100 books like Speculative Fiction for Dreamers

Among the more insidious and tragic consequences of colonialism and its assimilationist policies is the eradication of indigenous conventions around gender and sexuality. In many indigenous communities, gender and sexuality do not operate in as binary as a fashion as they do in European societies.

Highlighting these historical and contemporary possibilities for what we might call queer identities (or “two-spirit” in some communities), is Joshua Whithead’s breathtaking “Indigiqueer” anthology, Love After the End. Contributors amend the provocation, the future is indigenous, to consider how the future is also queer or indigiqueer. 

Weaving between the traditional and the contemporary, the past and the future, the ancestral and the posthuman, these tales of queer joy, love, and thriving remind us of what was lost and what is still possible as we strive toward mass decolonization.

The future is Indigenous. Time is not linear. The scientific and the spiritual are not mutually exclusive. The apocalypse can be survived.

These are some of the many provocations explored in the stories, essays, and excerpts that make up Grace Dillon’s (Anishinaabe) groundbreaking anthology, Walking the Clouds. The voices that appear in this collection lay the foundations for indigenous futurism and challenge the ongoing colonial politics of science fiction (SF) as a genre. SF tropes like alien encounters, apocalypses, and interstellar voyages are realigned with the assimilationist and genocidal histories of colonialism that inspired them.

Walking the Clouds is a powerful intervention and a must-read for anyone seeking an introduction to indigenous futurisms and decolonial fiction. 

I can think of no other book that so exquisitely inhabits the tension between indigenous knowledge traditions and science than Rae Mariz’s (Indigenous Pacific) marvelous clifi novella, Weird Fishes.

Inspired by marine science and the storytelling traditions of Hawai'i, Mariz’s world is a feast of bubbling colors and more-than-human senses that inspire an extraordinary empathy for all the wondrous beings with whom we share this planet. Weird Fishes reads like a parable and an aquatic mystery, a magnificently crafted voyage that leads the novella’s cephalopod scientist protagonist (Ceph) to the startling discovery that humanity is behind the growing disruptions to marine ecology.

How do we thrive together? Or does the survival one society hinge on the extermination of the other? Is co-existence possible for beings with such radically different natures and senses? These are the questions that will linger in your gills well after the last pages are turned.

Not all indigenous languages have a corresponding alphabet or writing system. For example, many North American indigenous languages are now represented in a Romanized alphabet, but traditionally these languages were spoken and the stories they contained were transmitted by oral tradition.

In the case of my Taino ancestors, stories were also told with pictographs or petroglyphs. I conclude my list of indigenous futurist books with stories that are told graphically, in the form of Moonshot, a collection of comics edited, written, and illustrated by indigenous storytellers and artists.

Edited by Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe & Métis) and Michael Sheyahshe (Oklahoma Caddo Nation), the imagery is striking, conjuring colorful mythoscapes and slipstream futures with indigenous people at the forefront, redefining science and technology along the way. One story features a protagonist in a wheelchair, raising questions about ableism in SF and the possibility for “Crip” Futures and Indigenous Futurism to be… show more.

James Alan McPherson, a writer I’d long admired and my teacher at the University of Iowa, introduced me to The Hero and the Blues. Murray and Ralph Ellison were friends and intellectual sparring partners who worked out their ideas in conversation, and in letters to one another, so it’s not surprising that many of the same ideas occur in their work.

Here, Murray argues that the hallmark of great artists, Shakespeare, Duke Ellington, and Thomas Mann, is their ability to improvise; that is, to take what they’ve learned through formal study and come up with something new. More than that, Murray writes convincingly, the blues has been essential in affirming the humanity of black Americans despite challenges complicated by the particularities of our situation.

As with Ellison, I keep coming back to Murray, again and again, for inspiration and affirmation.

This landmark book by the Iranian-American writer Azar Afisi is an account of the oppression of the Islamic Revolution in her native Iran and an ode to the liberating power of literature and truth.

In her book, Nafisi recounts the experiences of a group of students she worked with as a professor of English at the University of Tehran. She was dismissed from that professorship in 1981 for refusing to cover her hair and 16 years later, emigrated to America, where she teaches, writes, and is an internationally respected voice for press and personal freedoms.

This is a book about stories of the land I live on.

My home is in Winnipeg, on the edge of the flatland called “the Prairies” in Canada and “the Great Plains” in the United States. But the land doesn’t care about the Canada-US border. And that border is nothing but an imposition on the older nations whose territory I live in: the Red River Métis, and the Anishinaabeg.

These Indigenous Peoples have ancient living traditions of oral storytelling, and this book, by Anishinaabeg scholars, celebrates their stories’ spiritual, practical, and political power.

A teaching shared by storyteller Kathleen Delores Westcott tells us “the story is a living being. It’s alive.” That teaching has helped me to understand how stories attract us, get inside us, change, and move across boundaries. 

I clung to every word, every story, and every turn of phrase like a traveler gripping a well-worn map. Listening to the audiobook version narrated by Cherokee Nation writer Daniel Heath Justice, the stories unfolded, some like a quiet stream, urging me to pay closer attention, others rushing flyaway wild like the wind, gripping, inspiring, and wandering. 

Tuning into the audiobook with my headphones on made my nature walks an immersive and contemplative experience I’d highly recommend. The questions posed about humanity challenge us to be better humans, and I was struck by the familiarity of the stories to my own culture.

I could read and listen to this book over and over again as the life lessons are so generously expressed and simply made me want more, more, more.

Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” is one of the most useful for recognizing the long-term, and “slow motion urgency” of environmental damage.

His lucid storytelling highlights the environmentalism of marginalized communities. I’m inspired by his goal of changing how we think about the “deferred casualties of our poisonous, unsustainable practices.”

There’s something deliciously attractive about this book.

The language Bradbury uses draws me in every time I visit it, and it keeps me hooked. This was another book I found as a kid, and it left its hooks in me from when I was young.

Is it morbid? There are definitely morbid parts to it. And it deals with life-and-death situations, but it’s just so good. I never wanted it to end.