Indigenous Futurisms in Tobias Buckell’s Xenowealth Series
Howard, Jacinth. "Indigenous Futurisms in Tobias Buckell’s Xenowealth Series."[1][2] 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]
[...C]onsidering 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. [...] 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). [...] The ship which brings the Nanagadans to this realization, carries ammunition and is outfitted with cultural representation on the sails of “Chalchihuitlicue the Jade Skirt Goddess, she who was the water” (239) demonstrating Azteca ownership. Contrary to popular belief, technology and indigenous people are inextricably linked. In Sly Mongoose when one character complains that lives were weighed against “fuel and technology,” Pepper points out that “civilizations live and die by power and technology” (215). [...]
Beyond knowing about an artefact, preservationists [in the stories] emphasise the necessity of knowing the mechanisms behind devices. They manage to locate machinery thought to have been destroyed by the Pulse and revive them (127). This spirited exploration reveal that preservationists have the joint function of being historians who discover the past and inventors who build the future. It is a fitting reminder that before colonialism, these indigenous peoples were inventing systems and building empires by their own scientific method. (Howard pp. 77-88)
Students of Afrofuturism[8] should find this essay a useful extension of their area; those interested in Steampunk should find it an instructive riff on that subgenre.
RDE, finishing, 18Oct.21
