Unlimited Futures: Speculative, Visionary Blak+Black Fiction

Introduction

RAFEIF ISMAIL AND ELLEN VAN NEERVEN

Compiled from recordings from April 2021 and August 2021 and edited by Hella Ibrahim.

RAI: Hey sibling, how are you?

EVN: I’m not too bad, you?

RAI: I’m good! I remember telling you when we first started working on Unlimited Futures that I wanted this anthology to be a conversation, so I think it’s really fitting we’re doing the introduction as a literal conversation.

EVN: Such a great idea from you.

1 | ANTICIPATORY JOY

RAI: What drew you to Unlimited Futures as an editor? ‘My friend, Rafeif, steamrolled me into it’ is a valid response.

EVN: [laughs] No, I was really excited. I love the title. The title was the springboard for bringing a collective together.

To have that curation of First Nations voices as well as Afro-Black voices was something unique. Particularly when we really started working on this in early 2020, during an explosion of public consciousness on the Black Lives Matter and Indigenous Lives Matter movements. Solidarity between our different communities is really important, I think, in this evil nation state we live in that doesn’t care for our bodies, Blak and Black. I note that the usage of ‘Blak’ in this anthology’s title derives from K’ua K’ua/Kuku and Erub/Mer artist Destiny Deacon’s use, which dates back to the early ’90s. Destiny gave us ‘Blak’ to liberate us from the terms of reference settlers gave us.

RAI: I had the idea for Unlimited Futures in late 2018. I read Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements back when it first came out and it changed my life. I really, really wanted something like that here. I was inspired by books like Octavia’s Brood, So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy and other works coming out of the US at the time that were First Nations or Afro-Black, but not both.

I thought it would be great to have a conversation. And what better way to have a conversation than through storytelling? That’s the language we all speak, to some degree. At the same time, I was wrestling with my place as someone who’s in a Black body, but is a settler, and is also a refugee. All of that was something I wanted to explore, and I wanted to give the opportunity for other people to explore it as well.

For me, Unlimited Futures was ultimately conversations and skill-building. Anthologies are such amazing gateways for emerging voices. They can launch a career and, as you know, it’s so hard to get into publishing without winning a big prize or creating huge amounts of work. And we’re often asked to create work that’s taxing to ourselves.

So usually your first published work is a memoir or a personal essay, which are brilliant pathways. But I feel like we are at a time where we can give emerging writers more options than that. All the work we’ve been doing in these spaces — that you’ve been doing, that people like Melissa Lucashenko, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Alexis Wright and Anita Heiss and every other artist who’s paved the way has been doing — it’s given us the opportunity to say ‘Hey, emerging writers. You can write to your heart’s content in ‘genre fiction’ and still be published.’

EVN: Definitely.

2 | ‘UNPRECEDENTED’ TIMES

RAI: How did it feel to be a writer and editor in the middle of an unprecedented global health crisis? Working on a project and imagining the future at a time when creative energies are absolutely exhausted and the future seems so bleak?

EVN: ‘Unprecedented’, how many times did we hear that? No. This is our reality. This is the world that we’re living with as Blak and Black peoples; we’re in a constant state of panic and alarm and survival. In some ways, COVID-19 was a very familiar time. It was the dealing with white people losing their shit about their world ending that was so fatiguing. It was such a joy to work on Unlimited Futures during 2020 and 2021, because these were the kind of works that I needed during that time.

RAI: I think it’s brilliant that our writers created something in such a tempestuous year. There was so much fatigue and fear, and it wasn’t an unknown fear. Bla(c)k folk know biological warfare. We know the effects of environmental destruction. Submissions opened and closed in the middle of a major lockdown in the Eastern States, at a time where it was hard to create work. But people still rallied and created. Such a tremendous act of courage, but also such labour. That’s really admirable, I think, and just goes to show how much works like this are needed.

3 | RIVERS MEETING

RAI: Our incredible cover artist, Larrakia woman Jenna Lee, created this beautiful cover that looks at the interaction of separate cultures in the most respectful and wonderful way. I love that the cover symbolizes infinity — we’re not the first to have these conversations or write these stories and we’re not going to be the last. I think this anthology’s the continuation of something great, and I love that our cover reflects that.

EVN: We were also really happy that it reflected the movements of water in this work. We were going to begin the anthology with water to allow those kinds of threads of connection and continuation to flow into each other. For me the cover really kind of feels like rivers connecting and the life that is created through water, but is also water that we protect and have a relationship and a responsibility to.

RAI: Absolutely. We begin on water and we end on land as we seek new worlds. Just looking at the table of contents, you can see that it does feel like a river interweaving all these stories. One of the themes throughout this anthology is our responsibility to land, to water, to air, and what we must do to protect that which is precious to us, the responsibilities we’ve been entrusted with. It’s a running theme throughout, whether a story’s set in so-called Australia or in a different place.

Another thing I want to highlight is the use of non-linear time throughout the anthology. Our works aren’t set in this reality’s near-dystopian linear timeline. Instead, you have works that exist in the space beyond and the space before and after, but there’s no distinct time. I think that’s really, really important to show that, for us, the past, present and future, are happening simultaneously.

4 | UNAPOLOGETICALLY BLA(C)K

EVN: I think when you and I talked about the project early in the process, you talked about how much you wanted it to be for emerging writers. It wasn’t until after I’d read and worked on the submissions with you that I understood why you wanted this to be an anthology full of emerging voices — because it’s so powerful!

RAI: It is, yeah. I feel like that’s what’s needed in the literary landscape. Anthologies are these beautiful glimpses into what people can do as creatives, without having to produce an entire book right off the bat.

EVN: It’s incredible to have a strong percentage of emerging voices sitting beside established voices. We opened submissions and we didn’t know what we were going to get. We didn’t know who would submit. It was incredible to read those submissions and just be blown away by writing that is so different. The new authors excite me the most because this could launch their careers or be a significant moment for them. With the established writers, there’s a kind of assumption that what they’re going to send us is amazing, but there’s an added excitement to reading work by someone who’s unknown to you and making a connection with them.

This type of writing can be a hard genre to break into as an emerging writer. I think a lot of people hadn’t seen a call for submissions quite like ours before, and they’d been waiting for it. Creating a home for that, for this space, was exciting. I love that we opened it up to poetry. Where else do you see a call out for speculative visionary poetry?

RAI: And including a mixture of prose and poetry shows that speculative or science fiction doesn’t have to be written in one style. We start the anthology with a poem; it’s a really powerful thing, I think, to start with a poem. Then we go on to short stories, then another poem, and it works. It works so well.

EVN: We tried to look beyond the writing and publishing norms to create something that’s very global as well. We have writers representing so many different countries, First Nations and cultures, something that’s sort of beyond what was possible here in form and in the content.

RAI: Absolutely. And accessibility was kind of central to everything in this project. We made it explicit in the calls for submission that yes, these works can be multilingual, they can be recorded instead of written, etc. I think that made all the difference.

All the stories in this anthology are written for Blak and Black audiences: the language used is unapologetically Blak and Black, the absence of the leering white gaze is a palpable relief. It makes it so much more powerful. That’s what makes Unlimited Futures unique.

EVN: I agree. That’s what’s exciting about this work. It makes no apologies; it gives no explanations. Sometimes our communities feel like they have to write for a certain audience, sometimes there’s a pressure as a First Nations writer to represent all First Nations people. We wanted to free writers from those pressures. And you know, we’re more powerful as a group, so to have this kind of a critical mass of writers representing Afro-Black communities and First Nations communities means you don’t have to be just one person. Each story represents a different aspect or narrative, then they join up together.

RAI: These stories are dismantling the idea that First Nations or Afro-Black folk are a monolith. I love that speculative, visionary works aren’t … please correct me if this is wrong but I feel like, at least in African cultures, they’re not speculative. Speculative isn’t the word; it’s just another reality. And what better way to start a conversation between our communities than at the root of it all?

It’s just so beautifully interwoven. We’re seeing that with how the pieces in this anthology interact with each other. The commonalities, the differences, the hopes and dreams and the fears, but also the calls for action, the calls for change. Unlimited Futures is one conversation in an ongoing dialogue. And I think it’s brilliant that we got the chance to add to that dialogue.

I also want to acknowledge how incredible the process has been from the beginning. Everything was handled by First Nations and Afro-Black writers. I think it’s really important we centred our voices, and we made sure our voices stayed centred throughout the entirety of the process.

5 | PARALLEL QUESTS

RAI: You know when you pick up a story and you read it and you just … smile? That was kind of the feeling for every single one of those final submissions, wasn’t it?

EVN: Definitely. I’m so happy that we had this gathering of stories and we also have some of our established writers, like Sisonke Msimang and Alison Whittaker, writing in genres that they haven’t written before. I wanted to point that out, because I think that is a beautiful thing in itself. Feeling like they had the freedom to explore an idea beyond their usual kind of output is really cool. This genre of fiction is often seen as the poorer cousin to realist fiction or other types of writing that are seen as more literary or more serious or whatever. But genre fiction is so fundamental to our storytelling and our worlds, and it’s about time it gets the recognition it deserves. We have works of genre fiction written by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Afro-Black writers that were ignored by both the literary establishment and the mainstream, works that are now out of print or very hard to find. In doing this work we honour those writers, and we also honour the writers who had a fantastic story but never had the opportunity to be published.

RAI: Absolutely. And in saying that, I want to highlight that ‘The Prime Minister’, the piece that closes this anthology, was written in 1945.

EVN: I still can’t get over that. What a moment to hear about this writer, who’s no longer with us, but wrote this amazing gift. It’s almost like finding a message in a bottle or something. Incredible to think about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and Afro-Black writers creating these kinds of stories in the ’40s and earlier than that, and it being so relevant to today.

RAI: Exactly. It shows that our parallel quests for liberation have been ongoing, too, it’s not just this recent thing. When we engage in activism, we’re imagining new worlds. We’re establishing new worlds. And that’s what we do when we write visionary and speculative fiction. We imagine new worlds so that we can build them.

‘The Prime Minister’ perfectly encapsulates that feeling. This is a piece written in the 1940s, based in Queensland, that dreams of space flights and the first Indigenous Prime Minister and this sort of almost utopian Australia, free of colonial chains. I can’t get over how beautiful that vision is and how badly it should become a reality.

EVN: I just felt like I was sitting on something incredible. A piece that was going to change the world when it was published. To be publishing a story by an Elder who’s no longer with us in the living world, his story of imagining a better country … it blows my mind to think about how many of our ancestors were writing visionary fiction, telling stories about a different, better, future world. So many of those stories we will never see, but I feel like it’s deeply known that they have been told and that they’re out there.

I’m really grateful the family allowed us to publish this work, and that they’ve been able to take care of it and to recognise its significance. I can’t wait for people to read it.

I have a feeling it could open up doors for other families to be like, ‘Hey, we’ve also got this story, our ancestor was a sci-fi writer’. There were so many barriers for First Nations people to publish any work seventy-five years ago, let alone science fiction — it’s such a gatekept genre, and the political power of these stories would have been too much for white people back then to handle. Maybe people today, too. It’s still too much for them to handle. I just hope this piece encourages people who know of relatives with stories that also need to be told.

RAI: I felt really humbled by ‘The Prime Minister’. This story was written the year the Second World War ended. My own country was still colonised in 1945. We still didn’t have independence. Most of the world was still under some sort of colonial rule.

The hope for humanity that’s in this … in the end, humanity is what visionary fiction is all about. It’s the hope that we can and we should do better. Most of the stories in this anthology are about actions and consequences, how we can alleviate those consequences or how we can survive them. The consequences of imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchal society is the reality that we’re living in. There’s a lot of talk around depoliticising ‘The Arts’, but art is always going to be political; ‘The Prime Minister’ is a political piece of work. Works like this are pockets of resistance.

6 | UNLIMITED FUTURES

RAI: I can imagine Unlimited Futures being read ten years, twenty years, fifty years from now and still being a powerful body of work. What do you think this genre will look like ten years from now?

EVN: I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this writing over the next decade. Visionary fiction is already vital writing, but I think it’ll become even more vital as reality becomes more and more unstable with everything that’s happening, politically and environmentally. We’re going to need to pass the tools of visionary resistance down to the next generation and check in with our older generation about it as well. Things are so unstable, and storytelling gives us power. This is what our ancestors have always done — used storytelling as a way to imagine a better future and to have that conversation with the past as well.

RAI: We can see that power in this anthology already. And what I love about it is every single one of the stories does move towards justice in the end.

EVN: I absolutely agree. Justice is a key thing. We’re moving towards it.

RAI: I want to mention a few of the people who supported us through this project. Maxine Beneba Clarke, who helped champion this anthology; I had conversation after conversation with her being like, is this viable? How do I write a letter, asking a publisher? Maxine was incredibly generous with her time and amazing advice. Leanne Hall, who helped facilitate one of the very first letters of support. Ambelin Kwaymullina and Rebecca Lim, who gave us Meet Me At The Intersection, Melissa Lucashenko, who was so supportive of this project and who, along with so many great authors, shaped the literary landscape for us. We also had such great support from Hella Ibrahim at Djed Press, the team at Fremantle Press, and more people than I can name honestly. It was absolutely a community effort. Unlimited Futures could never have been something created and sustained in isolation.

EVN: I feel like I can’t wait to give them the book and say like, ‘thanks so much for your help, and for laying down the foundations for us to do this work’.

RAI: And thank you, too. I’ve been so excited to work with you! Your wealth of knowledge and experience has been so absolutely lifesaving, all the times I would come and be like, ‘hey, what if we did this?’ And you’re like, that’s not sustainable. Or ‘so what is X, Y, Z?’ And you’d explain it. It was just such a beautiful experience. I know they say never work with friends, but I’m so glad that we were friends before we worked together. I don’t think I would want to do a project like this with