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March 9th, 2009
 | 12:26 pm - books, sf, and more
Some books:
Keri Hulme, who wrote the bone people, also writes poetry; she is a New Zealand writer of Maori heritage, and the bone people won the Booker Prize in 1985. Strands [ISBN 0-86806-475] is her second book of poetry. She has also written a lot of other books, some of which I have read but none of which I have on hand so I can't offer you the ISBN numbers. The Bone People may be the only one that's currently in Books In Print (which notoriously only lists books published in the US), but her work is listed on Amazon here.
Witi Ihimaera, another New Zealand and Maori author, is someone you may have heard of in passing, because he wrote a story for children that was made into a movie, Whale Rider. He has written a series of novels about Maori families, starting with The Matriarch [ISBN 0- 7900-0513-1]; his Amazon page is here.
Amazon doesn't have everything; if you want to read more of Ihimaera's books that you can't find, consider contacting a New Zealand bookstore and ordering from them online. The people at Arts Centre Bookshop have been very helpful to me. There is also Scorpio Books. Consider, also, that these bookshops may be able to help you find other books published outside the US that are not easily available through Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc.
[I have no patience with ordering books through B&N, et al, that are published outside the US since the debacle that occurred when a cousin wrote and illustrated a couple of children's picture books in Toronto, back in the days before Amazon. Since I wanted to help his sales numbers, I did the official thing and ordered through a bookstore; after three weeks they got back to me and said the books didn't exist. I got tired of this and wrote him, and he mailed them to me.]
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When I was in my teens, for various reasons that are TMI, what got me through the days and weeks and years was science fiction and fantasy. I read my way through the fiction sections of three small libraries in nearby towns before I was out of high school, plus the small fiction section in my high school library, at the rate of about 15 books a week. They helped me find other ways to think, other cultures to think about, different ways to look at the world, and a refuge for when life outside of a book was unbearable. It's not too much to say that they kept me alive, if 'keeping alive' means preventing suicide, by showing me that there was more out there, and helping me survive to find it. The ones written by women mattered the most; in the late '60s and early '70s I wasn't sophisticated enough to notice or care if the authors were from my culture or not; I just wanted the stories that gave me hope for change.
So I am angry at the response of some of the "official" SF/F authors/authorities/spokespersons/personages to what is happening and what is being discussed online in LJ (and elsewhere.) Did I expect more of them because they are involved in literature whose purpose is to transcend boundaries of thought and experience? Yes, probably unrealistically. I realize that the "artist whose feet are clay" is an old, old cliche, about which movies have been made (yes, Antonio and Wolfgang, I'm looking at you, as well as others), and that the muse speaks through whoever is listening at the time, but it is deeply disappointing to see at least one author[s and publishers and editors] who has [have] not learned manners and better behavior [and willingness to listen to people whose viewpoints differ from their own] from the books they have written [or published or edited] about people making their way through different cultures and unfamiliar territory.
[Amended after reading the latest compilation of links at rydra_wong's LJ.]
I want to read books written by people who don't look or sound like me, whose experience is different, whose ideas are different. I'll be reading a lot from this list but I also want to read the ones that haven't been published yet, the ones that may be sitting in someone's hard drive or trunk waiting to find a publisher, from authors who don't look or sound like me, whose lives have been lived in different cultures and experiences. I strongly support verb noire and look forward to reading what is published.
I hope that what I am writing here will add light but not heat, and if something in it is problematic, let me know and I will try to sort this out. None of this is easy for me, not the reading or the thinking, and I will not burden the net with the TMI of it, but I am slowly working my way through all of rydra-wong's links. I have other thoughts but they will keep for another time; they are not important.
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