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Excerpt:

Science fiction and fantasy are often accused of being escapist, trivial, and mindless, portraying bug-eyed alien monsters, scantily clad women, spaceships and bizarre other worlds, while Real Literature concerns itself with humanity’s true problems, the struggles of the Self to become whole in a hostile world and so on. Often the movies and books of science fiction and fantasy are in fact frothy and shallow. But I have recently read a book by Ursula K. Le Guin called “The Telling” that concerns itself with the dominance of a space-faring culture over one that it just beginning to take its technological first steps. It is about cultural survival and personal freedom under totalitarian rule. It is about self-imposed cultural censorship. It is about colonialism of the mind. Nothing to do with the real world, eh?

Read Vandana Singh’s complete article here.

Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain
Edited by Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán

From a review by Joe Sutliff Sanders, published in Strange Horizons:

This new collection is a godsend for people who want to see what a large part of the rest of the world is doing with science fiction. It’s full of stories that are very much science fiction, not magical realism — whatever that means this week — or fantasy or ghost stories.

“Indian” Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction: First Nations’ Voices Speak Out
By Sierra S. Adare

At its core, this book is a social study whose purpose is to explore the responses of First Nations peoples to representative “Indian” stereotypes portrayed within the TV science fiction genre. Participants in Adare’s study viewed episodes from My Favorite Martian, Star Trek, Star Trek: Voyager, Quantum Leap, The Adventures of Superman, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Reactions by viewers range from optimism to a deep-rooted sadness. The strongest responses came after viewing a Superman episode’s depiction of an “evil medicine man” who uses a ceremonial pipe to kill a warrior.

Sierra S. Adare, of Laramie, Wyoming, is an independent scholar, a documentary filmmaker for Educational Fundamentals, and a member of the Word Craft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. She has been a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University’s American Indian Program and an instructor at Haskell Indian Nations University.