Think Galactic: Mothership

The full version of this John Jennings cover is worth sharing.
Via collection contributor Rochita Loenen-Ruiz.

For the last meeting of Think Galactic, we discussed some selections from "Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond", edited by Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall, and published by Rosarium. It's a really diverse collection, and Sara picked us a good handful of stories to focus on:

• “The Farming of Gods” by Ibi Zoboi
• “Life-pod” by Vandana Singh
• “Protected Entity” by Daniel José Older
• “Fées des Dents” by George S. Walker
• “Dances with Ghosts” by Joseph Bruchac (BONUS STORY!)

Difficult to summarize our discussion since the stories here varied so much. We definitely dug, and discussed, the inversion of a lot of standard race-related conventions.

All of these stories, interestingly, have some "horror" traits in addition to SF/F, which we wound up talking about for a bit. We also discussed shorter lengths as a medium, and which stories felt like they might be chapters or seeds to longer works.

Sorry these notes are so quick, we had a really great discussion but my notes aren't enough to walk through every story. Highly recommend the collection as a whole, though--as I said, REALLY diverse, a lot of different genre and style experiments going on here, with the connecting thread mainly just being diverse racial/cultural starting points.

Last meeting was also our planning meeting for our next six readings. Got a good spread!

• August: "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mendel
• September: "The Girl in the Road" by Monica Byrne
• For October we're doing a "Monster Mash", reading both/either of two quite different horror selections: "Vampire Junction" by S.P. Somtow, and "Annihilation" by Jeff Vandermeer.
• November: "Saga" (graphic novel) by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. Volumes TBD, probably at least 1-3.
• December: "Octavia's Brood" (collection) edited by Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown. Selections TBD.
• January: "Stations of the Tide" by Michael Swanwick

For July, we'll be discussing "Feed" by Mira Grant.