Walking the Clouds
Grace L. Dillon, editor
In this first ever anthology of Indigenous science fiction Grace Dillon collects some of the finest examples of the craft with contributions by Native American, First Nations, Aboriginal Australian and New Zealand Maori authors. The collection includes seminal authors such as Gerald Vizenor, historically important contributions often categorised as "magical realism" by authors like Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie and authors more recognizable to science fiction fans like William Sanders and Stephen Graham Jones. Dillon's engaging introduction situates the pieces in the larger context of science fiction and its conventions. (From The University of Arizona Press)
From the book
In the end, Walking the Clouds returns us to ourselves by encouraging Native writers to write about Native conditions in Native centered worlds liberated by the imagination. These stories display features of self-reflection, defamiliarisation, and the hyper real present that Veronica Hollinger explains undergirds postmodern science fiction. But those conditions are hardly new to Native experience. As Gerald Vizenor has stressed, postmodernism is already a condition for First Nations peoples, since they are seen as postindian if they do not resemble the iconic image of the late-nineteenth-century Plains Indian.
From "Introduction: Biskaabiiyang, 'Returning to Ourselves'" by Grace Dillon, Walking the Clouds, Grace Dillon, editor ©2012. Published by The University of Arizona Press.