mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

This is part 4 of my book club notes on Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. [Part 1, part 2, part 3.]

For unrelated reasons, my mental state wasn't great when I did the reading or when I attended the meeting, so I didn't feel able to contribute very much, but at least I could listen.


"Ganger (Ball Lightning)" by Nalo Hopkinson (2000)

Sex suits malfunction and go berserk. Though the quality of the prose was just as good as the Hopkinson story we read last week, I don't think this one has aged well. There is some SF imagery that comes off as implying that a non-binary mixture of sex characteristics is monstrous and threatening, which I don't think is at all what Hopkinson was trying to say, but for me it really overwhelmed any other redeeming qualities the story may have had.

Discussion also debated whether the nonlinear structure of the story added anything. If you need to jump around in the timeline just to keep the reader's interest, does that point to a fundamental problem with the concept of the story?


"The Becoming" by Akua Lezli Hope (2000)

Saxophone cyborg, maybe...? I actually had a lot of difficulty following this story when I read it, and was hoping others would shed some light on what it was about. Someone said it was about wanting to make art in a world where people value you for your art but not for your personhood. Sounds plausible!

Nobody seemed very enthused about this story or found it memorable. The worldbuilding felt limited. One person pointed out that it has that quality of some literature written by New Yorkers where it assumes that New York is the world and the world is New York, and doesn't seem to think anything beyond that is relevant.


"The Goophered Grapevine" by Charles W. Chestnutt (1887)

A formerly enslaved man tells a tale about a vineyard that allegedly carries a curse.

A few people in the group were familiar with Chestnutt's work and were able to discuss the story in the context of his life and other writings. Most of his ancestry was white and he could have passed as white, but he chose to openly identify as Black and to write about racism and colorism. This story comes from a collection with a framing narrative about white Yankees coming to North Carolina to buy this maybe-cursed vineyard, and it raises questions about whether the curse is real, or if the storyteller is playing into the buyers' perceptions of him and his community to scare them off for his own reasons.

This led to some back-and-forth about how reader expectations come into play with SF when there's that kind of ambiguity. Some readers are inclined to take the supernatural at face value unless there is an unmistakable refutation of it within the text (one person used Scooby Doo as a reference point for this—let's see who you really are!) while others look for realism if there's any way to find it. And then others are comfortable leaving it ambiguous.


"The Evening and the Morning and the Night" by Octavia E. Butler (1987)

People with a genetic disorder that can cause violent episodes are outcasts in society, but find new ways to help one another.

I think most people had read this story before, but it was new to me. I thought it was powerful and a much-needed corrective to a lot of SF that tries to do things with speculative disabilities and just winds up reinforcing ableist tropes (for example, "Tasting Songs" from two meetings ago). This, instead, is a story about how disabled people don't have to settle for whatever scraps able-bodied society deigns to give them, but can and should demand more. I loved the emphasis on how the people with this condition help each other, rather than depending on an able-bodied savior. And the characters really are people in all their complexity who are allowed to grapple with really hard things, not idealized figures of inspiration porn.

One person remarked that this story is so good it seems almost unfair to include it in an anthology. Yeah, kinda!


"The Monophobic Response" by Octavia E. Butler (1995) [essay]

Butler speculates on why we create aliens in our imagination when we can't even get along with members of our own species.

The discussion focused on how the ideas in this essay relate to themes in Butler's fiction, to which I couldn't contribute much because I haven't read enough of her work to spot the recurring concepts yet. The part of the essay that stood out to me was where she talks about how stories about aliens often incorporate a fantasy that the aliens' attention will be focused on us, but of course if we ever meet real aliens their existence will not be all about us and we'll have to contend with that.