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.

More than a century before Oprah, emancipated African Americans organized their own book clubs. They studied mainly the Western classics but also emerging black writers.

While Booker T. Washington emphasized vocational training, more militant black leaders demanded the right to read the same authors taught in elite white academies: One of their syllabuses included Milton, Spenser, Homer, Aeschylus, Longfellow, Dryden, Pope, Browning, Pindar and Sappho. Those poets, said one reader, inspired the "hope [that] the great American epic of the joys and sorrows of our blood and kindred, of those who have gone before us[,] would one day be written."

And that's exactly what happened. A young Ralph Ellison read everything in the segregated branch of the Oklahoma City library; Malcolm X was profoundly affected by Paradise Lost; and Toni Morrison minored in classics at Howard University.

This book showed me how engaging, intellectual history can be written. It’s never enough to present information. If you respect your readers, as Delbanco does, keep them entertained. These twelve essays mix the personal, literary, and social in a lively and often surprising, frothy brew. I also like the way Delbanco makes the distant past relevant for today’s world.

Individual sentences are a delight. You’ll leave the book knowing much more about the life, times, and work of writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, and Richard Wright.

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.

I never thought of the Old West the same again after reading this book, which shows how the myth of the Old West was made by powerful men who created the West in their own image.

I used to think of Western vigilantism as part and parcel of the “Wild West,” necessary to keep the piece in the absence of “civilization.” Little did I know that the ones behind Western vigilante violence were powerful men using terrorist tactics to preserve their control over the land and its resources.

Bold’s meticulous research is as undeniable as it is thought-provoking and utterly absorbing. 

I love the grit and heroism of this story about the history of the humble Armed Services Editions. My own university holds one of the largest collections of these small wartime reprints that were sized to fit into the pocket of a GI’s uniform.

So, I initially reached for this book out of duty but then relished it for its compelling historical facts and vividly bookish humanity.