Afterword

Nisi Shawl

 

 

WE’VE BEEN SHINING a long time.

Decades back, as a recent graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, I met with a committee to pick our next set of instructors. (Every year there are six different instructors for Clarion West’s six-week intensive, all writers and editors of note in the speculative genre.) Since this was a special anniversary for the workshop, I proposed that we celebrate by choosing people of color for every slot.

We didn’t. There were numerous objections to my idea, but the one that has stayed with me was the heartfelt complaint that by doing this we’d “use them all up.” That is, if we filled our teaching roster with nonwhite instructors one year, we’d have none left to call on for following years—unless we kept inviting the same old crew back again and again.

“This is how we breed!” I fumed later to a sympathetic listener. Far from “using up” all available writers and editors of color, I thought that focusing on their existence would encourage others to ignite and burn and light the literary cosmos with hundred-hued flames. I thought we’d help even more potential writers of color reach critical mass and fire up their brain furnaces.

But there were fewer people of color writing speculative fiction twenty years ago. It was just conceivable that there would have been a (temporary) dearth of new nonwhite teaching candidates had my plan been accepted.

That was then. This is now—a time when the anthology you hold in your hands could easily have filled multiple volumes, when I never even got to issue a public call for stories because I received plenty merely by asking the writers of color I personally know.

This is not the first such anthology, as I note in the book’s dedication, and these are not the first authors of color writing imaginative fiction, as many students of the genre’s history are aware. For centuries we have been this brilliant.

Now, though, our numbers have grown. And we shine together.

Would you like more of what you’ve read here? Wider constellations, greater galaxies of original speculative fiction by people of color? Then seek us out. Spread the word. Wish on us, reach for us, and yes, let us gather together in the deep, dark nurseries of stars. Let us congregate. This is how new suns are born.