Drew Hayden Taylor is an author, playwright, journalist and filmmaker from the Curve Lake First Nation in Ontario. A fan of classic sci-fi, he explains in the foreword to this slim short story collection that he set out to “take traditional… science fiction characteristics and filter them through an Aboriginal consciousness.” This effort came after years of fruitless attempts to find a market for an Indigenous creator driven sci-fi anthology, and the subsequent decision to just write an entire collection of his own. (Happily, multiple such anthologies do exist today, some which I think even predate this collection.) I expected these stories to all center characters from Taylor’s community, but instead he incorporates a diverse range of Native characters: Kanien'kehá:ka radio station operators meeting the apocalypse, an Anishinabe man in space grieving the death of his grandfather, a Kwakwaka’wakw boy who converses with a talking robot.⁣
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This collection was quite creative and a lot of fun, and I think it successfully met Taylor’s objective of playing with tropes and traits of classic science fiction. For me this sometimes meant the stories were a little less interesting, because they were tackling the canon with a twist rather than reaching in more unexpected directions, but perhaps this is an unfair complaint because isn’t everything (in science fiction and also more broadly) reacting to what’s come before?⁣
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Cw for suicidal ideation, discussions of death and genocide