Indigenous Futurisms in Tobias Buckell’s Xenowealth Series

Howard, Jacinth. "Indigenous Futurisms in Tobias Buckell’s Xenowealth Series."[1][2] SYMPOSIUM: Symposium: Proceedings of the SFRA 2019 Conference, Day 2, June 22, 2019. Caribbean SF and Nalo Hopkinson. Conveniently printed SFRA Review #330 (Fall 2019): pp. 75-81.[3]

Deals with Crystal Rain,[4] Ragamuffin,[5] and Sly Mongoose[6][7]

Secondly, considering Indigenous Futurism, it is implied that history is an efficacious route to access technology. The other main group of indigenous people throughout the stories is the Aztecas. The Aztecas’ culture is “borrowed from a lost culture on distant Earth” (Sly Mongoose 14) based on the ancient Aztec civilization. According to archaeologists Geoffrey Conrad and Arthur Demarest, within the last five hundred years along with the Incas, the Aztecs were one of two great powers of the Americas. Often, discourse on the Aztecs is reserved for fora involving pre-Columbian and post-classic conquest history. Yet in Crystal Rain, the people group is used as an anachronistic tool to develop and discover technology.

On [the planet] Nanagada, hundreds of years prior to Crystal Rain, during the war, an electromagnetic Pulse caused everything with a microchip in it to die (Crystal Rain 132). As a result, much of the technology developed among Nanagadans is from the Victorian era. Meanwhile, the Aztecas retain their traditional weapons such as atlatl and spears [...]. Nevertheless, the Aztecas are also responsible for constructing more developed machinery such as Azteca airships (Crystal Rain 7) and sail powered ships (237). (Howard p. 77)

RDE, finishing, 18Oct.21