Content area
Full Text
Dillon, Grace L, ed. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2012. 272 pp. Softcover. ISBN 978-0-8165-2982-7. $24.95.
Grace Dillon opens Walking the Clouds with a relatively short but remarkably comprehensive introduction entitled "Imagining Indigenous Futurisms," wherein she makes explicit the fact that this collection of indigenous science fiction, the first of its kind, "confronts the structures of racism and colonialism and sfs own complicity in them" (10-11). Given Dillon's own expertise in indigenous literatures, she is indeed well-positioned to develop such an anthology, and the introduction effectively speaks to the diversity of the nineteen collected sf works written by Native American, First Nation, Aboriginal Australian, and New Zealand Maori authors, while drawing on a wealth of critical scholarship related to indigenous and sf literatures.
Following the introduction, the anthology is divided into five thematically organized sections: "The Native Slipstream," "Contact," "Indigenous Science and Sustainability," "Native Apocalypse," and "Biskaabiiyang, 'Returning to Ourselves'." Each of these sections is introduced with a short essay providing valuable context and framing as they briefly situate each author's work historically, geographically, and politically; these introductory essays also point to other relevant texts, particularly indigenous sf films that are related in some way to the content being introduced in the anthology. These introductions, however, could easily have been twice as long. While certainly well-written and informative, greater depth, particularly as...