Chief Petty Officer Tyrol: “What do you want to do now, Captain?”
Lt. Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace: “The same thing we always do. Fight ’em until we can’t.”
“When I get mad I put it down on a pad.”–Chuck D, Welcome to the Terrordome
I don’t usually do New Year Resolutions. But fellow writing colleagues Troy Wiggins & Khaalidah inspired me to create one of these lists. So even though January’s almost done, here goes.
“The world is more like a living creature than a machine, and so too are stories. In fact stories exist in a bewildering number of adaptations…some of them might even look a little like a fish.”
Some time ago, in a younger life that seems far, far away, I decided I wanted to write. I was going to write speculative fiction, like the sci-fi and fantasy books I’d spent so much of my younger life reading. I was going to be a PoC writing awesome speculative fiction that no one had seen before, away from the run-of-the mill elves, dwarves and what-not. And the very novelty of my work would gain accolades and applause.
Then I woke up.
Prolific science fiction writer Ray Bradbury died this week, at the age of 91. I read my first Bradbury book in middle school–The Illustrated Man— and it *blew my mind.* It wasn’t my first speculative fiction book by any means. I’d long torn through Middle Earth, traveled Narnia, tesseracted across space and time with Meg and Charles Wallace and tried my hand at inventing with Danny Dunn. (Yeah, let those memories sink in). But the stories in The Illustrated Man were on another level–it was like everything I loved about the old Rod Serling hostedTwilight Zone episodes my mother got me into, but on paper…and with words! From the creepy virtual reality nursery story “The Veldt” to the hauntingly sad “The Exiles” (we made Santa cry!) to every-kid’s-revenge story “Zero Hour,” I knew I’d never look at sci-fi the same way again. Most startling of all was a story by Bradbury called “The Other Foot”–startling to my young PoC eyes, because the main characters were something I’d hardly seen before. They were black.
Phenderson Djèlí Clark 