So Long Been Dreaming (53 page)

Postcolonial writers have given contemporary literature some of its most notable fiction about the realities of conqueror and conquered, yet we’ve rarely created stories that imagine how life might be otherwise. So many of us have written insightfully about our pasts and presents; perhaps the time is ripe for us to begin creatively addressing our futures.

Toronto and Boston, March 2004

Nalo Hopkinson
is the author of three novels, numerous short stories, and a collection of short fiction. She’s also the editor of the anthologies
Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction
and
Mojo: Conjure Stories
. She has received a number of awards for her work, including science fiction’s John W. Campbell Award, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and Honourable Mention in Cuba’s Casa de las Americas Prize for Fiction. Her new novel,
The Salt Roads
, has been shortlisted for the Nebula Award. She’s currently co-editing
Tesseracts
, an anthology of speculative fiction by Canadians, with Geoff Ryman.

PHOTO: DAVID FINDLAY

Uppinder Mehan
is a scholar of science fiction and postcolonial literature. His interest in connecting the two fields first came together in his article “The Domestication of Technology in Indian Science Fiction Short Stories.” He is at work on a book about spiritual possession in Caribbean literature and continues to research questions of culture and technology in postcolonial literature.

PHOTO: RHEA BECKER