Yes, this is the year of the biggest doom of all—the Mayan Apocalypse. Time will stand still; the earth will cease to turn; giant asteroids and rogue planets will collide with us; a new Ice Age will cover much of Europe and North America; global warming will make a desert of everything and melt the polar ice caps. Angels, demons, and aliens will appear and whisk us off to Heaven or Hell, or to a perfect planet that has no war or pestilence or famine, or even death.

I’ve been thinking a lot about doom since Y2K. On New Year’s Eve, 1999, I asked my husband if we should store some water or something and he replied “If you want to” and went back to reading his book on ancient history.

Y2K was a blip. All those years that should have heralded the end: 999, 1999, innumerable dates in between, were also blips. Most people just shrugged it off and went about business as usual. The end would come in God’s own time.

Now it’s 2012. I intended to lay in a store of grains and freeze dried foods last year mainly because this summer the harvest is predicted to fail. Now all I have put aside are four jars of pickles and one jar of last year’s peaches. And oatmeal—lots of oatmeal.

Yet in spite of my lack of preparedness, I’m not worried. I’m not scared of any of those horrible things possibly happening, but I am terrified by other things, things I see actually happening around me (you know: political, economic, environmental, stupid things). But in 2012, just what am I most afraid of?

The ultimate fear—that of ceasing to be. Now I see how all that pondering over Kierkegaard decades ago scarred me and left me falling from the highest tower of being trying to count the windows, or have conversations with others, or engage in fun-filled adventures. Anything but look down and see the inevitable splat.

Then there’s the nausea. Some things do make me ill—violence, loud angry voices, threats, unkindness, thoughtlessness, and of course, my own lack of perfection.

Then came the dread. Yup. The dread that washes over one’s nausea like a five kilometre high tsunami and threatens to drown everything beautiful, and great, and joyous, and uplifting, and hopeful.

By nature I am a happy person. I always try to see the best in everyone’s motives and I was completely astonished to discover that not everyone is nice and some people really are as mean as junkyard dogs, and that beauty might be only skin deep, but ugly spirit went clean to the bone.

So an apocalypse seemed distant and had nothing to do with me.

Yet, it has everything to do with me. I am a selfish being, it turns out—not as nice as I once was, nor as naive and credulous. But it IS all about me. And you. And them. And that’s why I think we become afraid when confronted with a big ending.

We’re selfish creatures and a sense of self-preservation is strong in us. It’s fed by our natural greed without which we likely would never have made it out of Africa. Some other anthropoid would be in charge of the world and maybe stripping leaves off the trees for a light supper rather than stripping trees off the land to build more houses for more people.

I’m trying to make sense of six decades of images and ideas that contradict each other at every turn. Would the earth be better off “Without People”? What the heck does “better off” mean? Would the natural world recover from our abuses? Of course. Would some beautiful species still go extinct? Certainly. Would the rats and cockroaches care? Nope.

What if only SOME of the people disappeared? Who gets to pick? All the right-wing religious fanatics? All the left-wing humanist fanatics? Libertarians? Librarians? Indigenous people? Immigrants? Do we all go back to the land of our fathers or mothers? Yikes, what a prospect!

What I’m trying to say is that every day is an apocalypse somewhere on our planet.

It doesn’t matter if we are hit by giant sow bugs from outer space, ten times the usual number of tornadoes, or hailstones the size of basketballs. It will be something. It will be a motor vehicle, misadventure, self-destruction, or even autodestruct when you are 127 years old and riding your bike too hard uphill and the old ticker can’t keep up. Every day, every year is Armageddon.

My father-in-law Jack used to say most people are just trying to get to the next day in reasonable shape. How we each get to the next day varies, and that explains a lot. It also explains in part why we are so fascinated by doom. Other people’s doom, that is. It distracts us from our own and when we walk out of the theatre, or put the story down, we are relieved we lived through it, and can continue to hope we will live well into the next day, and beyond.

Web publishing is a hell of a thing. You probably knew this already; you’ve probably already read fiction online, maybe read a comic or watched a web series. Maybe a family member or coworker has emailed you a cute picture or an interesting article. You might even follow a blog, a comic, a YouTube channel, or some other web product. Even if you’re not a regular internet user, you’re probably pretty used to being told that the internet is the wave of the future and that books are going out of style any day now. Well, that may or may not be true. But, whatever happens to books, web publishing is changing the face of literature in a lot of exciting, terrifying, unexpected ways.

Let’s start out by saying that there’s stigma against web publishing, especially in the literary world. Many people see web publishing as a cop-out. Why is this?

Well, frankly, because there’s a lot of crap. If you’ve waded into online fiction at all, you’ve almost certainly seen some of the crap, because it’s not hard to find. But, you’ve probably also seen something really brilliant, too, and all of it for free. Not only that, but the internet is capable of all kinds of new and exciting multimedia projects, comics with animated frames, stories that come with embedded background tracks, fictional information websites that have created their own elaborate worlds, stuff that can really take entertainment to some new and exciting places. I’ve rolled the dice a fair number of times by now, but to those of us familiar with books and magazines, rolling the dice is an awkward way to go about our search for a great story.

Here’s how it is. It all comes down to capitalism. Most things do, if you’re accustomed to overthinking. This time, it’s all on account of the fact that paper costs money.

When a publisher chooses a story, it’s a gamble. The stakes are the cost of author payments, preparation, printing, and promotion, and the game is sales. Any publisher’s goal, no matter how much she loves literature, is to sell enough copies to make back all the costs associated with production, and enough profit to keep rolling. If a book doesn’t sell, she’s still got to pay the author, the printers, the marketing team, and if a book undersells by enough, that leaves her with less money than she started with, and publishing is a business. So, of course, she’s going to choose stories with good odds—stories with well-known authors, with interesting angles, with a niche in the market at the time.

The result of all this is a barrier to entry; a lot of stories get passed over for traditional publication for a variety of reasons. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of submissions to any publishing house or magazine are going to be rejected. The figure you’ll hear kicking around is about 90%, and whether it’s quality of writing, the market, or any other reason it always comes down to a gamble the publisher hasn’t got any faith in. The same thing applies to music, to games, to just about any part of the entertainment industry you’d care to name. If it’s not paper distribution, it’s discs, or TV broadcasts, or a studio full of dedicated digital artists that need salaries.

Now, that brings us to the internet. Obviously, the internet is not made of paper. Internet publishing costs far less than traditional publishing methods. The bare minimum is server space, which many sites are willing to give away for free. A dedicated internet publisher will want to buy banner ads here and there for the product, or hire people to format an ebook, but it’s still less expensive than everything involved in the creation of a paper book, which means a web publisher has a lot less riding on any given story.

In fact, these days pretty much anyone can publish for free, which means a writer can go ahead and post a story somewhere just for the sake of readership, no need to make any bets on making back paper costs. An amateur can just format the story as a .txt file or an HTML page, tell some friends and hope for good word of mouth, and have a story up and ready for the world to read without having spent a dime. So, more and more writers are becoming publishers, and third-party publishers no longer need that barrier to entry. Sites like Blogspot and Tumblr can publish anyone with an account, no need to vet or edit anything.

That there is the sticky bit. No need to vet or edit anything. Because there’s no need for an editor to make sure the story’s got enough quality to increase those odds, many stories you’ll find on the internet haven’t been edited. And, because there’s no risk involved, there’s no need for anyone to say what is and isn’t going to be published except the authors themselves.

Long story short? Everything gets published on the web. With no one sitting behind a desk (or in my case, usually on a couch) saying what will and won’t sell, absolutely everything makes the cut, for better or for worse. Brilliant stuff that’s too experimental for a publisher to feel confident about, terrible stuff that no one would want to read, average stories that never stood out and got the chance. Everything makes the cut. It’s all out there, and the best you can hope for is for word of mouth to point you to the good stuff. Actually, web publishing is a lot like a traditional publisher’s slush pile; there’s a lot of material there, and no guarantees.

So, yes, the internet is changing the face of publishing. Consumers can find free entertainment online as long as they’re willing to sift for it—and a lot of us are. More importantly, though, web publishing is giving people the freedom to prove themselves; authors who many publishers would be too scared to publish can get their start for free online, prove they’ve got what it takes to build an audience, and then move into more conventional methods. Publishers and producers are gaining new talent, talent they can be confident about knowing that they’ve already got an audience. Video game designers these days get their start online, and even major companies are looking to downloadable formats rather than more overhead-intensive physical distribution, just like a lot of traditional publishers (including On Spec, of course) have started producing ebooks of their hard-copy products.

Is the internet going to render books completely obsolete? From here, it’s hard to say. Maybe. But, more important than changing the format, the internet is changing the way people interact with and search for entertainment, and changing the way the publishing industry works. That’s what happens when an established economic model gets a sudden rush of low-cost alternatives. Everyone involved, producers, distributors, and customers, suddenly has a completely new way to interact with the product.

But, rest assured, as long as people want to be entertained, the internet can’t destroy the entertainment industry no matter how much it changes. That, too, is how the market works. No matter how much the face of the publishing industry changes, its heart isn’t going anywhere.

Once upon a time, in a land not too far away, science fiction thrilled the people with tales of wondrous new futures and what dangers new technologies might pose. We settled Mars, led the Fremen against
House Harkonnen and rendezvoused with Rama.

But then something happened. We stopped reading science fiction. Fantasy became the dominant genre in the land of make believe. Gone were the advanced machines (and humans) on futuristic worlds. In their place came kick-ass heroines with werewolf lovers fighting mages and fae on a city’s dark streets.

And sci-fi fans wondered: “What happened?”

Some pointed to Harry Potter, saying the popular and accessible boy wizard turned parents and kids alike from science fiction to the world of magic and creatures. Young boys didn’t dream of being Andrew “Ender” Wiggin or Paul Atriedies, but the Boy Who Lived.

While one book can certainly have an influence in the growth of a genre (see The Hunt for Red October and the surge of technothrillers), it doesn’t explain the decline of another.

So what happened to science fiction? We caught up to it.

Reading offers an escape into worlds, lives and situations far removed from ours. And that escape is entertainment. But the closer stories resemble our real lives, the less escape they provide and, therefore, the less entertainment they offer. (I’ve always felt that’s why 90210 lasted ten seasons while My So Called Life barely lasted one.)

We’ve seen the same thing with horror. In the 80s, Stephen King led an unstoppable juggernaut along with Peter Straub, Dean Koontz, Robert R. McCammon, Brian Lumley and more. While the Devil was the villain of choice in the 70s (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen), 80s horror found evil in cars, dogs, country-side villages, middle class suburbs and cities. The government was out to get you, mind control was real, your seemingly nice next door neighbour was a homicidal maniac and the (un)dead stalked the Earth’s small towns and remote forests. We escaped into these worlds where we had no idea just how awful things would get, finding entertainment and titillation in the suffering, struggles and set backs of our heroes, knowing they would rise up and fight back, but not without sacrifice.

Yet like one of its stories, the horror genre fizzled and died. True, a glut in any genre can lead to reader fatigue, but I think there was more than that. In the late 80s and early 90s, the Soviet Union collapsed and without this villain to focus our fears on, we looked to ourselves… and realized we had a lot of problems to deal with. We began talking openly about AIDS, bullying and suicide, teen pregnancy and abortion, street gangs and sexual abuse of children. Cocaine morphed from the cool Wall Street drug of choice into the scourge of poor neighbourhoods in the form of crack. Middle-aged men who had worked for the same company all their lives found themselves out of work. It was almost like our lives had become horror stories. We no longer needed to escape and sublimate our feelings of revulsion or fear. And more than that, we came to realize that in the end the hero doesn’t achieve some small victory. Sometimes, the hero dies unceremoniously and no one notices. And sometimes, the hero is just as bad as the villain… he’s just “our” hero.

Today, we’re seeing the same thing with science fiction. It’s a cliché to say we live in a science fiction novel, but that doesn’t make it any less true. William Gibson might have written about a whole country being cut off from the Internet, only to have hackers dust off old-school technology or hack into satellite feeds to show the world the oppression in their country. The American President debating an Internet kill switch sounds like the subplot of a Tom Clancy novel. Where Will Riker handed Captain Picard a PADD, a small device with a reconfigurable interface, today we call it the iPad. And a private businessman building his own spaceship hearkens back to the dreams of Delos David Harriman.

But the decline of science fiction is more than just real-world technology becoming as fascinating as rebelling robots or hyperdrives (though both might arrive sooner than we think). First, we are not only acclimatized to technology but the speed at which it’s evolving. Who would be surprised if thimble-sized blue tooth headsets were announced tomorrow, or self-cleaning clothing? We have plug-in cars, like in Watchmen, that might become as ubiquitous as cell phones before we know it. Technology companies keep advertising thinner, faster, smaller… and we expect that these things will be thinner, faster, smaller. In a few years, the MacBook Air will be considered a big, clunky device from some primitive age.

And there’s more. Good science fiction doesn’t just rely on cool gadgets or settings, but their effect on us. Is an AI alive? If so, what does that mean for us humans as living beings? How much can you tinker with human DNA and still have it be human? What parallels do we see between invading extraterrestrials destroying our culture and imperial powers of old?

In the past, we relied on science fiction’s authors to offer up tales examining these issues while entertaining us with adventure, intrigue and escapism. Now we debate these things on Facebook, Twitter, text messages and articles’ comments sections (all of which, 20 years ago, would have had homes in science fiction stories). Do we buy organic? How dangerous are genetically engineered crops? How much information about us does the government have stored in its databases? And just who has access to all those cameras watching us on the street? We love our devices, but we know every smart phone, tablet and laptop we plug in to charge is that much more environmental damage we’re causing. And if not the greenhouse gas produced by coal or oil, then nuclear’s radioactive waste, wind-power causing headaches and health problems, or the toxins found in solar panels.

So we turn to greater escapism in fantasy. A virtually limitless field, it still offers up analogy and allegory but in tropes and McGuffins removed from our daily lives. Parents worry about their daughters dating a troublesome or abusive young man, but no one really need fear her dating a vampire or werewolf. Yet young women can still get that dangerous thrill from the story of the rebellious but still good girl taming the bad boy. We can be entranced by stories of two magical races going to war over ideologies, which resemble the West and China, but because this takes place on another world with magic instead of nukes and shaman-emperors instead of presidents it still allows for escapism.

So what will the future hold for science fiction? Again, we can look to horror. Horror, especially in Canada, has morphed into a genre of not horrific things, but horrific situations. The uncanny, the
disquieting. Horror doesn’t just come from the monster, but knowing that we might be even more monstrous.

Science fiction will likely similarly evolve. The growth of steampunk and biopunk take sci-fi tropes and sensibilities, but transform them into worlds that never were (steampunk, usually set in the past) or probably never will be (biopunk, which posits worlds where rather than developing technologies external to us, we develop ourselves; the human body is the technology).

What is also interesting is how social sciences—politics, sociology and history—are creeping more and more into science fiction (with all respect to the legacy of Heinlein). Like all future worlds, the cause of ruin is what we fear at the time of writing—militarization, overpopulation, disease, nuclear war. But consider the science fiction of the 60s and 70s. Writers therein recognized the terror of the Cold War and drew a very short line between the idealized politics of the previous generation (most notably the inclusive ideologies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt) and the politics of the future. Indeed, the United Federation of Planets takes its founding language almost directly from the League of Nations charter.

The last decade or so has seen science fiction, with exceptions like Robert J. Sawyer, abandon that optimism. Hope for a peaceful and egalitarian future has been replaced by millenarian warnings of environmental catastrophe and capitalist avarice that turn Huxley’s “Fordism” into a best-case scenario—social engineering aside, at least everybody had a job.

Yet novels such as The Windup Girl, Julian Comstock and Oryx and Crake do more than look at our demise through all-powerful corporations; they tap into the culture of fear and apathy that has become the hallmark of the early 21st century. Are those emotions the product of the collective anxiety produced under the George W. Bush era? Few would argue against the notion that those years filled the traditionally left leaning SF/F community with fear of a religion corporation-military triumvirate that would trample the arts, personal liberties and tolerance. Fewer still would argue that the three year long post-Bush hangover has had no influence upon the creation of future worlds. Convenient as that causality may be, it presumes to overlook the impact of the past generation on current writers. Ill-fated sequels aside, Gordon Gekko would find himself quite at ease in any of the worlds created by Bacigalupi, Wilson or Atwood. Top-down economics, politics of hegemony and challenges against individual agency are just as much a product of the 80s and early 90s as they are today. And perhaps that is the new, and old, direction for science fiction—using sociology and political science as the science in “science” fiction rather than interstellar travel, cloning or computers of today’s “hard SF.”

In conclusion, let me share a personal story. In July, the space shuttle Atlantis completed the last mission of the shuttle fleet. Aside from one or two friends, no one talked or even knew about it. Shuttle launches had become commonplace and the end of the manned American space program—for the moment—should have been a major cultural milestone. Thirty years ago, the flights of Enterprise and launch of Columbia held the world rapt. One wonders if the space program will ever regain the support, let alone attention, it once held because it no longer thrills us. Will its absence renew our excitement for space exploration, or has its waning momentum finally flagged and this could be the end of the West’s space program for many, many decades? Or might we see the exploration of space replaced with its commercialization? •

Having negotiated a well-worn path that many women have trod before me and moved through many experiences I had never imagined for myself whilst a child growing up in Western Canada, I currently find myself in a rather privileged time and place where I can sit at my kitchen table that faces the window that opens to the back yard. A large maple tree is aglow in newly green splendour, and my laptop whirs off and on like a moodily contented cat. This privilege is by no means fixed; it is acquired through my participation in imperialist systems, namely the colonization of Indigenous lands—which continues to be challenged by Indigenous peoples today in their efforts toward self-determination. I co-own a house and much of my day is my own to read, write, think, dream. I can choose what I want to write. I open the Word program and format the first page.

Fantasy and Science Fiction are two genres (please note that I think of “literary fiction” as a genre as well, and not a separate category that exists outside of genre) that are particularly compelling areas for creative speculation because there is room to develop ideas that currently we do not experience in our lived world. Fantasy, and in similar ways, Horror as well, articulates and makes manifest that which is psychological, emotive, symbolic into material representation via language and narrative. Science fiction can be the ultimate of extrapolative thought experiments—the literal expansion of a hypothesis into a narrative form. The best of Fantasy and Science Fiction exemplifies, for me, the culmination of the richest possibilities of both creative and rigorous thinking. For the writer who works in these genres there is the heady experience of shaping that which did not, before, exist. Yes— I admit: there is a god-like thrill to this fleeting moment, the Bwah-ha-ha capering dance, a little hand-rubbing glee. (We are entitled to a moment, I think. Let’s just keep it inside the trousers.)

The wonderfully exciting world-building aspect of writing Fantasy and/or Science Fiction is of particular importance for imagining what our futures can be. I am most profoundly moved by those stories that, at their core, are about human transformation. For the act of writing and reading, no matter what the subject matter, is about human relationships: between the writer and the reader via the text, and between the reader and the fictional characters as imagined by the writer. That a human and social relationship has been engaged cannot be under-emphasized because the writer needs to recognize the enormous responsibility she carries in embarking on this engagement. This human relationship is not limited solely to that between the writer and the reader. The fictional stories that are read and discussed, written about and shared, taught and sold, re-enter the public social sphere that is also a part of an even larger social history and context. The story shaped on my laptop travels through publication and vectors out to the larger world beyond my kitchen, the yard, the neighbourhood, the nation.

Indeed—if we think about it too deeply, we may succumb to paralysis and drown. There is a tenuous place where a writer must seek a balance between understanding the enormous social responsibility and buffering this knowledge enough in order to be able to write at all!

It is not for the faint of heart.

For the fictional planet is not one’s own, even if we’re the ones who’ve written it into being. The writer is writing out of her umwelt—her understanding of her world has been shaped by her subject position and experiences—her place within her history, culture, nation, body. She is not separate from the multitudes of simultaneously streaming narratives. She is also an agent. And the writer writes herself back into the world when aspects of her umwelt are recreated in a work of fiction. We can never unsee our way of seeing. We can only deconstruct and expand upon it. It is an enormous relief to know that we can continue to grow. The best of Fantasy and Science Fiction reframes the familiar and allows for a shift in subjective positioning—making the strange, familiar, the familiar, strange.

Imagine the honeybee. What the honeybee perceives, experiences and understands of a “meadow” is vastly different from what the human perceives and understands of the same surface area, the decoding of this “environment” forever framed by the limits of one’s own mechanisms of decoding. Particularly for humans, these mechanisms are not only physical and experiential, but also cultural, political and historical. When Virginia Woolf, speaking from her umwelt, details the ways patriarchy and systemic sexism oppresses and limits the lives of women and women writers, she either does not deem it of consequence and/or has not noticed, that the very site she critiques and that she seeks to expand is also confined to her own social and cultural framework; it is not only women who have been systemically oppressed, but also people of non-white races.1 (For the purposes of this petit editorial I am not going to expand upon issues of class. But class, clearly, is a major part of the social fabric by which one’s world is perceived, understood and circumscribed.)

I feel most keenly the limitations of our ways of imagining a planet of one’s own when faced with the different ways race is or is not represented or the different ways in which investigations of race are avoided in Fantasy and Science Fiction (I am also looking to see how sexuality is being depicted or assumed—has blanket heteronormativity again been the automatic default assumption?). How will race be represented in these genres? Will race be a skin-tone application with no cultural dimensionality? Or, if the narrative is offset against, say, an alien species off-world, or amidst fantastical creatures in a fantastical realm, does the human race flatten into the universal one-race? And, if there is such a universal one-race, whose race shall represent this? If race, in the story, “is not an issue”—that is, the central character’s race and the dynamics of racism are not a part of the world system in the fictional narrative and has nothing to do with the plot—does it matter to us, the readers, if characters are of diverse races?

No doubt it is very clear that race matters a great deal to me in both fiction and in my lived life. Does it matter to you? If so, in what ways? And if not, why not?

Issues of race2, racism and power have always been part of our species’ history. If we trace the stories back in time, race has always been entwined with struggles between different groupings of human beings. If this is so when we look far behind us, how can we then think that race will not be an issue as we move toward the ever future? With such ideas in my mind I often find myself frustrated by novels and stories in Fantasy and Science Fiction in which the dimensionalities of race and cultures have been sidelined, erased, under-represented or glibly skin-tone-washed3. It’s frustrating to read characterizations of peoples in the future as off-white in terms of skin-tone, as if some benign universal blending has occurred, and not only are there no longer any issues of race, but there are no longer any cultural beliefs and practices. Race and cultures have collapsed into the universal (sic)—or, the remnant of race is only a gesture of what used to be but is of no relevance any longer. When I read stories like this, I wonder if the ideological future has been used as a way to avoid having to enter into any examination of race at all (i.e. Phhh-chew! At least in the future or in a magical realm we needn’t worry about race and representation! It also gives us the false sense that we are moving swiftly toward a post-racial humanity when so much more work remains to be done). Ultimately, even if these ways of thinking can be levered as rationalization, these constructed fictions, arising from any one writer’s umwelt, re-enter the reader’s larger sociological and historical moment that is always inter-connected. We can never write and read discretely. We are forever implicated. And if, eventually, humans have moved into greater latitudes of hybridity, I cannot imagine that as a species we will have learned to live without some kind of constructed racialized categorizations as a means to exert control/power.4 I have always thought that Octavia E. Butler’s Oankali’s assessment that humans are both intelligent and hierarchical—but that their hierarchical drive overwhelms their intelligence, to be succinct and accurate. What this understanding means to me is that we need to keep these conversations going, and not imagine we’ve ever arrived at a site to be considered politically and critically evolved. The learning and re-imagining is ongoing. And we need to continually engage in the practice of shifting from thought to action.

Working these considerations into the writing of Fantasy and Science Fiction does not mean that the fun is all over and that the rain-filled clouds of “political correctness”5 have ruined the spectacular picnic of speculative fiction. The inclusion of well-considered, nuanced and complex depictions of race(s) and culture(s) in genre fiction will bring greater depth and complexity to these narratives. Even in those narratives where the plot has “nothing to do with race”, the writer’s careful research and understanding of race and the workings of race and culture as they would realistically inform and influence the character creates a fictional umwelt from which the reader can expand her own. Race and culture in stories such as this move well beyond skin-tone application as a singular aspect of character appearance, and create a dimensionality to the fictional world that is rich, resonant and specific. I am not satisfied with the gesture of inclusion, the plunking into story of the “generic light-brown-skinned hero”. I want and I ask for more! Writers like Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula Le Guin, Larissa Lai, Geoff Ryman, and Nnedi Okorafor are doing just this, and it is heartening and inspiring. But I long for a time when a careful consideration of race and culture in Science Fiction and Fantasy becomes the norm rather than the exception.

As an adult reader and writer of Fantasy and Science Fiction, these spectacular genres are not my escape vehicles by which I fly to a planet of my own. The best of these genres has me re-examining my relationship to the world I live in, and the communities around me. They lead me to perceive the limits of my own thinking and ask me to explore the unfamiliar and to embrace the transformative. I am transformed.

My gratitude to Rita Wong for editorial feedback on this article. Errors of thinking and grammar are my own. HG

Footnotes

1 I point to Woolf’s limitations as an example of the limitations that we are all subject to—I am and remain a great admirer of her feminism, innovative writing and fierce thinking.

2 I understand that the idea of “race” exists and is utilized as a social construction rather than a biological or empirical classification.

3 Skin-tone-washed (I just made that up!) is the idea that instead of “white-washing”, the skin-tone is “melaninated” to signify a person of colour but aside from skin-tone, there is no specific contextualized cultural, racial or historical dimensionality to the character.

4 See Wayde Compton’s essay, “Pheneticizing Vs Passing” in his collection of essays, After Canaan for an interesting re-framing of ideas of seeing/decoding race(s).

5 “Political correctness” as the term is currently used is a powerful example of the ongoing existing tensions and resistance toward creating space for discourse around issues of social justice. Originally, “political correctness” was used in a proactive sense, as a way to speak to those moments when bias, racism, sexism, bigotry, etc. revealed itself. That this proactive term has been spun around 180 degrees to be used as a term of derision against the person who is seeking to raise awareness of bias, racism, sexism, etc. reveals that we are far from “having arrived” at a place where this discourse is no longer necessary.