Excerpt
She got the which of what-she-did,
She hid the bell with a blot, she did,
But she fell in love with a hominid.
Where is the which of the what-she-did?
—"Ballad of the Lost C'Mell" by Cordwainer Smith
I didn't used to like people much. When I was sixteen and depressed, keenly reactive to every injustice I witnessed or experienced, very aware of having no control over my life, and (I thought) powerless to do anything about all the evil, unhappiness, violence, and pain in the world, I had no hope for us as a species. We humans have spread over the face of this planet like a fungus, altering and destroying whole ecosystems and species, abusing and waging war on each other. If teenaged me thought about it too much, I was engulfed with despair.
Not to say that it was all bad. I had friends, there was good music in the world, my parents were involved in the arts and made sure to expose me and my brother to them. And there were books.
The title of this collection comes from my love of Cordwainer Smith's writing, especially his "Instrumentality of Mankind" stories. I loved his imagination, style, the poetry of his writing, his compassion. Loved his sensibility in writing about a racialized, manufactured underclass and telling some of the stories from their context. I'm black and female. I was born and for many years raised middle/creative class in the Caribbean, a region of the world which has had to be keenly aware of issues of race, class, gender, and privilege. You see the concerns reflected in much of our art and literature. I'd always loved reading science fiction and fantasy as well, and came to value the SF/F writers I found who could explicitly bring any of that into their writing in complicated ways. These are such human issues. I love and am fascinated by human beings. We are, all of us, capable simultaneously of such great good and such horrifying evil.
It's a bit of a trick to treat a collection such as this as though the stories were all conceived of and written at the same time, with a single unifying principle. In fact, they were written over the course of perhaps eight to ten years, for different editors, on different themes, and published in different venues. The only unifying element is me, the author. Thinking about the stories as one volume forced me to consider what I'm about. What are my passions and obsessions of which these stories might be emblematic? Well, so many things, really. But one of the progressions I've made is from being a depressed teenager who saw how powerless she was to change all the ills around her to being a mostly cheerful fifty-something who realizes there are all kinds of ways of working towards positive change. I am not as active in doing so as my conscience would have me be, but I am not at all passive, or powerless. And that's because I'm not alone. I've learned I can trust that humans in general will strive to make things better for themselves and their communities. Not all of us. Not always in principled, loving, or respectful ways. Often the direct opposite, in fact. But we're all on the same spinning ball of dirt, trying to live as best we can.
Yes, that's almost overweeningly Pollyana-ish, despite the fact that sometimes I just need to shake my fist at a mofo. I am not at all discounting all the pain, torture, and death we can and do inflict on others. As I hope will be clear from the stories that follow, I am not forgetting oppression, repression, abuse, genocide. I experience anger and outrage and despair. I see the ways in which science fiction is too often used to confirm people's complacency, to reassure them that it's okay for them not to act, because they are not the lone superhero who will fix the world's ills. And yet, humanity as a whole is not satisfied with complacency. So part of the work of these past few decades of my life has been the process of falling in love with hominids.
