July Books 15) So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy

This anthology, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, pulls together 20 short stories by writers of colour, all exploring different aspects of the colonisation experience through an sfnal lens. They are all very good. I found I had to read most of them very slowly to let the language settle into my brain; I think for that reason my attention lingered a bit more on the stories by Vandana Singh, Maya Khankoje and Tobias Buckell which made slightly fewer demands on me. This is a great anthology.

It was published in 2004. The Hugo Short Story shortlist for 2005, for which most of these would have been eligible, was of particularly poor quality (as I said at the time), and even the least impressive from the Hopkinson/Mehan anthology (I’ll identify it as devorah major’s “Trade Winds”) is a far better story than the Hugo winner (Resnick’s “Travels With My Cats”). None of the stories from So Long Been Dreaming got the 11 votes necessary to be recorded on the long list, let alone the 18 needed for the short list. It surely cannot be true that only ten (or fewer) Worldcon members had read So Long Been Dreaming before the nominations deadline? Something is wrong, or at least was wrong in 2005; this year things seem to have improved.

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