So Long Been Dreaming
This has loose connections to the stuff I was talking about in the previous entry, but I think it deserves its own entry:
The anthology So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, is now available in Canada.
(Note that that page has one inaccuracy: there's no Delany introduction.)
The book will be out in the US in October. If you live in the US and want the book before October, it looks like you can order it from the publisher, Arsenal Pulp Press. I'm hoping there'll be copies at WisCon.
One partial answer to my question in my previous entry about what editors can do is to familiarize themselves with traditions other than the ones they grew up with. (Um, note that in this entry I'm conflating plot and culture. I don't mean to suggest that different cultural traditions must of necessity have different plot traditions; but I think that anthologies devoted to stories from a particular cultural background or set of backgrounds are likely to be useful for someone wanting to familiarize themselves with plot structures and other storytelling conventions from those backgrounds.) Even if one is monolingual, one might, for example, read a bunch of relevant sf anthologies, such as Nalo's anthologies (this new one along with Mojo: Conjure Stories and Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction), and Cosmos Latinos, and Strange Kaddish, and Dark Matter (I gotta remember to pick up the new volume, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones), and so on.
There was some interesting discussion in comments on Toby's journal a couple months ago between Nalo and Catherine S. and others, about the idea of having an anthology specifically limited to writers of color. Alan Lattimore posted some further comments on the subject in his own journal.
