Essays

We have our own voices and stories – and we always have and always will – and so we continue presencing our stories and asserting our side of the colonial story, so that our abusers, personal and institutional alike, can no longer control the narrative about us.

It was clear that articulation had real world benefits. Survivor testimony was being taken seriously as a form of resistance and as a tool for informing policy. It was also clear that to be read I would need to relinquish even more privacy and power.

The main counter-manoeuvre is to become the new weather god; to establish a climate in which characters who have not mattered, matter, and are safe, even if they don’t know it…

The opportunity to write music for an exhibition of paintings by Turner was irresistible. Turner had been a favourite artist…

Have you ever wondered about your own death? About how you might die, about where, with whom, distressing and difficult,…

My questions are simple. Enough: How can I live in hope? And what does it mean to be radical? Terrible…

Hope is such a soft and insubstantial thing, slipping in and out of your peripheral vision; I think it’s fair to ask; what is hope even for?

Out of the dizzy techno-optimism of the 1980s and 1990s, Octavia E. Butler saw clearly what would actually come next.

How long does academic work take? How long should it take? Even more troubling, who gets to decide what is valuable and necessary work for an academic today?

I wanted to collect the best of our spec fic writing together in this basket of like-minded genres, so that the stories could all be read in their proper cultural context, side by side with their siblings.