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Books & Authors, Diverse Voices

Speculative Fiction by Indigenous Authors

Speculative fiction is a catch-all term that can include science fiction, fantasy and horror--basically any story with an imaginative setting with fantastical, supernatural or technological elements that don’t exist in our real world.

Throughout history and still today, mainstream popular culture often depicts Native characters as stereotypical historical figures. These books by Indigenous authors imagine new worlds for Native culture to thrive.

 

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
Xiala, a disgraced Teek who can calm waters or cause madness with her song, arrives and disrupts the holy city of Tova during the winter solstice.

Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger
Elatsoe lives in this slightly stranger America. She can raise the ghosts of dead animals, a skill passed down through generations of her Lipan Apache family. Her beloved cousin has just been murdered, in a town that wants no prying eyes. But she is going to do more than pry. The picture-perfect facade of Willowbee masks gruesome secrets, and she will rely on her wits, skills, and friends to tear off the mask and protect her family.

Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline
A story inspired by the Canadian Métis legend of the Rogarou finds a woman reconnecting with her heritage when her missing husband reappears in the form of a charismatic preacher who does not recognize her.

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
A tale set in a world of reversing evolution and a growing police state follows pregnant thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, who investigates her biological family while awaiting the birth of a child who may emerge as a member of a primitive human species.

Girl Called Echo. Volume 1, Pemmican Wars by Katherena Vermette
Echo Desjardins, a 13 year-old Metis girl, is struggling with her feelings of loneliness while attending a new school and living with a new foster family. Then an ordinary day in Mr. Bee's history class turns extraordinary and Echo's life will never be the same. During Mr. Bee's lecture, Echo finds herself transported to another time and place--a bison hunt on the Saskatchewan prairie--and back again to the present.

Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction by Joshua Whitehead (editor)
This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous) writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism's histories.

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
A daring post-apocalyptic novel that imagines a small community on the precipice of winter without power or communication where leaders must grapple with control, restore order, and save their people from a grave fate.

Moonshot. Volume 1: The Indigenous Comics Collection by Various authors
This collection of folklore from a powerhouse team of Native authors, including Buffy Sainte-Marie and Richard Van Camp, will wow readers with traditional and futuristic tales based on tribal-specific cultural teachings. Stories are central to Indigenous people, and reflecting their varied tribal differences, the entries in this collection vary as well. Storytellers sought permission from their elders to share these in their comic form.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
Four American Indian men from the Blackfeet Nation, who were childhood friends, find themselves in a desperate struggle for their lives, against an entity that wants to exact revenge upon them for what they did during an elk hunt ten years earlier by killing them, their families, and friends.

Trickster : Native American Tales : A Graphic Collection. by Various
This anthology collects over twenty trickster stories, in graphic novel format, from various Native American traditions, including tales about coyotes, rabbits, ravens, and other crafty creatures and their mischievous activities.

 

 

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