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Mindblowing Science Fiction by POC

The conversation around the Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF is tapering off, but one aspect of it I’d always meant to keep better track of is the lists of authors and stories that readers suggested as being examples of great and mindblowing SF. I thought such a thing might make a nice list for the Carl Brandon Society blog. And maybe for other things… ;)

In comments, please list authors or stories or novels you would include in a list of mindblowing science fiction. If you’d like to include a bit on why you feel these choices are mindblowing, feel free. There is no restriction on time period, both modern and decades long past authors and fiction are desired. If someone has already mentioned an author, story, or book you were going to, co-sign.

58 thoughts on “Mindblowing Science Fiction by POC”

  1. Claudia says:

    Octavia Butler. ‘Nuf said.

  2. anna says:

    Hi! *waves nicely*

    I recently read “Fledgling” by Octavia Butler. it honestly blew me away. Shori/Renee’s voice was so absolutely compelling and fascinating…

    I’m not sure if this is the kind of rec you’re looking for.

    hope you’re well, anna

  3. Sophie says:

    The collection “The Story of Your Life and other Stories” by Ted Chiang, especially 72 Letters.
    Everything I’ve read by Octavia Butler, especially “Wild Seed” and the Xenogenesis trilogy.
    “Stars in the Pocket like Grains of Sand” by Samuel R Delaney

    If fantasy counts:
    “The Arrival” by Shaun Tan

    If manga/graphic novels count:
    “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind” by Hayoa Miyazaki

    *ponders* Will try and think of more when it’s not 4am

  4. Josh says:

    Given that Ashley’s criterion for “mindblowing” was the fiction’s creative use of S*C*I*E*N*C*E, I think Nisi Shawl’s “Good Boy” and Vandana Singh’s “Infinities” are great candidates, although each author has published other stories that fit the bill as well. And although it’s hardly a novel suggestion, I’d nominate “Bloodchild” as the OEB story that blew my mind the most.

    I’d also suggest, especially if one does not care to use the “hard SF” criterion implicit in Ashley’s remark, the consideration of SFish novels that aren’t marketed as SF, such as work by Colson Whitehead or Sherman Alexie.

    1. Lori S. says:

      Ditto for “Bloodchild.”

      1. Debbie Notkin says:

        It’s not just that I usually agree with Lori. It’s that “Bloodchild” completely rocked my world, and still does. It’s not the only mind-blowing Butler. It’s just (for me) the most mindblowing Butler.

  5. Godheval says:

    Speaking of mind-blowing sci-fi, have you all seen District 9? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it. I wrote up my own here:
    http://godheval.net/district-9-is-better-than-its-critics/

  6. shah8 says:

    Steven Barnes has written a ton of decent to good black science fiction. My favorite is Iron Shadows
    Walter Mosely has also written a cool black science fiction novel by the name of Blue Light. He has written a couple of others.
    Samuel Delany is a not so obvious to some (often not known as non-white). Dhalgren is the most mentioned novel. That one (tho’ I have not read it, is considered mindblowing).
    Minister Faust has written some fairly psychedelic/comedic sci-fi that was interesting, but I wouldn’t have said mindblowing. John Ridley and Billy Dee Williams write action packed science fiction…/me shrugs.
    I haven’t gotten to Buckell, yet.

    People are going to have to help me out with hispanic material. There just isn’t all that much in english (tho’ like say…SP Somtow–who is Thai, there might be a couple I’ve read that I didn’t know were hispanic). Urban fantasy has Maria Lima, who isn’t all that bad. Otherwise, it’s down to comic book writer Joe Quesada.

    Mindblowing works from people of asian extraction generally means japan. Plenty of other cultures have had meaningful science fiction traditions, like muslim South Asia, but the only ones I’ve ever read were from Japan. Aside from the obviousness of Ted Chiang, Masamune Shiroe, the creater of Ghost in the Shell, is probably by far the most influential asian science fiction writer. Morioka Hiroyuki is another japanese writer who is massively influential in Japan who is less known here. I consider the work of Makoto Yukimura to be truly sublime (and especially do not watch the anime version afterwards). Here is a place that is translating and selling japanese science fiction in the US. http://www.haikasoru.com/ Check it out!

    Also, there is an awesome interview about African science fiction at the nebula award site:
    http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/is_africa_ready_for_science_fiction/#When:22:22:01Z

    And if you’re still reading, go to scifisignal.com and look for entries on MindMelds. They just did a huge discussion on science fiction written outside of the english language.

    1. ladyjax says:

      On the comic book tip you can add Phil Jimenez.

  7. Chally says:

    Octavia Butler! As for a comment, well, I blogged.

  8. delagar says:

    Eleanor Arnason, Knapsack Poems, which still blows my mind every time I read it. It was the first thing I ever read by her, and though it’s not an easy read (at first) what she’s does with the idea of person/gender/self in that story just keeps knocking me over. And that’s not all she has to say, either — ha! What a great story that is.

    Octavia Butler, The Evening and the Morning and The Night — lots of seriously cool science in that one.

    Tais Teng: the Rim Runner’s Wife. Great Big Science Ideas. (I might have the title slightly wrong — RimRoller’s Wife?)

    Kij Johnson — I suppose everyone knows her already? I’ve only read a couple stories so far, but not a dud yet.

  9. Julia says:

    Reading the stories in Nisi Shawl’s Filter House blew me away. My jaw dropped and I couldn’t stop reading. My favorites were: “Maggies”, “Deep End” and “At the huts of Ajala.” The first two are in sci fi futures, the last is sort of magical realism combined with Vodou and possibly Santeria.

    Nalo Hopkinson “Ganger (Ball Lightning)” and “A Habit of Waste” are both set in futuristic sci-fi worlds and tackle technology and how it affects people really well
    “Greedy Choke Puppy” is more fantastical or magical realism. It one of the many stories by Hopkinson that blends Carribean folklore into the mundane world in a way that is brilliant and original. This story also combined elements of the European fairytale “Bluebeard” for a story that is chilling and gripping.

    Derrick Bell “The Space Traders”. I read it in Dark Matter and it blew my mind. I’ve re-read it several times and forced other peopel to read it. Seriously AMAZING.

    Darryl A. Smith “The Pretend”. I just….um…robots, sentience, and race. OMGWTF

    Tasha Campbell “River’s Daughter” (ebook from Verb Noire Press). This is basically the rural fantasy novel I had been waiting for. If you like Manly Wade Wellman’s “Silver John” books or Orson Scott Card’s “Alvin Maker” series, read this and pass out of the awesome

    Nnedi Okorafor. Zahrah the Windseeker. It’s set in a futuristic place inspired by parts of Africa, with amazing techno-organic things, and magical elements. I was impressed by the originality and vibrant storytelling.

    Charles Saunders. I read his “Dossouye” stories original in various anthologies. What blew my mind about them was that they were in the style of sword and sorcery amazon chicks, but about African people. They were the first fantasy stories I read that weren’t about white people, and really made me realize just how white washed the fantasy genre is.

  10. alumiere says:

    i know he’s not a poc, but kim stanley robinson’s mars trilogy absolutely blew me away, and i loved the diversity of his future solar system

  11. Ben says:

    I put Kindred face-out on my recommends shelf at work and sold out in less than a week (5 books in a week is a good sell for a regular book). So now I’m waiting for the distribution hub (don’t get me started) to send me another 10 and in the meantime I’ve put Blue Light by Walter Moseley in her place to keep it warm.

    One thing to note is that the edition of Kindred I’m selling has a POC front and centre on the cover so obviously the ‘public won’t buy books with POCs on the cover’ myth gets another nail in that particular rotten coffin.

  12. shah8 says:

    Chally, I miss her so badly that I think of her whenever I’m reading someone who plays around in her sandbox. Kit Whitfield’s Bareback, or what I’m reading right now, Let the Right One In by John A Lindquist. I haven’t yet read everything of hers (her short stories and I will never read Kindred–just about anything slavery drives me slightly crazy) and I intend to reread some of my favorites.

    One of the things that does piss me off is that O Butler is such an easy name to recall. There just aren’t enough POC in sci-fi such that there would be a huge number of off the top of your head authors. She shouldn’t stick out like that. Of course part of that is that the hard sciences/mathematics were such white male dominated endeavors. There are a ton of physicists like David Brins and Vernor Vinge who got into sci-fi. However, as far as I’m aware, Catherine Asaro (to a lesser degree James Tiptree Jr) is about the only woman science fiction writer with a strong background in science. The rest were either self-taught really well, like Butler or Bujold…come out of some other rigorous intellectual tradition, like Cherryh, or they were outright polymaths like Chris Moriarty and Rosemary Kirstein.

    Don’t get me started on the term hard science fiction, either.

  13. nojojojo says:

    shah8,

    There are tons of women in SF with a strong background in science. Offhand I can think of Julie Czerneda (biologist), Elizabeth Moon (biologist), and Brenda Cooper (literal rocket scientist), but there’s quite a few out there, esp. in hard and military SF. Now, not many become “off the top of your head” authors to many readers — but that’s a whole other issue. (I’m convinced that one of the reasons Butler is such an easy name to recall is because many readers don’t read much SF, particularly short fiction, and when they do they go for whoever “everyone’s talking about”, and that tends to leave out most women and PoC.)

    Some short fiction by PoC that blew my mind is Greg Van Eekhout’s “In the Late December”, a Christmas story about the heat death of the universe. And rather than just cite Octavia I’ll mention a specific story of hers: “Bloodchild”, which was both squicky and heartwarming, which are two adjectives I never thought I’d put in a sentence together, but stories about aliens implanting deadly larva in human hosts really shouldn’t be heartwarming. Yet she did it.

    I would second most of the other stuff mentioned here, incl. Derrick Bell’s “The Space Traders”, and add an anthology: Nalo Hopkinson’s SO LONG BEEN DREAMING, which is a whole book full of short stories about PoC. Not necessarily by PoC — though many of them are — but they all acknowledge the layered meaning of colonialism in science fiction, and many are mindblowing simply for breaking the genre’s “colonialism is good!” convention.

  14. shah8 says:

    Thanks, nojojojo, wasn’t *quite* sure of my thesis, but no way did I know the backgrounds of most of the authors that I have read. What strikes me as truly interesting was the Elizabeth Moon was a biologist! I never would have guessed given what she has written. Reading her wiki, I suspect I’d have enjoyed her company very much. Three cheers for biologists!

  15. Angie says:

    “The Intuitionist” Colson Whitehead

  16. ladyjax says:

    The sequel to “The Space Traders” is called “Redemption Deferred: Back to The Space Traders” and can be found in Derrick Bell’s book, Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival in an Alien Land Called Home”.

    1. The Angry Black Woman says:

      The Space Traders messed me up for MONTHS after I read it. I seriously could not stop thinking about it and feeling sick to my stomach, because I knew it was all completely true. I knew there was a sequel, now I need to find that book.

      1. ladyjax says:

        It was published in paperback by Basic Books in 1997. Checking their website, woohoo, it’s still in print.

        I know most people have read “The Space Traders” either standalone online or in Dark Matter but I think it’s worth it to give a shoutout to where it originally appeared: Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Persistence of Racism which is where I first got hold of it. Mostly because Bell uses the presence of a character he created, Geneva Crenshaw, to move through many of the issues he wants to explore around race and representation. She interacts with Bell as a friend and a sounding board; I think I read somewhere that his Crenshaw stories fall into the realm of ‘magical realism’ but I could have been smoking something at the time and therefore remembering badly.

      2. Julia says:

        SAME HERE!!

        I bought “Dark Matter” for my father and brother in part because I wanted to talk to them about it. It’s brutal in its plausibility.

  17. shah8 says:

    Huh, only now do I realize I…know this Derrick Bell you guys speak of, but through his non-fiction work.

    One biiiiig reason I don’t read short fiction? It’s too hard to get access to them outside of going to Amazon. Tracking this stuff down via the crappy public library is tedious and sometimes futile. Sell me e-versions of short stories!

    1. Aoede says:

      http://readersrepository.blogspot.com

      This is obviously a work in progress, but I have a LOT of short stories, novelettes, and novellas listed :)

    2. ladyjax says:

      I’m a big fan of going to used bookstores or specialty bookstores for things like these. I got my copy of “Gospel Choirs” at Marcus Books here in Oakland. It looks like their revamping their website (http://www.marcusbookstores.com/) but I’d keep an eye on it to see what they roll out.

      I’ve started patronizing Powells Books if I really need to buy from a larger store online.

    3. DCMovieGirl says:

      I’ve read his Faces at the Bottom of the Well and there were definitely some short stories with a sci-fi bend.

    4. Julia says:

      http://www.half.com and abebooks.com are great ways to get used books cheap

  18. Tlönista says:

    Another nom for Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters”, and also “Tower of Babel”, and…oh, most every story of his. Sensawunda at its purest.

  19. susan says:

    Hello all,

    Don’t know if I can add much to the list. I read mostly women of color and that is the focus at Color Online. Not long ago for our CORA Diversity Roll Call, we focused on POC in Sci-fi/fantasy. Participation was high for us. You can read the list of writers we came up.

    I also read unsualmusic’s post on the Liar controversy. As I mentioned above, we focus on women writers of color. I also run a library. It is 80% books by women and the percentage is that much if not higher by women of color. At Color Online, you can find plenty of YA POC fiction, and while I read and love Ms. Mildred Taylor’s work, there are many talented POC writers who are writing today including Jaqueline Woodson and Zetta Elliott (who wrote, A Wish After Midnight, a speculative/sci-fi YA). One response to the Liar backlash was our Color Me Brown Challenge. We need to promote POC authors and works prominently, regularly on our blogs. You’ll find more than 50 links to date for the challenge and many more titles on our site.

    I also wrote “What We Can Do” to further promote writers of color if you’re interested.

    I’ve enjoyed my time reading here. Come by. You’re welcome.

  20. Pat Logan says:

    Tananarive Due’s series starting with My Soul To Keep is blowing my mind.

  21. Aoede says:

    Seeing that Ted Chiang has not been particularly prolific, I would gladly nominate every single one of his short stories :D

    I kind of suck at figuring out race/ethnicity in general though, because all I ever see is the name, so the name has to be really obvious >.>

  22. elf_man says:

    Pretty much anything by David Gerrold, but of course War Against the Chtorr series in particular. Everything from the biology, economics and political theory, gender theory and philosophy, sexuality and racism.

  23. elf_man says:

    Oops, misread the post title. Not a POC author. Still worthwhile for the above reasons.

  24. Debbie Notkin says:

    I’m surprised by how little attention Delany gets here (and the earlier commenter’s statement that people don’t know he isn’t white).

    For short stories, I’ll call his “Driftglass” and “Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones” mindblowing any day of the week.

    Ted Chiang can’t write without being mindblowing. My personal favorites are “Liking What You See” and “The Tower of Babel,” but there’s plenty more.

    Both Nalo Hopkinson and Nisi Shawl have written stories that blew me away. I’ll pick “Wallamelon” for Nisi, and would have to go look at “Skin Folk” to pick something from Nalo.

    If we get into novels, or even short stories by white women, I’ll use up my posting space. Suffice it to say there are hundreds.

    1. Julia says:

      As a reader, I find it difficult to get an entry point into Delany’s work. I find I really need to read it big gulps and really concentrate. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s that it’s not easy read for me.

      I am loving his non fiction writing though. I find it more accessible and totally fascinating. I know Delany blew my dad’s mind back in the day.

  25. DCMovieGirl says:

    Gloria Naylor, Tananarive Due…

    If you want a pulpy vampire-slayer paperback, L.A. Banks.

  26. Nisi Shawl says:

    Thanks, Josh, Julia, and Debbie.

    The Manthology was supposed to be about mindblowing science fiction, so “Wallamelon” doesn’t cut it. But yah, “Good Boy” is chock full of quotes from John Lilly, and sure qualifies in my mind.

    For Octavia, I’d have to agree that “Bloodchild” blows my tiny mind.

    For Nalo, my favorite short story is “Glass Bottle Trick,” in the aforementioned Skin Folk collection.

    For Chip, OMG, so many, but top picks would be “Time Considered As a Helix of SemiPrecious Stones” (the title alone could blow most minds), and “Aye, and Gomorrah.”

    For Ted, my favorites are “Story of Your Life” and “Division by Zero.” (The latter I love because it helped me win an argument with an ex about all sf depending on technology for its scientific jolt. No tech there.)

    Not yet mentioned: Hiromi Goto (Japanese Canadian and a Tiptree winner) has a whole collection of short stories called Hopeful Monsters. The title piece is probably the strongest, and it certainly has a scientific element–spontaneous genetic mutation.

    I’m not going to mention everything by everyone that blew my mind. Suffice it to say that there could be several volumes of the “Rest of Us” antho series.

    And @ shah8, nothing tedious need be involved in reading short fiction, which IMO is the leading, bleeding edge of speculation. True, if you’re looking for just one particular piece it may take work to track it down. But if all you care about is short and good, there are collections by individual authors, many published by small presses. There are anthologies–both general interest anthos with more inclusion going for them than the Notorious M.A.N., and targeted ones such as So Long Been Dreaming and the two volumes of Dark Matter, all three of which feature several POC authors. You could actually enjoy finding and reading these things.

    Sorry to ramble on so. I should go finish writing a story or something.

  27. The Angry Black Woman says:

    Over on Feminist Sf blog I’m also soliciting lists of Mindblowing SF by Women.

  28. BWrites says:

    Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro should qualify, though I’m not sure it’s ‘hard’ enough for some tastes.

    1. Ico says:

      Oh! I was going to mention that! I think it definitely qualifies. It’s literary sci fi at its best.

  29. shah8 says:

    Maybe we oughta seperate it by form?

    I know lots of books, not so much short stories or novellas? Or a specific category such as space opera/steampunk/cyber(nano)punk? It might help with deeper suggestions that are more genuinely useful to people. Even in books, there are a *ton* of little rabbit holed stories that most people wouldn’t know about–like the rather steampunkish novel The Steam Magnate by Dana Copithorne. I try to spread the gospel of Kirstein for a reason.

    I’ve gone through Amazon listmanias for a long while now…It is thouroughly amazing (and discouraging) just how many very, very,…very good speculative fiction novels are languishing–and yes, many of them are by women. Heh, I went to the bookstore yesterday (and checking out all the books that were supposed to be released next tuesday) and saw that Bone Dance, by Emma Bull, was rereleased with a new cover and all. It was a nominee for a *ton* of awards in 1991. I found it some time ago trawling the listmanias, and enjoyed it very much. However, when I mentioned it on a thread by Latoya in Feministe, apparently even an Emma Bull fan had not heard of it. I quite literally can go on and on and on and not stop with the number of worthwhile authors…Who knows Maureen McHughs these days, let alone the quality that never gets awarded such as books by Paula Downing?

    1. Julia says:

      Huh. “Bone Dance” has been discussed a lot in my circles because the main character is, in many ways, a trans person. Then again I know a ton of trans activists, gender queers and gender rabble rousers.

  30. Zahra says:

    I am currently in the middle of Haruki Murakami’s Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and it is pretty much the definition of mind-blowing science fiction. Literally. The main character’s mind is blown, and the rest of us get taken along for the very entertaining ride. Amazing that thinking this hard can be so much fun.

    Short stories are hard for me, as I don’t read that many and am a very harsh critic. But yes, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” should definitely be on the list. And I don’t like much Ted Chiang, but “The Story of Your Life” is one of the best short stories I have ever read in my life. Not only did it blow my mind, it made me break down in tears.

    Sherman Alexie’s “The Sin Eaters” (found in his collection The Toughest Indian in the World) is gripping, apocalyptic, and disturbing. I read it hoping it was sf and not true, because the US government has done weirder medical experiments on American Indians (& black folks).

    Definitely something from Skin Folk (still my favorite of Nalo Hopkinson’s works). I loved “Tan-Tan and the Dry Bone” but I’m not sure how sf it is without rereading (my copy was stolen).

    I’m not sure if the Argentinian writer Angelica Gorodischer identifies as of color, but if so I would nominate something from her collection Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was. Probably “The Natural History of Ferrets” or “The Old Incense Road.” (I’m a huge fan of Kij Johnson’s two novels, by the way, but I have always been under the impression that she’s white. Am I wrong?)

    I’d also include Nigerian-British writer Helen Oyeyemi; as she writers primarily novels, I’d probably pick one of her plays, Juniper’s Whitening. It’s also about a mind being blown, or split consciousness; imagine a play with an unreliable narrator, who isn’t narrating.

    At the risk of slipping out of hard sf, the list needs something from the maddening and uneven but undeniably mind-blowing Salman Rushdie. Perhaps an excerpt from The Satanic Verses, or his delightful Haroun and the Sea of Stories (travel to the moon). He might have something shorter in the collection East, West, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.

    I would nominate Nisi Shawl’s “The Deep End” if I could get over my disappointment that it’s not a full-length novel, but I’m still working on that (apologies, Ms. Shawl!).

    I’ll be honest and say that I don’t think Craig Laurance Gidney is mind-blowing yet, but I think if he keeps writing and gets a good editor he might someday be. I might throw in “Etiolate” from his collection Sea, Swallow Me nevertheless, because it’s so memorably creepy, and because I’m as tired of seeing only Butler & Delaney as the designated queer SF writers of choice as I am as seeing them as the the designated WOCs.

    All of which is to say: more new names! I just got Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled out of the library; it’s a frame tale, and seems ripe for excerpting. And I’ve been very much wanting to read Vandana Singh, too.

  31. Nisi Shawl says:

    I love, love, love Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the Edge of the World; it is one of my favorite books of all time. I walked around for weeks after reading it with my mind blown. I dreamed about it.

    But it’s a novel, not a short story.

    My editor, Timmi Duchamp, tried to get me to write a novel based on “Deep End.” I could, if someone would advance me about $4000. It’s a cash flow problem, not an artistic one….

    Couple more anthos for folks to check out: Mojo Conjure Stories and Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root, both edited by Nalo Hopkinson. The first is both POC and white authors writing about mojo/voodoo/santeria, so as fantasy it wouldn’t make it into that imaginary Rest of Us antho. The second is from Caribbean authors.

    You know, the whole definition of what is “scientific” is problematic to me. Some technologies are social in nature, and those are the ones that survived transplantation from African countries to the Western Hemisphere. Because non-physical technologies were the ones our enslaved ancestors could carry with them. I talked about that a little at Stanford one time. Someone needs to write a book on that subject, doncha think?

  32. NancyP says:

    Most of the interesting well-known POC SFF English-language writers have been mentioned above. There is little translated SFF out there.

    Part of the problem in recognizing POC SFF writers is that some do not have obvious ethnic names. A story by a new author might be mindblowing for some reason totally unrelated to POC status, and if its author is J. Smith, I wouldn’t have a clue.

    I don’t know the racial identity of Raphael Carter (Fortunate Fall, “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation”. Ze has had a tiny output, but all have had major awards.

    1. Julia says:

      In this digital age, most every author has a personal website (and often a blog) that will give you information about the author and a photograph. The big publishing houses have websites which often have author photos.

  33. Fritz Freiheit says:

    I would like to John M. Faucette‘s Age of Ruin (which was one of the first adult SF novels that I read) originally published as an Ace Double (with Mack Reynold’s Code Duello) back in the 60s. Age of Ruin is still my favorite post-apocalypse story, filled as it is with action-adventure galore and highly imaginative vistas.

  34. Tom says:

    I know some people already mentioned him, but Samuel R. Delaney is pretty interesting, to put it mildly. Trouble on Triton is the most obvious Sci-Fir one for me, but Tales of Neveryon is all about exploration of social and philosophical issues through the lives of people existing in an interesting society. It’s like Kim Stanley Robinson but quite a bit more radical and ground-breaking.

  35. Stefanie says:

    I am delighted to come across such a wonderful list. If anyone is willing, may I ask– is something like Bloodchild very, well, bloody? I have really strong triggers about blood/cutting/violence (could not read the Kushiel series for example) and the concept of the book appeals but if anyone would be kind enough to give me a heads up about actual blood I would be very grateful.

  36. Robert Hopt says:

    Oh yes, Samuel R Delaney! Go read “Babel-13” and “Nova” and his short story collections, especially “Time Considered…” as mentioned earlier. “Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand” has some particularly mindblowing parts as well.

    Also, though she is white, Ursula K Le Guin is worth a mention for her curious insistence of writing with characters of all complexions. They’re making a miniseries of her Earthsea trilogy now and I hear that she was very angry at the producers for changing the ethnicities of her locale (the inhabitants of most of Earthsea are dark-skinned).

    1. Julia says:

      They already made a movie of Earthsea, and Le Guin wrote a scathing piece about the whitewashing of it.

  37. shah8 says:

    Stefanie, I’m sorry, but Bloodchild, while awesome, is quite exceptionally bloody.

  38. Carrie D says:

    A couple off the beaten path – I’m reading a novel about near future cryptology, activism, and hacking by a Bolivian writer, Turing’s Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldan. (2006 English translation) I can’t vouch for the end, but so far it’s pretty interesting. Teen girl hacker as one protagonist, though otherwise a guy novel.

    A short story writer and novelist who got published in SFF mostly in the 80s and 90s but has had a couple stories in F&SF lately is Marta Randall. (Collection on Lulu) I haven’t gotten around to reading all her stuff and don’t know her identifications, but she was born in Mexico City and later moved to the SF Bay Area; she writes a lot of POC characters and her stories have that whiz bang pulpy SF style (mindblowing I dunno, but I love to read that style not tied to horrid politics).

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  41. Stefanie says:

    shah8, thanks. Argh.

  42. NancyP says:

    How about First Nations SFF authors in the US, Canada, Central American countries? Maori, Hawaiian/Polynesian, Australian indigenous SFF authors? African SFF authors?

    There was a good anthology of “post-colonial SFF” a few years back, So Long Been Dreaming. I have seen it mentioned a number of times at this and other sites, but it is always worth promoting.

  43. eric says:

    late to the party…. Re. Delaney, “Aye, And Gomorrah” was more mind-expanding than any of the other Delaney stories I’ve read. But I don’t know as much Delaney as most of the Delaney boosters here; anyway, he’s to me one of the quinteseentially mind-expanding writers in SF, so I’m puzzled by any list of mind-expanding stories that doesn’t include him.

    Other than that, I don’t really know who is ‘of color’ and don’t assume I know who’s a man or a woman. (Tiptree being case in point.) So I don’t feel qualified to make any other recommendations. Unless we’re considering magical realism, in which case some of Sherman Alexei’s short work would qualify.

  44. el gato calculista says:

    samuel delany’s Dhalgren is one of the best books i have ever read. the fact that the main character is a queer indigenous person is quite amazing. and the amount of sexuality, race, gender, mental health etc. content in it is fantastic.

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