Episode 118: Transcript

Episode: 118: F*ck Your Space Empire! (with Naseem Jamnia)

Transcription by Keffy

Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and fantasy and the future that wants to be your date for the Spring formal. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of the young adult Unstoppable Trilogy. The first two books are out now and the third book Promises Stronger Than Darkness comes out in April. 

Annalee: [00:00:20] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist and a science fiction writer, and my forthcoming novel, The Terraformers will be out in January, so you can pre-order it now if you're obsessed with terraforming or if you like flying moose. 

[00:00:36] So today we're gonna talk about the more recent history of colonization. When I say “recent”, I mean in the last 300, 400 years because I read a lot about archeology so the past can be quite distant for me. And so we're gonna talk about that recent history and how it's shaped western fantasies of exploring strange new worlds and why these fantasies are bound up with the history of settler colonialism.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:04] And later in the show we'll be talking to Naseem Jamnia about their new book, The Bruising of Qilwa, and their thoughts about decolonizing our epic fantasies. 

[00:01:14] Also on our audio extra next week, we'll be processing our feelings about She Hulk and why we wish there would be more meta superheroes.

[00:01:23] And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and is funded by you, our listeners, through Patreon? That's right. If you become a patron, you're making this podcast happen. Plus, you get audio extras every other week where we explain, even more about the nature of the universe.

Annalee: [00:01:41] That's right. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:43] Plus you get access to our Discord channel where we just hang out all the time. I'm in there right now. 

Annalee: [00:01:43] Me too. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:49] Think about it. All of that could be yours for just two or three bucks a month. Anything you give us goes right back into making our opinions even more correct. You can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.

[00:02:02] Okay. Let's get into it.

[OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]

Annalee: [00:02:31] So obviously when we look at the history of speculative fiction, we have to think about the fact that every culture has created their own speculative stories going back centuries. So here we're really focusing on the works that Westerners tend to think of as the science fiction canon because these were created mostly by white people during a period of European empire building in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

[00:02:56] And also this phase in science fiction leads up to the rise of the United States as a global superpower. So, my first question, with all that weighty history in mind is how does this affect the way speculative fiction understands what it means to explore new worlds? 

Charlie Jane: [00:03:17] Yeah, I feel like there are a couple of major ways that you see colonization influence the fabric of speculative fiction.

[00:03:24] First of all, there's a whole bunch of stories about exploring and settling other worlds, or in a fantasy story, be exploring or settling other realms. And those borrow heavily from the real history of exploration and colonization on earth and the myths that we told ourselves to justify that behavior.

[00:03:42] And secondly, there's a whole thread running through. Science fiction classics of saying that the alternative to imperialism is chaos and barbarism and basically a new dark age, like what people used to believe had followed the fall of the Roman Empire. 

Annalee: [00:03:59] So we're talking about, it sounds like two different tropes, one of which is about expanding the empire, how you go out and explore and find people or planets to exploit or land to exploit.

[00:04:13] But the other is about maintaining empire, keeping everything calm and well maintained. So let's talk about the first one first. So obviously any story about first contact with aliens is probably drawing from a real history of first contact between different cultures on Earth. I guess I've always wondered how consciously science fiction writers are drawing on real history, especially earlier, like in the Golden Age?

Charlie Jane: [00:04:44] Oh, very consciously. It's something that they're definitely thinking about, and you have to remember, of course, that Western novels were a big deal at the same time as golden age science fiction.

[00:04:53] You had all these novels about settling the actual frontier in the west of the United States, which was basically part of the genocidal sweep of Europeans across the Americas. Also, in case you needed more evidence, here's Isaac Asimov, the sort of ultimate grand master of science fiction talking about this in a 1975 interview with Sy Bourgin

Isaac Asimov: [00:05:16] The entire history of mankind has been that of crossing the hilltop to see what's in the next valley. Mankind has been exploring the earth over thousands of years. Somehow, just because we have now explored the entire Earth, even Antarctica and Greenland, it seems a shame to stultify this impulsive of ours and the next thing to explore is the moon and the planets. That's one thing. It's sort of an analogy from the past, an extrapolation forward. But then another thing, the environments on these other planets are made to order for our purposes. Strange environments, the possibility of new forms of life. This takes the place of stories in the old days about mysterious islands in the Pacific.

Sy Bourgin: [00:06:04] I see. 

Isaac Asimov: [00:06:05] Or hidden civilizations in the Amazon Valley and so on. 

Charlie Jane: [00:06:08] So what you hear in that quote is Asimov, basically just coming out and saying that stories about meeting aliens and exploring new planets are basically just those older stories about exploring parts of the planet Earth and meeting new civilizations on earth and they're just transposed to a whole new planet.

Annalee: [00:06:28] Yeah, and I know that Ray Bradbury often said that The Martian Chronicles were very much based on what he had gleaned of his, the history of white settlement in the West, in the United States. 

[00:06:41] The other thing that interests me is that there's this whole cluster of stories, especially in early science fiction, about explorers going to worlds where civilization has fallen. That's the premise of Princess of Mars, which later became the terribly… that was terrible, but performed even more terribly. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:01] No, don't say it. Oh, come on. 

Annalee: [00:07:02] John Carter of Mars is what we're talking about.

Charlie Jane: [00:07:03] No, don’t bash that movie.

Annalee: [00:07:05] It was actually kind a fun movie.

Charlie Jane: [00:07:07] That movie was actually… I liked that movie.

Annalee: [00:07:10] Okay. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:10] It was a movie that was unfairly attacked, I think.

Annalee: [00:07:12] It was… yeah. Anyway, the point is that John Carter of Mars, which was a giant flop, although I think both of us kind of enjoyed it… Anyway, but that's based on this early 20th century story, Princess of Mars which is about basically how an explorer from Earth is magically transported to Mars. And basically the culture of Mars is supposed to be like the late Roman Empire. It’s kind of in a shambles. Their resources have been depleted. They're infighting. They're fighting barbaric other creatures. 

[00:07:43] So this kind of sets the stage for a lot of other stories about explorers finding planets with these quote unquote “fallen” civilizations. 

[00:07:52] And sometimes it takes the form of discovering an ancient alien technology, which is front and center in the classic 1950s movie, Forbidden Planet, where explorers come to a planet that has this giant computer kind of under the surface, which can do a lot of things that they don't understand, one of which is manifest people's secret desires and secret feelings. 

[00:08:20] So it's like psychic technology, anyway. And no one knows who built it. And this is kind of verbatim taken from a white settler colonial myth, which you see in a lot of 19th century stories about Southeast Asia and the Americas, where European. explorers would happen upon what they would call lost cities or lost civilizations. The city of Ankor in Cambodia is a great example of that. A lot of the ancient Mayan cities were also similarly quote unquote “discovered” by white explorers.

[00:08:58] And the stories that would get told by these explorers are basically things like, oh, there once was a great civilization that fell. And then the people who were meeting here now, the indigenous people, they're like some other barbaric group. They're not the people who built these things. This isn't their ancestors. This is just like… in unrelated news, there's a bunch of people living here. And so that was a story that helped justify colonization because the idea was like, oh, these people who are here now can't appreciate or ever create their own civilization, and so we need to build one for them. And all the civilizations that existed are gone from this place. 

[00:09:41] So one of the. Sci-fi examples of a kind of lost city story, by the way, you and I were talking about this earlier, Charlie Jane, is Ringworld, which Ringworld is itself a kind of lost city. It's this ancient, incredible structure. It's a Dyson ring around a star and the people who live on there have no idea who built it. They've all fallen into barbarism. The ring itself is malfunctioning in a lot of different ways, and so as our characters explore this ring, they come to realize that they're basically in a crumbling lost city.

Charlie Jane: [00:10:16] Yeah. And I think that trope of the indigenous people who either didn’t build this stuff or built it long long ago, but now they've fallen into barbarism, it is this idea that they need somebody to come along and bring civilization to them. And one of the common tropes in a lot of 20th century science fiction, including countless episodes of Star Trek and Doctor Who and other episodic sci-fi things, is the trope of the cargo cult in which explorers from Earth show up with our amazing technology and we’re worshiped as gods. Or, the technology itself is viewed as being mystical and having godlike powers. 

[00:11:02] And you see it constantly on a lot of these things. Like in classic Trek, you're always meeting like loin cloth wearing natives who worship a giant lizard that's secretly an advanced computer or whatever.

[00:11:12] Any time you have like natives worshiping something, it's usually an advanced computer or a crashed starship or something. This comes directly from the real-life claim, for example, that when Captain James Cook visited Hawaii, he was greeted by the Natives as a god. They thought he was their god Lono and that's why they ended up killing him. And of course, historian Gananath Obeyesekere criticized this idea in a 1992 book that made a huge splash and here's what he had to say about it.

Dr. Obeyesekere: [00:11:46] The crux of the issue is that when Cook went to Hawaii. The way that European scholars, some very distinguished ones present it is that he was treated as one of their gods, the god Lono. [Because he was called Lono?] But then I point out, that's the title of the book, European Mythmaking in the Pacific. The whole crux of the book is to show that this is a European myth.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:11] And it really is true that this idea that, they greeted Captain Cook as a god is in itself a myth. It's a myth that the Europeans created to make ourselves feel powerful and awesome. Oh, people thought we were gods. That's so cool. Obviously that means that we're… it means that the indigenous people are like children in a way, and that it's up to us to educate them better. And so that justifies all kinds of just total barbaric treatment, including re-educating people away from their own cultures and just trying to destroy people's own societies because we can bring them something, quote unquote “better.”

[00:12:49] And in that interview that we just heard from Obeyesekere, he goes on to say that this is the same thing that you see with Columbus and Cortez and it's part of how European colonizers made themselves feel like they were doing something really important and amazing and not just going in and stealing people's shit, which is what they were doing.

Annalee: [00:13:09] Yeah. It's funny because what you're saying makes it really clear that colonization, the act of colonization, requires the colonizers to come up with science fiction stories to justify what they're doing, or fantasy stories. So they're writing these fantasy stories that are supposedly true, and then that's being taken up by science fiction and turned into more fictional stories, whereas the reality was much more mundane. 

[00:13:38] And when you were talking about cargo cults, it made me think of this really cool new book that I've been reading called The Archeology of Refuge and Recourse, and it's by this archeologist, Tsim Schnieder. And he's a professor and he's also a member of the Federated Indians of Grattan Rancheria. And so the book is focused on the coastal Miwak who are a tribe here in Northern California. And what he talks about in the book is how these coastal folks, throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries had a lot of salvage operations because so many ships crashed offshore from colonizers like the Spanish, and then later, people from all over the place, their ships would crash and all of the goods would wash ashore.

[00:14:24] So this is the perfect foundation for a cargo cult, right? Literally cargo is washing ashore. And so if what colonizers were claiming was true you would imagine that these Miwak would be worshiping what they found. But no, all of the evidence that we have, and there's plenty of it, and Schnieder talks about it in the book, is that even when a very ancient ship, there's actually strong archeological evidence that a ship crashed off the coast in the late 16th century. It was from Manila and it was full of trade goods from China. And all of this beautiful porcelain and different tools. wash ashore and the Miwak were like, oh yeah, these are plates and tools. We're just going to use them as plates and tools. And then the ones that were broken up, they turned into jewelry and beads and things like that.

[00:15:15] So there was no worship. There was literally like, Yep. It's cargo and now it's ours, so we're gonna just use it. They didn't think it was from gods.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:23] Finders, keepers.

Annalee: [00:15:23] I know. They were like, yep, we know what boats are, we know what trade is and we recognize that and we're gonna use this stuff cuz you know. Yeah. Finders, keepers.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:34] Yeah. And of course a lot of 20th century speculative fiction does feature the figure of the heroic anthropologist who visits and studies an alien culture, right? 

Annalee: [00:15:45] So yeah, we see this a lot in Ursula LeGuin’s work because she often features these individual sort of anthropologist figures coming down to a planet. And this makes a lot of sense for LeGuin to be doing because her father, Alfred Kroeber was an anthropologist. He was a very esteemed scholar at UC Berkeley. And so at a very young age, LeGuin was exposed to the thinking of people like Margaret Mead, who was also an anthropologist, who very famously in the 1920s popularized the idea of participant observation, which was intended to be a radical new way of doing anthropology, where the anthropologist wouldn't come and observe from the sidelines, but he or she would participate in the culture. And so Margaret Mead went down to Samoa and tried to join up into a bunch of the different groups that she met and participate in their rituals and their parties, and learn about them from an insider perspective. 

[00:16:49] And we see again and again, Ursula LeGuin’s characters doing that same thing. In Left Hand of Darkness, classic example, a single anthropologist comes down and tries to join one group and then joins another group and discovers that basically they're in the middle of a cold war on this planet. 

[00:17:07] And the thing that I would say about that is that these are still, this type of anthropology is still very much in a colonizer mode because even if you are a participant observer, you're still in a kind of privileged position. That person, that observer still is the one who gets to describe and explain the object of study. 

[00:17:32] So this whole culture that allegedly they're participating in is still an object for them. It's something they're looking at and taking apart and they're putting themselves into a bit of a god-like position. It's a humble god. But it's still, they're the ones doing the evaluating. They're the ones doing the analysis. And so it's, like I said, it's like colonization lite. 

[00:17:57] But I wanna move on to talking about the other strand of colonization science fiction that we talked about at the beginning where you said, one of the things that people are really concerned about is the idea that empires protect us against chaos and that we need to maintain the empire. So how do we see that being reflected in science fiction?

Charlie Jane: [00:18:21] To bring it back to Asimov, the ultimate Grand Master, you see this in his Foundation books where you know the mathematician Hari Seldon realizes that the vast galactic empire is about to fall and that this will bring about 30,000 years of quote unquote “barbarism”. And in the first book, Seldon says that even if you admit that the empire is a bad thing, which is an admission, he's says he's not willing to make, “the state of anarchy that would follow its fall would be much worse.”

[00:18:51] And Asimov here is drawing on Edward Gibbon, who was writing about the fall of the Roman Empire during the rise of the British Empire. And there's actually a great essay in The Atlantic by Zachary D. Carter about how Asimov, in turn, is sort of kind of subtweeting the rise of the American Empire as he writes his Foundation books.

[00:19:10] Basically, these Foundation books became popular in like the early 60s, just as the American Empire is on the rise and allowed us to think about our own technocratic dominance as a positive force for order and innovation while we still remained in denial about whether it was actually an empire at all.

Annalee: [00:19:31] Yeah, that is so interesting. I never thought about the like multilayered, imperial reflections going on there, that it's like, it's about Rome, it's about England, it's about the United States. It really makes me think about Dune, which comes out… the novels come out in the 1960s and then of course have been made and remade into movies ever since. And TV series. And those books, that story is very much about ancient empires layered on top of each other. These long dynasties of specialized groups and kind of nation states that are designed to maintain stability among the world so that they can keep the spice flowing. And the spice is basically, space gasoline, space oil, or whatever, that's all being mined on the planet Arrakis, also known as Dune.

[00:20:22] John Scalzi also plays with this in his Collapsing Empire books, which I mean, they're literally called The Collapsing Empire because Scalzi, he always tells you what's happening right on the tin. He's not holding anything back. He's like yeah, no, this is literally about a collapsing empire.

[00:20:41] It is similar somewhat to Dune in that it's an empire that depends on transit and their method of transit is being threatened because they have this sort of series of wormholes that connects the worlds together, just the way spice connects the worlds together in Dune. 

[00:21:03] It's a great series and it really does, again, deal with what I think is this profound anxiety that you see in a ton of different science fiction stories and in American politics about what happens if the empire is destabilized? And oftentimes if you're at the center of empire the way we are in the United States, the fear is really personal. It's like, what if we are no longer in charge of the empire? So it's a fear about lack of stability, but a not so hidden fear that it's really about what if we aren't the top dog anymore?

Charlie Jane: [00:21:41] Yeah. And. Pax Britannica was followed pretty seamlessly by Pax Americana, which is what we're at the tail end of now. And you see an undercurrent of this in all the discussions about the Ukraine War and all the other kind of situations around the world that are simmering right now that, is the US still capable of keeping the peace around the world and if we're not, what does that mean? And yeah, it's not a simple question. It's not like a simple… Clearly stability is good, but also from the standpoint of people on the ground living in the empire, is it really that stable? Are they really like having that great of a time living under the empire? Do their lives feel that stable when the empire can swoop in and take all their shit at any time. And as usual, there are counter narratives in speculative fiction, right? 

[00:22:34] Even as… this is just like what we talked about in the cars episode. Any time you have a prevailing narrative, there are going to be counter narratives and for example, we talked about LeGuin before, and one of LeGuin’s most famous works is The Word for World is Forest which is absolutely a pretty brutal story against colonization. And she's always wrestling in those stories about the Hainish civilization, about the dangers of empire and the dangers of systemizing oppression and so on and so forth. But there's more stuff, right? There's other kind of counter narratives about colonization in the history of science fiction right?

Annalee: [00:23:10] There's a ton, and of course we're gonna be talking really soon to Naseem, who's actually written one of my favorite recent counter-narratives. But I think the aanti-imperialism in science fiction really does go all the way back to the beginning. HG Wells' War of the Worlds is a very self-consciously, anti-imperialist novel, written really at the height of British imperialism in the world, and he's doing something really simple. He's just flipping the script. He says, well, what if the aliens came and did to us what we, the British, have been doing to parts of Africa, Southeast Asia and the Americas for hundreds of years? Like what would happen? And of course, what he shows us when he flips the script is that means that creatures come down and rape the earth, destroy our habitats, and kill us.

[00:24:03] Then you get, a lot of echoes of that same kind of script flipping, following on from that. One of the most, I think, famous kind of funny examples, is a short story called To Serve Man by Damon Knight, which became this Twilight Zone episode that I feel like everyone has seen, it's just so well known. And basically the premise is a group of aliens come down to earth. They are super advanced. They have interstellar travel and they're like, “Humans, we love you. We just wanna enlighten you and civilize you. And like we even have this holy book called To Serve Man. And it's all about how we're gonna just help you out and it's gonna be awesome. So why don't a bunch of you come with us on our spaceships and come back to our home world and we're gonna totally teach you things. And and then of course the… here's a spoiler for a very old story. The punchline is somebody translates the book To Serve Man and it's a cookbook! So it's all about how they're pretending that they're gonna civilize us and teach us things, but they're really gonna eat us.

[00:25:17] Which, if you take “To Serve Man” together with War of the Worlds, it's a pretty amazing admission on the part of white settlers and colonizers, that if you flip the script, it's basically like aliens wrecking our entire world and eating us. That's what colonization is, and it's this little moment where you see the colonizer kind of admitting like, oh yeah. What we're doing is incredibly horrific and destructive and we're destroying worlds. And that's the beauty of science fiction, right? Is it allows you to admit the truth, a truth that's otherwise really taboo and that nobody wants to say out loud. 

Charlie Jane: [00:26:04] Yeah. And it's interesting that one of the really influential stories of the ‘80s is The Space Traders by Derek Bell, who was, an anti-racist activist and one of the founders of the idea of Critical Race Theory. And he wrote this story that was adapted for television in the ‘90s where basically aliens show up and offer to give all this advanced technology and all these beautiful miracles to humanity if we will hand over all of the Black people on earth, basically, to be taken away.

[00:26:36] And of course you could probably guess how the story ends. It doesn't end well for Black people. 

[00:26:44] Okay. So we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back we'll be joined by Naseem Jamnia, the author of The Bruising of Qilwa, who's going to talk to us about how some 21st century authors are working to decolonize these narratives altogether.

[00:27:00] [OOAC theme plays briefly.]

Charlie Jane: [00:27:03] So now we're so lucky to be joined by Naseem Jamnia, the author of the incredible new book, The Bruising of Qilwa, which is just like one of, I think, both of our favorite books of the fall. And so thanks for joining us, Naseem.

Naseem: [00:27:17] Thanks so much for having me. I’m really delighted to be here, that you asked me to come on.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:22] Yeah, so The Bruising of Qilwa is a pretty self-contained story about a young healer and their family and their practice where they're dealing with this mysterious plague. But it's got this huge backdrop. It's got this huge kind of sweep of a former empire from which this character is now a refugee and like imperial colonial politics that go back hundreds of years and are just really complicated. How did you come up with this really rich world building and backstory and why is that important to have in this kind of small, intimate story about medicine and blood magic? 

Naseem: [00:27:59] Yeah, so this is a world that I have been playing in for a while. Originally I was mostly playing in Firuz’s home, the main character Firuz’s, home country of Dulmun which is the product of, like Qilwa itself, is a product of colonialization and empire building and so I originally I had started with this idea of what would Iran have looked like if the Muslim conquerers had never left, not understanding the difficulty in that question, because Iran is a Muslim majority country. We have been for 1300 years. There's also the colonization that happened afterwards by the Mongols and the Turks and our own history of empire, which is the big thing that I touch upon in the book. 

[00:28:44] But this is originally where I had started, where I was really interested in okay, what could my background and my heritage have looked like if this key thing hadn't happened where a Persian dynasty reemerged on the throne, which, like we will talk about thrones [crosstalk] to begin with.

[00:28:59] So that was, like originally kinda the backdrop. And so when I was designing the sociopolitical stuff for Qilwa, I was drawing upon that and I was thinking about what is then the original, the Sassanian Empire, not the historic Sassanian Empire. The Sassanians are the name of the Persianate group in my book. What does that empire look like? How does it relate to its neighboring areas? 

[00:29:22] And Qilwa is in the neighboring area of where this empire, the seat of this empire was. And that, because this is a story about healers and it's about everyday life, but it's also a story of migration and it's a story of forced migration. And if you're going to have forced migration, there has to be a reason behind it. And although the reason behind it isn't like a direct war that's happening, it is the result of this larger history of colonization and empire. I think we'll probably get to talking about what does a story look like about migration that doesn't have this history. But so much of migration, especially when we think about it now, does have its roots in some sort of colonial or imperial enterprise, even if it's not colonialism, the way we think about it, it might be like financial colonization, right? We see that with a lot of Latin American migrants coming to the United States.

[00:30:10] It’s something that… I wanted that to be the political backdrop because that is a familiar political backdrop. Even if the magic stuff is like the dressing on it, right? It's magic. It's not really about that. It is about that, but it's about how you as an individual are moving through these larger political landscapes in your everyday life. 

Charlie Jane: [00:30:30] And so it feels to me like there's been like a huge rise just in the last few years of like sort of decolonization narratives. And I'm thinking of like CL Clark, CL Polk, Shelly Parker-Chan, R.F. Kuang. Do you feel like that's been like a huge trend recently and what do you think is behind that?

Naseem: [00:30:47] I think it's interesting because I, it's part of me is oh, I wonder what took us this long to get to this point. Because, the wave of, when we think of political decolonization, that happened after World War II. But, I think it is a reflection of where a lot of our societies are now, where it's been decades since technical decolonization, but a lot of the countries that were left, dropped from their empires weren’t then given the tools to thrive as independent nations or as their own individual governments. And then, so things have gone to hell in many respects for a lot of countries. And I think now it's been enough time. Oh my gosh. I would, of course, like growing up in the late ‘90s and early 2000s I'm like, oh, World War II was like 60 years ago. It was not 60 years ago. It was a whole lot longer than that. 

[00:31:41] But I think by now enough time is passed where it's like, okay, what were the consequences of these decisions that were being made? Can we, it's hard to judge, where a new nation or a new country is going based on the first five or 10 or maybe even 15 years of their history. But now that there's been enough time where we can be like, okay, here's the consequences of all the things that did and didn't happen.

[00:32:03] And also, coinciding with publishing. I think, being more accepting of our voices. Of not only publishing, like, cis, het, white male voices. So that means that now we can enter into this sphere to talk about what our cultural backgrounds are in relation to colonialism stuff. So this will, yeah, I don't know. I hope there is more on the rise. Certainly there are still, I think, stories that implicitly buy into the idea of kingdoms being, or monarchy being good or like empire doesn't have to be bad, but there does certainly seem to be a wave against that, especially from people who have had their ethnic origin.. that state had been decolonized or colonized. Or, in response to recent kind of demonstrations, like I think about the Blood Heir Trilogy by my friend Amélie Wen Zhao. 

[00:32:57] It’s a retelling of Anastasia, it's a secondary world YA fantasy. And it's about… the Anastasia character wants to get back her kingdom. And then she realizes there's… kind of the communist equivalent forces who are like, no, we have to do, we can't have monarchy. Monarchy is bad. And she's like, “What?” 

[00:33:16] But then she comes to realize oh wait, all the problems that people have with this empire are inherently tied in with my family's history. And it takes, I'm not sure whether Amélie started wanting to write that story at the beginning, and I think it's amazing that's the story that she ended with. And I think a large part of that had to do with the demonstrations that were happening in Hong Kong. And that kind of just being like, okay, what does now this relationship look like? 

[00:33:41] So I definitely think that's, funny enough, the internet has helped… For all that the internet is a terrible place, the internet has done a lot to show this is what it looks like across the world in different parts of time and space, depending on what's going on. And then allowing us to think about that and have those conversations through our literature as well.

Annalee: [00:33:57] So in the first half of this episode, we were talking a lot about sort of tropes in science fiction that reflect colonizers’ points of view that are like, if not pro-imperialist, they treat imperialism as like a fact of life and that's just like how things are gonna be. 

[00:34:17] I wonder if you see any tropes emerging in decolonization narratives and anti-imperialist narratives because tropes obviously don't have to be a negative thing. A trope is just a theme or a recurring idea. What do you see as being some of the decolonization tropes?

Naseem: [00:34:36] One of the things that I've been thinking about is they tend to be messy stories because that's the reality of the human condition, but it's also the reality of decolonization. Like we, we don't necessarily see a good clear cut moral character or somebody who came from like a colonized background in a story necessarily always being the good guy.

[00:34:57] It's very obvious in, like when you watch a Star War, like the empire is bad. Empire bad, everything else good. And I think that… and not that, that's not also in decolonization narratives, but when you have an example of The Poppy War Trilogy where Rin is like not, she's a complex character. She’s, I think, the definition of morally gray at it finest, where she does atrocious terrible things. And she's also coming from a legacy of colonization and of deep pain and of genocide. 

[00:35:35] So I’m also thinking of She Who Became the Sun. You don't necessarily hate like the Mongol rulers, the prince is like, he's a good character to Ouyang. And then Ouyang is still like, but I have to think about what happened to my family. I have to think about what's happening moving forward, and these complications… I'm not sure. Every story is complicated, but they feel like they're a salien part of narratives that are pushing against kind of the imperial colonial reign of things.

Annalee: [00:36:08] So like morally gray characters are one of the hallmarks? 

Naseem: [00:36:13] I think so, and that… and even more, morally gray situations as well, right? It can be easy for, I'm trying to, I can't even come up with a specific example, but it's very easy, I think, if you're not having these conversations to buy into the like, well, the people who are upholding the law or whatever, they're necessarily doing a good thing when they see something bad is happening.

[00:36:36] And like the easy flip of that is what if the other person was stealing a piece of bread because they were starving? But it's so much more complicated than that. On all sides. And, of course, I'm anti law enforcement, but that's neither here nor there.

[00:36:53] But it's, yeah. We're not only are we seeing morally gray characters, but we're also seeing that like life, the situations around situations are complicated and we don't necessarily have a clear cut answer or way through. 

Annalee: [00:37:11] Yeah. Yeah. I think the other thing that we see a lot is stories building in the idea of a long history like you've done in your work. And I think we see that in Broken Earth, which is like one of the pioneering narratives where we understand that things are not just unfolding in the present, but there's this whole backstory of how everybody was maybe on different sides at different points. And so I think that adds to the messiness in a way that’s very pleasing and very mind expanding compared to the colonizer evil, colonized good. 

Charlie Jane: [00:37:47] Yeah, and I wanted to jump in and say, you mentioned Ouyang in She Who Became the Sun, who's such a great character, and I feel like that's something I've noticed of this, kind of this figure who turns up into a lot of these stories, who has been adopted as a child by their kind of oppressors, by the imperial forces. And it also shows up in Babel by R.F. Kuang, the main character, Robin is adopted by an English guy when he's a kid and is remade into an Englishman and is like “civilized” quote unquote reeducated to be like an English guy. And it turns up in The Unbroken by CL Clark. We had CL Clark on the podcast a while ago, and like these people who are taken from their families or often cases orphaned and then raised by the Empire and molded into imperial citizens and have a false consciousness, often, of no, the empire is really good. And I'm like, I'm part of civilization now. But then they start to realize, oh wait, actually no, the empire isn't really good. And the people who killed my family maybe are not my friends actually.

Naseem: [00:38:51] Yeah. That's an interesting point. Because we also see that in Broken Earth, right? With. The Orogenes are taken in by the people who are essentially oppressing them, right? , I think and that's not… I think indigenous boarding houses are a great example of that. Or people who have, who've gone to like the US border and been like, ah, yes, this small brown child. Now I will adopt. And family separations. Not that overseas adoptions is like inherently traumatic. I'm sure it's actually inherently traumatic. It's not inherently like a bad thing. But it happens in a lot of places, right? Where like, oh, this is a wartorn country and we must now save these children. It's a related narrative. I don't think all narratives of decolonization have to be that way, but that is a nice way to put the political problems that are going on into a single human and therefore make it like a conflict that even people outside of that can understand because, oh, this is so personal. It becomes personal, there you go.

[00:39:53] That’s the word. It becomes very personal in a way that's just easy to otherwise walk away from.

Annalee: [00:39:56] Because it's all about decolonizing your own brain as well as decolonizing a nation or a community. And that is what those residential schools were all about in the United States was like, how do you colonize the brains of, indigenous kids?

Naseem: [00:40:10] Yeah and I think about the fact that the British canon was used in different African countries as an a colonizing force. Oh, you come and you get a European education and here is the European canon that you then consume. This is what it means to be like the height of civilization, or the height of great work. And now you take those ideas… And craft is something that's so inherently cultural, now then becomes colonized as well. So yeah, I totally agree that it’s definitely a mind thing as well.

Annalee: [00:40:37] So moving on to thinking again about the larger field of decolonization stories why do you think it's so powerful to just be celebrating non-European culture in secondary worlds? Like why is that such a, an important piece of this?

Naseem: [00:40:51] So many… like, I think for a lot of us, we haven't seen our cultures in secondary worlds. For me, personally, fantasy was my genre from a young age. I was fascinated by magic and I was fascinated by this idea of, this whole other world that we could build.

[00:41:07] A lot of those times, I would like… my favorite trope, perhaps unsurprisingly, growing up was girl disguises her gender to do the thing, because only boys can do the thing. And then surprise, she's actually a girl. But it's gender weirdness and it's gender fuckery, and that was like, I should have known I was trans when those were my favorite things growing up. 

[00:41:32] So a lot of us enter, for whatever reason, enter into speculative fiction because it gives us something that we're not seeing in our daily lives. Whether that's just something that we think is cool or there's something, more emotionally salient going on in our lives.

[00:41:43] And so then we don't see our cultures or the times that we do see our cultures, we're like, wow. So that was it, huh? That was the way you decided to go? I think of God bless her, like I love Tamara Pierce. Her work has been some of the most influential work on my own writing and my own upbringing.

[00:41:59] But like the Bazhir tribesmen in Tortall are like this vaguely Arab-eque desert people. There's nothing like… they're very like gender essentialist, like women are only allowed to do X, Y, or Z thing. Other than that, they're not necessarily, she's not the worst offender for people who are writing for kids at that time and who are alive and kicking now. 

[00:42:23] But that doesn't feel great when those are the only visions that you have of ourselves. Any sort of representation is important because how are you gonna imagine something different? So then now to be in a space where so many people are able to talk about their cultures from a place of authenticity and write those into secondary worlds or into speculative fiction where we haven't seen ourselves is just, it's really powerful.

[00:42:46] I think the beauty of it is a lot of these narratives bring us narrative structures or forms or storytelling that we haven't been seeing. Of course, there are those that reproduce the same things. That has happened. I think the thing that really gets me going in a good way is seeing the ways in which people have also brought in their cultural storytelling elements and not necessarily reproduce the same things that we've seen here, but with the different cast of characters. 

[00:43:12] So yeah I think, again, publishing is a long way to go, but just because it's now so much more open to our voices that there has been this movement towards it's important to see ourselves, but we can see ourselves in secondary worlds too. It doesn't just have to be a primary world thing.

Charlie Jane: [00:43:27] Western fantasy epics often seem to be bound up with the question of nation building and empire building and who is gonna sit on the throne and how we can, rule justly or whatever. And is it possible for us to imagine like a different model of fantasy epic? And what does an epic without colonialism and empire building actually look like?

Naseem: [00:43:48] This is such a good question. I think it is possible. I think everything is possible in speculative fiction. 

Annalee: [00:43:54] It is! 

Naseem: [00:43:54] The beauty of speculative fiction is that any of this stuff is possible. And so many of us are reacting to, either our histories and our backgrounds or things that are current events. There are words for these things. Current events, or both. I think a lot of us are caught up in what does nation state building look like? What does an empire called by a different name look like in secondary world fantasy. But I think it… I don't know what it looks like yet, but I think it's definitely possible because again, that’s the beauty of speculative fiction because I think one, there's the appealing reason of the rightful heir or here's a sense, here's like, the world order, as we've known it has gone through these things and there is, truth to looking at our Earth and human history and saying empires have been around for a long time. 

[00:44:43] But, empires wasn't the first thing that happened in human advancement, right? When human civilization started becoming a civilization, as we understand it, it wasn't the first impulse. So if we can think of a way of what does it then mean if that impulse hadn’t taken place. What drove the first empires? It was like resource expansion. In the case of like my cultural background, the Persians, it was like, oh, we're the kings. Like we are the one true king. 

[00:45:15] But I think if we do it from scratch, where if we think about here's how humans began. I think then we just have to build like a new evolution of history to get to whatever that secondary world is. So I totally think it's possible. I just this is something I think will take people to sit down and really think about it, because this is something that we tend to be like, oh, of course there's gonna be some sort of imperial motion. 

[00:45:38] But I don't think it has to be like, what does it look like if we design a world such that humans from the get go, were like, okay, we are gonna share all the resources that we get as a community. No one is inherently better than another. Each person has like a job that they're doing and that's all contributing to the community. And we rotate out jobs or, so and so is not physically able or mentally able to, and I mentally able, I mean like emotionally, I don't mean to say anything about intellectual disability. Or that, like not able to do this, so here's other ways that we can incorporate every member of the community no matter whatever their backgrounds are. 

[00:46:14] And then I think then the conflicts come in different forms. And that's amazing. I guess the one, this isn't quite the same, but I know we've talked about Becky Chambers's Monk and Robot Series, and the thing that's so beautiful about that is it’s like a world that's figured out it's shit. It’s like they had the factory age, the robots left, and then the humans respected that the robots had become autonomous and left, and they're like, okay, half the world is not ours anymore. We're gonna stick here. And we're not in conflict with each other in terms of war, like we figure out our payment system is not based on payments, but of here is what the value of what you did for me. Now pass on that good karma to the rest of the community. And they have a way to track that. That's the closest thing I can think of off the top of my head. But even that has a history of, there is, if nothing else, the human impulse of creating these robots to be over before the robots became sentient. And what a beautiful 

Annalee: [00:47:08] I know and I feel like in your work, in Bruising of Qilwa, you've talked about how you retold colonialist history without race. So that's like another way to play with the inputs and outputs of your colonial world building is, either maybe you take out colonialism entirely or you take out one piece and you're like, okay, what does it look like if we take that out? Oh, it turns out we have other ways of developing caste systems. 

Naseem: [00:47:34] Absolutely. Because race wasn't a thing until the European colonizers were like, okay, we need to have another moral reason for what we're doing. Oh, hey, let's take this ancient trope of barbarians, savages and barbarians and the civilized. Which incidentally, the Greeks used to describe the Persians, which is hilarious. We are the OG uncivilized. And yeah, there's still… people will come up with different ways to have conflicts and to, as you said, like create castes, but it doesn't have to be in a way that centers like white supremacy or have to be a way where physical features of race are then the marker of your worth as a human.

[00:48:14] And I'm definitely trying to grapple with like, how do I create a world where I don't want… I can’t like realistically say there's no ethnic prejudice in this world because I think that would be untrue. But I also really don't want that to be the driving factor of the empire that was in the background, because I think there's just as harmful ways, as opposed to this overt ethnic supremacy to do empire. But like it's still harmful. It's still an empire, you know?

Annalee: [00:48:39] Yeah, I think that's really great because it is it's allowing us to think about what the real harm is and saying yeah, there's many symptoms of this harm.

[00:48:50] White supremacy is one symptom and it's really bad and we need to work on getting rid of it, but getting rid of that doesn't mean we get rid of the underlying problem, which is somebody taking power and extracting resources from someone else and not compensating them. That’s like the most basic unit, I think, of imperial conquest is, I take your thing and give you nothing, or I give you a shitty job.

Naseem: [00:49:17] Yeah, exactly. 

 Annalee: [00:49:18] So I think my final question or our final question as, to do a quick thought experiment about what migration and cultural exchanges might look like without colonization. Do you have any like quick and dirty, like SF/fantasy way of thinking about that and what you would imagine that to be? 

Naseem: [00:49:38] Yeah, The Actual Star by Monica Byrne is a good answer for that and for the future timeline. So granted, it's like the future of our world, so it has that world history baggage , but in the future timeline, humans are not meant to be sedentary. They're meant to be migrating constantly. And there's way houses around the world that people stay at for different amounts of time and they're constantly migrating and therefore have different roles in the communities that they come into every time. And I think that's an incredible way to hope for human history. That rather than being like, “Here is our land, here is our property, here is ours.” Instead, it's, this whole world is all of ours to share. And so the way that we do justice by that is through movement, through being involved in the community that we're in at the time, to honoring the fact that we shouldn't stay here and basically overstay our welcome, but that also has a reciprocal relationship with the environment.

[00:50:31] So yeah, no I definitely think that there is a way to write migration stories that doesn't have to be forced migration like colonialism tends to, and I highly recommend that book for it. 

Charlie Jane: [00:50:42] Awesome. Yeah. So, wrapping up, where can people find you on the internet? 

Naseem: [00:50:47] Yeah I'm on the internet, so social media, I’m @jamsternazzy, mostly Instagram and Twitter, although I apparently have a TikTok as well. And by apparently, I made one. And my website is naseemwrites.com. I have a newsletter on there, which has a messy link, so I can't give it a nice, easy link. But yeah, I have a newsletter where I send it out twice a month on Tuesdays. So, I’m around.

Charlie Jane: [00:51:11] Awesome. Thank you so much. 

Annalee: [00:51:12] Yay! Thanks so much for coming.

Naseem: [00:51:14] Thank you. Thank you guys so much for having me. 

[00:51:17] [OOAC theme plays.]

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[00:51:52] We're gonna go tell you in Discord in five minutes how much we love you, and the rest of you, we’ll be back in a couple weeks with another episode. Bye!

Annalee: [00:52:00] Bye!