Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars
Page 24
Carl Brandon Society
P.O. Box 23336
Seattle, WA 98102
The science fiction convention WisCon’s parent organization, the Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science Fiction, granted us $2000 to cover Bloodchildren’s publication. This money helped to pay the Butler Scholars for their fabulously fine stories, me for the weeks I spent editing them, Laurie T. Edison for producing the book’s gorgeous cover photo, and various other expenses I won’t go into here. Carl Brandon Society Secretary Victor J. Raymond was instrumental in obtaining the SF3 grant and in administering the scholarship.
Arisia ’13 gave us a convention at which to stage the anthology’s launch party, and their Guests of Honor, Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due—along with author Stephen Graham Jones—provided Bloodchildren with wonderfully heartfelt endorsements.
Shweta Narayan’s story “Falling into the Earth” previously appeared in the anthology Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (Zubaan Books, 2012). We’re very grateful to editors Anil Menon and Vandana Singh for permission to reprint it here.
“Speech Sounds,” by Octavia E. Butler, originally appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (1983). Octavia’s literary executor Merrilee Heifetz, a senior agent at Writers House, has graciously agreed to let us reprint it in Bloodchildren.
In addition to contributing her brief memoir of interactions with Octavia over thirty years, Vonda N. McIntyre took all Bloodchildren’s texts and graphics and made them into a book. Her extraordinary skill and patience deserve the highest praise, so please join me in giving that to her. Book View Café, which Vonda helped found, is responsible for Bloodchildren’s distribution; because of this we thank the organization as a whole and all its members.
For making it possible for you to find this book by developing publicity for it, we’re thankful to the inimitable Eileen Gunn. Eileen also wrote Vonda’s true-if-not-necessarily-factual biography, another reason for us to tell her how deeply we appreciate her. How deeply? River deep, mountain high.
Nalo Hopkinson wrote the anthology’s introduction, lending Bloodchildren her lustrous glamor despite the pressure of academic commitments, the demands of her muse, and the draining effects of chronic illness.
Candra K. Gill, President of the Carl Brandon Society, designed the book’s cover. She incorporated the aforementioned photo by Laurie T. Edison, who for six years has given each of the Butler Scholars a silver replica of the owl pendant she created for Octavia. Candra is also in charge of the Carl Brandon Society website, including implementing all the changes made necessary by Bloodchildren’s publication.
Kath Wilham of Aqueduct Press proofed the anthology’s texts at lightning speed and with a sharp and excellent eye.
Of course, none of this would have done anyone any good without the stories offered here by the eleven Butler Scholars: Christopher Caldwell, Shweta Narayan, Caren Gussoff, Mary Elizabeth Burroughs, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Kai Ashante Wilson, Erik Owomoyela, Jeremy Sim, Dennis Y. Ginoza, Indrapramit Das, and Lisa Bolekaja. Thank you all for writing such moving, strange, powerful, challenging, hilarious, enchanting, frightening stuff. As literary offspring of our genre family’s matriarch you make us all very, very proud.
Contributor Biographies
Nalo Hopkinson, born in Jamaica, has lived in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and Canada. She is currently an Associate Professor at University of California Riverside. In 1999 she helped found the Carl Brandon Society. Nalo is the author of six novels, a story collection, and Report from Planet Midnight, a collection comprising stories, an historic speech, and an interview. Nalo edited the anthologies Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction and Mojo: Conjure Stories, and is co-editor of So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction. She has received multiple honors, including the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the World Fantasy Award, the Sunburst Award, and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. Her novel Sister Mine is a March 2013 release from Grand Central Publishing.
Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer. A recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Butler was one of the best known African American women in the field. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant. Admired for her diamond-like prose and her unflinching willingness to confront difficult topics, Octavia was also beloved as a teacher for her warmth, grace, and honesty. She taught several times at both the Clarion West and Clarion workshops, which have served as training grounds for the authors of Bloodchildren’s stories.
Book View Café founding member Vonda N. McIntyre keeps a large personal menagerie: wild snakes, tame wolves, and cloned dinosaurs, plus a huge mole named Philby that sleeps on the hassock in her office, and a wolverine named Ursula, of which she is inordinately fond. In harmony with Pacific Northwest reverence for the land, Vonda has created an urban-wildlife rescue area, with crocuses, on the parking strip in front of her house, attracting native raccoons, possums, bald eagles, and the occasional retired grunge band.
Vonda also controls a vast woodland empire, in which she has built a stately pleasure-dome out of recycled Popsicle-sticks. She oversaw the planting of thousands of tiny trees on this preserve, many of which have grown to enormous size. Through her domain runs a trout-stream with genuine trout in it. She feeds the trout her famous home-made chocolate decadence, which they take from her hand, emitting chirps of oncorhynchoid pleasure. It’s terrifyingly bucolic and yet reassuringly picturesque.
Christopher Caldwell attended the Clarion West Workshop in 2007 and received the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship that same year. He is a black American from Los Angeles with heavy family ties to Louisiana, and is interested in exploring questions of race, gender, and sexuality through fiction. He currently lives in Scotland with his husband and collaborator Alexander Kelly, where they are at work on a novel.
Shweta Narayan was born in India and has lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Scotland, and California. She makes her home in liminal spaces. She was the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient for Clarion in 2007, where she wrote the first two drafts of “Falling into the Earth.” Shweta’s fiction and poetry have recently appeared in places such as Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, The Apex Book of World SF 2, Nebula Awards Showcase 2012, and Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded.
Caren Gussoff is a science fiction writer living in Seattle. The author of Homecoming (2000), and The Wave and Other Stories (2003), first published by Serpent’s Tail/High Risk Books, Gussoff has also been published in anthologies by Seal Press and Hadley Rille, as well as in Abyss & Apex, Cabinet des Fées, Fantasy Magazine, and M-BRANE. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998, and in 2008 was the Carl Brandon Society’s Octavia E. Butler Scholar at Clarion West. She’s currently shopping around a novel set in post-pandemic Puget Sound. Find her at spitkitten.com.
Mary Elizabeth Burroughs is an American writer. She earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Mississippi as a Grisham fellow. In 2008, she studied speculative fiction at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UC San Diego as an Octavia E. Butler Scholar. She lives in Australia.
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2009 as the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship. A Filipina writer, Rochita currently lives in the Netherlands. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print periodicals, including Interzone, Apex Magazine, Philippine Genre Stories, Weird Fiction Review, and Our Own Voice. When she is not engaged in frantic bouts of writing, she keeps house, tends to her children, gives piano lessons, and volunteers for a Filipino women’s organization. She has a website at http://rcloenenruiz.com.
Kai Ashante Wilson was the 2010 recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship at Clarion in San Diego. He lives in New York City.
Erik Owomoyela was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he
gained an appreciation for open skies. After studying political science and journalism at the University of Iowa, he tried his hand briefly at world travel and less briefly at small-town newspaper reporting before attending the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2010 as a recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship. He currently resides in Seattle, with his laptop and the car he drove from Iowa.
Jeremy Sim was recently stuffed in a box and mailed to Germany, where he lives with his girlfriend Celine and their incredibly cute dog Rico. When not experimenting in the kitchen or playing video games, they take turns revising each other’s writing, though Celine’s is less fictional and contains more squiggly symbols. He will be repackaged and forwarded to another country when he perfects the thrilling technique of arriving at the platform just as the train pulls away.
Jeremy received the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship to attend Clarion West in 2011. Check on the excruciatingly slow progress of his author’s website at www.jeremysim.com.
Dennis Y. Ginoza holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University. His work has appeared in Shimmer Magazine, Per Contra, and Phantom Drift. His story “Other Names, Other Histories” was nominated for the 2012 Pushcart Prize. Dennis is very grateful to have received the 2011 Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship to attend the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in San Diego. He lives and works on the Kitsap Peninsula of Washington State.
Indrapramit Das is a writer and artist from Kolkata, India. His short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Apex Magazine, Redstone Science Fiction, The World SF Blog, Flash Fiction Online, and the anthology Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (Zubaan Books). He is a grateful graduate of the 2012 Clarion West Writers Workshop, and one of two recipients of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship for 2012. He completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia and is currently in Vancouver working as a freelance writer, artist, editor, game tester, extra, tutor, would-be novelist, and aspirant to adulthood.
Lisa Bolekaja is the second vice president of the Organization of Black Screenwriters, a former Film Independent Screenwriting Fellow, a Guy Hanks/Marvin Miller Screenwriting Fellow (aka the Bill and Camille Cosby Fellowship), and a Nicholl Fellowship Semifinalist. Her script “Skin,” based on her own short story, was optioned in 2005. She’s a proud member of the Black Science Fiction Society and wants to explore Afrofuturism through her Black Indian heritage and the African diaspora. She was the Octavia E. Butler Scholar attending Clarion in 2012 (“The Year of the Awkward Robot”). She wrote “The Saltwater African” during her final week in the program.
Nisi Shawl is a cofounder of the Carl Brandon Society and author of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award-winning story collection Filter House. Recent publications include “In Blood and Song” in Dark Faith 2 and “Salt on the Dance Floor” in Oceans Unleashed. With her Clarion West classmate Cynthia Ward she wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. In 2011 she edited WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity, and she’s coeditor, with Dr. Rebecca Holden, of the forthcoming Aqueduct Press nonfiction anthology Strange Matings: Octavia E. Butler, Feminism, Science Fiction, and African American Voices. Nisi was a friend of Octavia’s and misses her every day.
Copyright & Credits
Bloodchildren:
Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars
edited by Nisi Shawl
Published by the Carl Brandon Society, P.O. Box 23336, Seattle, WA 98102, www.carlbrandon.org, in association with Book View Café, www.bookviewcafe.com
ISBN 978-1-61138-237-2
Copyright © 2013 Carl Brandon Society
Published January 22, 2013
All rights reserved.
“Introduction to Bloodchildren” copyright © 2013 Nalo Hopkinson
“Speech Sounds” copyright © 1983 Octavia E. Butler. First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
“Octavia Estelle Butler” copyright © 2013 Vonda N. McIntyre
“My Love Will Never Die” copyright © 2013 Christopher Caldwell
“Falling into the Earth” copyright © 2012 Shweta Narayan. First published in Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana, edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh, published by Zubaan Books
“Free Bird” copyright © 2013 Caren Gussoff
“Impulse” copyright © 2013 Mary Elizabeth Burroughs
“Dancing in the Shadow of the Once” copyright © 2013 Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
“'Légendaire.'” copyright © 2013 Kai Ashante Wilson
“Steal the Sky” copyright © 2013 Erik Owomoyela
“/sit” copyright © 2013 Jeremy Sim
“Re: Christmas, Bainbridge Island” copyright © 2013 Dennis Y. Ginoza
“The Runner of n-Vamana” copyright © 2013 Indrapramit Das
“The Saltwater African” copyright © 2013 Lisa Bolekaja
Cover photograph by Laurie Toby Edison
Cover design by Candra K. Gill
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction
Speech Sounds
Octavia Estelle Butler
My Love Will Never Die
Falling into the Earth
Free Bird
Impulse
Dancing in the Shadow of the Once
“Légendaire.”
Steal the Sky
/sit
Re: Christmas, Bainbridge Island
The Runner of n-Vamana
The Saltwater African
Acknowledgments: It’s a Family Affair
Contributor Biographies
Copyright & Credits