. On the basis of that evidence, it thought itself the most enlightened body politic that the world had ever seen. It kept its citizens under surveillance, arresting or ejecting those who did not agree, and as a result enjoyed unanimous approbation. One day, two men, sons of a vast clothing empire, who had recently been elected to the body, presented a sheaf of invisible bills. “See how stylishly we’ve cut, trimmed, and hemmed taxes! How popular you’ll be with the tastemakers of this realm—how perceptive and attractive you’ll seem—if you pass them!” “See how they funnel the vast majority of money to the military, which is always fashionable. How powerful you’ll look to your enemies!” “Look how your children will benefit, leapfrogging into elite universities, flourishing in the compost of your trusts and estates!” “All honorable members of this body politic will see the good, glorious vision these bills represent. All citizens of discernment shall agree. The others? Well, they are not citizens, or they are fake citizens, voting without proper identification, and we should divert a portion of our security budget to uncovering these traitors and deporting or imprisoning them, as our fathers did in their day.”

She phones her mother every Thursday and they talk for half an hour and on Fridays she likes to watch a movie. Saturdays she goes grocery shopping. There are no curses under fluorescent lights, nor can you find mysteries at the till while you swipe a credit card. The city comforts her like a mother who coddles a child. It says, ”You are an ordinary body among ordinary bodies, you are in fact no-body.”

They were clever, and knew that these towers had to be houses, which, for humans at least, were starships that did not move through space, and simply sat on a world to transport humans through time instead.

The child said to the darkness, “I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand. Can you explain it better?” The darkness said to the child, “It means that you cannot be good in a world that has seen no evil. It means that I will be your shadow under the new stars. It means that I will be the gift of evil. It means that I am the kal, and I have waited long aeons for you.”

It amused me that Sollozzo needed reasons. As a storyteller he should’ve been immune to reasons. When I told him that, he countered with a challenge. He offered two sentences. The first: Eve died, and Adam died of a heart attack. The second: Eve died, and Adam died of grief. “Which of these two is more satisfying?” asked Sollozzo. “Which of these feels more meaningful? Now tell me you prefer causes over reasons.”

His entire argument rested on the necessity of novels. But every novel argues against its own necessity. The world of any novel, no matter how realistic, differs from the actual world in that the novel’s world can’t contain one specific book: the novel itself. For example, the world of Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence didn’t contain a copy of The Museum of Innocence. If Pamuk’s fictional world was managing just fine without a copy of his novel, wasn’t the author—any author—revealing that the actual world didn’t need the novel either? Et cetera, et cetera.

Ummm...what? That makes no sense. This person is arguing for the importance of literarture on a whole, not any one particular novel. Also, even in stories, there exist other, similar stories. Marvel, for example, famously exists in the world of DC because Dick Grayson reads Spiderman comics.

“They were monsters,” my lover says to me. “And it does no good to have mercy on a monster. They will not have mercy on you.”