there’s so much more diversity in our fiction, if we just look for it
August 17, 2016 6:24 AM Subscribe
152 published authors of speculative fiction, of Asian descent. (includes links to stories by the authors, if available online.)
Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 was amazing. The story can feel like it should've been resolved sooner than it did, but when you get to the end it's very satisfying (not just because it's a loooong book).
posted by numaner at 7:01 AM on August 17, 2016
posted by numaner at 7:01 AM on August 17, 2016
Sharma is tech/usability smart, Quarter Days had both an epub and mobi link so it's on the kindle now!
A sub index of novel length works by sub category would be nice, as much as I'm all for diversity, when I'm looking for a good time travel or far future space battle yarn, well ya know when you need a fix, you need a fix. :-)
posted by sammyo at 7:03 AM on August 17, 2016
A sub index of novel length works by sub category would be nice, as much as I'm all for diversity, when I'm looking for a good time travel or far future space battle yarn, well ya know when you need a fix, you need a fix. :-)
posted by sammyo at 7:03 AM on August 17, 2016
Not listed, but Alyssa Wong Has a pretty good chance of picking up a Hugo this weekend.
posted by Artw at 7:22 AM on August 17, 2016
posted by Artw at 7:22 AM on August 17, 2016
There's almost no context here, or critical content, so it just looks like a pointless random link collection, like a Wikipedia list of Italian-American sports figures or something.
These aren't even recommended authors, they're just a random subset of everyone either from Asia or of Asian descent who's published something, so it's kind of patronizing.
I have no idea what Kobo Abe (1924-1993), say, is supposed to have in common with a minor Filipino poet or an Indian novelist or an unpublished American YA author or Kazuo Ishiguro, other than serving as an undefinable "Asian voice" for the original list compiler.
posted by Umami Dearest at 7:30 AM on August 17, 2016
These aren't even recommended authors, they're just a random subset of everyone either from Asia or of Asian descent who's published something, so it's kind of patronizing.
I have no idea what Kobo Abe (1924-1993), say, is supposed to have in common with a minor Filipino poet or an Indian novelist or an unpublished American YA author or Kazuo Ishiguro, other than serving as an undefinable "Asian voice" for the original list compiler.
posted by Umami Dearest at 7:30 AM on August 17, 2016
There's almost no context here, or critical content, so it just looks like a pointless random link collection, like a Wikipedia list of Italian-American sports figures or something.
For me, as a white person who teaches a community ed SF class, this kind of list is useful because it allows me to look at a lot of SF by writers of Asian descent and then choose what seems relevant for whatever we're working on in class. For instance:
1. If we're doing themed work (space opera, feminist SF of the early eighties, cyberpunk) I seek out non-white writers who deal with those themes. I look for what I think are the "best" writers of color, but it helps tremendously to have a large pool. So, for example, we did a group of revisionist space opera novels and read Aliette de Bodard's fantastic On A Red Station, Drifting against Player of Games and Ancillary Justice.
2. Sometimes we just read a lot of SF by writers from a particular background in order to get a feel for the concerns and approaches. So we might read all the translated Chinese SF we can get our hands on, regardless of quality/quality of translation. I'd generally back that up with some historical and critical material, but the goal would be to read broadly in order to get a sense of the field.
3. Sometimes we read meh stuff on purpose if it has an interesting element. We read a bunch of vaguely-historical left-leaning fantasy anthologies recently. Some of the stories really weren't that great but pointed to interesting historical moments and literary concerns. We were reading them in part to think through how fantasy works as historical memory.
4. Sometimes I put together reading lists as a way to periodize - so I might want to say "here are short stories which illustrate the trajectory of Indian-American SF writers in the US, starting from [story] when there were few such authors and hitting the high points of these famous stories". It helps tremendously to have a long list available to choose from.
5. Lists like this also help me get a sense of just who is writing - it's very easy to miss writers who have only a few short stories published, or not to realize that a writer is of Asian descent. I tend to think that this is important because such knowledge is still patchy and scattershot - and because I remember the fairly recent past when I literally did not know of any US-based Asian SF writers because it was before the internet and I knew only what I could find in the bookstore.
Basically, I read and teach SF as a genre. I'm interested in who is writing, how that changes over time, how themes get dealt with, how SF "talks to itself" as different writers work different themes, etc.
There are lots of ways to construct lists, but I think that a foundational way is to construct a list of All The Things As Far As You Know. Later on, operating with more information, you can say "here are space operas" or "here are the very finest prose artists" or whatever.
To illustrate: I collect women's SF of the seventies and eighties. I have a bunch of small, obscure anthologies as well as the big ones like Women of Wonder. I value these tremendously not because every story is a hidden gem (many of them are mediocre at best) but because having these stories in the aggregate allows me better to understand the field itself. Many people who don't have access to these short stories but who read the better-known ones (Joanna Russ's Whileaway, for instance) just don't have the full sense of where Russ was writing from.
Also, you might find Russ's How To Suppress Women's Writing of interest - one of the observations she makes is that women writers are always [this was written in the eighties, now it's just "are often"] positioned as unique and the first of their kind, and that women's writing was basically historyless because past women writers' works were allowed to fall out of print and be forgotten, and did not make it into histories of writing. This is part of why Virago Press, the Women's Press, etc, concerned themselves with republishing lost women's writing - to get women into the cannon, into the stories we tell about writing. Simply making those books available was a political act that changed how we understood fiction.
posted by Frowner at 7:57 AM on August 17, 2016 [17 favorites]
For me, as a white person who teaches a community ed SF class, this kind of list is useful because it allows me to look at a lot of SF by writers of Asian descent and then choose what seems relevant for whatever we're working on in class. For instance:
1. If we're doing themed work (space opera, feminist SF of the early eighties, cyberpunk) I seek out non-white writers who deal with those themes. I look for what I think are the "best" writers of color, but it helps tremendously to have a large pool. So, for example, we did a group of revisionist space opera novels and read Aliette de Bodard's fantastic On A Red Station, Drifting against Player of Games and Ancillary Justice.
2. Sometimes we just read a lot of SF by writers from a particular background in order to get a feel for the concerns and approaches. So we might read all the translated Chinese SF we can get our hands on, regardless of quality/quality of translation. I'd generally back that up with some historical and critical material, but the goal would be to read broadly in order to get a sense of the field.
3. Sometimes we read meh stuff on purpose if it has an interesting element. We read a bunch of vaguely-historical left-leaning fantasy anthologies recently. Some of the stories really weren't that great but pointed to interesting historical moments and literary concerns. We were reading them in part to think through how fantasy works as historical memory.
4. Sometimes I put together reading lists as a way to periodize - so I might want to say "here are short stories which illustrate the trajectory of Indian-American SF writers in the US, starting from [story] when there were few such authors and hitting the high points of these famous stories". It helps tremendously to have a long list available to choose from.
5. Lists like this also help me get a sense of just who is writing - it's very easy to miss writers who have only a few short stories published, or not to realize that a writer is of Asian descent. I tend to think that this is important because such knowledge is still patchy and scattershot - and because I remember the fairly recent past when I literally did not know of any US-based Asian SF writers because it was before the internet and I knew only what I could find in the bookstore.
Basically, I read and teach SF as a genre. I'm interested in who is writing, how that changes over time, how themes get dealt with, how SF "talks to itself" as different writers work different themes, etc.
There are lots of ways to construct lists, but I think that a foundational way is to construct a list of All The Things As Far As You Know. Later on, operating with more information, you can say "here are space operas" or "here are the very finest prose artists" or whatever.
To illustrate: I collect women's SF of the seventies and eighties. I have a bunch of small, obscure anthologies as well as the big ones like Women of Wonder. I value these tremendously not because every story is a hidden gem (many of them are mediocre at best) but because having these stories in the aggregate allows me better to understand the field itself. Many people who don't have access to these short stories but who read the better-known ones (Joanna Russ's Whileaway, for instance) just don't have the full sense of where Russ was writing from.
Also, you might find Russ's How To Suppress Women's Writing of interest - one of the observations she makes is that women writers are always [this was written in the eighties, now it's just "are often"] positioned as unique and the first of their kind, and that women's writing was basically historyless because past women writers' works were allowed to fall out of print and be forgotten, and did not make it into histories of writing. This is part of why Virago Press, the Women's Press, etc, concerned themselves with republishing lost women's writing - to get women into the cannon, into the stories we tell about writing. Simply making those books available was a political act that changed how we understood fiction.
posted by Frowner at 7:57 AM on August 17, 2016 [17 favorites]
#33 is me!
posted by dhruva at 8:14 AM on August 17, 2016 [9 favorites]
posted by dhruva at 8:14 AM on August 17, 2016 [9 favorites]
Thanks for that background, Frowner. I guess I would find this list somewhat less problematic if it limited itself to "Asian-American" writers, who could at least arguably be said to have certain shared points of view, or at least come from a limited number of different American communities.
But including a Taisho era-born Japanese author like Kobo Abe just seems misguided, and placing Kazuo Ishiguro alongside a Filipino YA author - it seems to be assuming some sort of mythical pan-Asian cultural sensibility based solely on having ancestors who came from roughly the same hemisphere, and it just strikes me as being patronizing.
posted by Umami Dearest at 8:30 AM on August 17, 2016 [1 favorite]
But including a Taisho era-born Japanese author like Kobo Abe just seems misguided, and placing Kazuo Ishiguro alongside a Filipino YA author - it seems to be assuming some sort of mythical pan-Asian cultural sensibility based solely on having ancestors who came from roughly the same hemisphere, and it just strikes me as being patronizing.
posted by Umami Dearest at 8:30 AM on August 17, 2016 [1 favorite]
(And hi dhruva!)
posted by Umami Dearest at 8:31 AM on August 17, 2016
posted by Umami Dearest at 8:31 AM on August 17, 2016
I just saw a trailer for Arrival and I was thinking it looked like a short story I read. And it is! It's based on Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life, collected in the anthology Stories of Your Life and Others. Each of those stories is very different from the others and all of them are fantastic. Though if I were going to turn one of those stories into a movie, that wouldn't be the first one I'd pick. Deep questions about free will and metaphysics.
posted by Loudmax at 5:19 PM on August 17, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Loudmax at 5:19 PM on August 17, 2016 [1 favorite]
« Older "I could sit here and read figures until I'm blue... | Who you gonna call? (An-ces-tors!) Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
I also get a kick out of how it's alphabetized by first name.
I've not read a lot of these yet, but I will absolutely second the recommendation of Vandana Singh - The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet is fantastic.
Also, I defy you to read Iona Sharma's Quarter Days and not be utterly enchanted. (In fairness the class politics are a bit off and I don't at all agree with her interpretation of the General Strike, but it's a charming and lovely story - I could have read pretty much infinite stories in this world with these characters.) Giganotosaurus has published some pretty good stuff by writers of Asian/South Asian background lately in general.
posted by Frowner at 6:42 AM on August 17, 2016