Sputnik’s Children

Terri Favro follows up her award-winning novella The Proxy Bride with Sputnik’s Children, a full-length debut mixing comic book science fiction with reflections of growing up during the atomic age at the height of the Cold War.

Comic book creator Debbie Reynolds Biondi finally decides to tell the origin of Sputnik Chick—a character reminiscent of Flash Gordon—after 25 years of calling her “The Girl with No Past.” But there’s a slight catch: Debbie can’t just make up the story of Sputnik Chick considering a lot of it actually happened to her. Debbie grew up in Atomic Mean Time, an alternate reality where a nuclear corporation rules over everything and the Cold War is much hotter. With World War III looming and the bomb about to be dropped on her town, Debbie is recruited by time travellers to collapse the timeline and transition humanity to current reality—all while losing everyone she loves in the process.

Favro’s time-travelling comic book adventure narrative is fast-paced and entertaining, especially in moments featuring alternate versions of historic events or celebrity biographies. However, while the premise and setting are imaginative, together they create a narrative suffering from the same duelling identity as its main character. The story slows down considerably when it switches to its coming-of-age in a small town narrative, resulting in the mission of the story unable to reach climax until it feels too late.

At least the time spent getting to know Debbie’s friends and neighbours in Shipman’s Corners (a stand-in for St. Catharines, Ont.) makes the collapse of the timeline much more heart-wrenching. It’s also interesting to see who remains from the previous timeline. Even more intriguing: do they remember Atomic Mean Time? We won’t spoil it for you.

CHELSEA VOWEL, MOLLY SWAIN, AND SOME DALEKS AT COMICCON | Photo courtesy Métis in Space

Métis in Space is a hilariously smart take down of Indigenous stereotypes in popular science-fiction

LAST SUMMER, friends Molly Swain and Chelsea Vowel were having a rough time, and looking for an excuse to spend more time together. Swain and Vowel, who are both Métis and live in Montreal, came up with a solution to fix their woes: create a podcast where they could “nerd out,” drink red wine, and talk about science fiction.

Swain and Vowel created Métis in Space, a bi-weekly podcast that reviews and critiques movies and television featuring Indigenous tropes and themes. It took the friends three days to come up with the podcast, record their first episode, and upload it to SoundCloud.

“When Molly and I hang out, we’re hilarious. I thought that the rest of the world should hear that,” says Vowel. “We expected our entire audience to be our moms, and then our moms were not interested.”

Indian and Cowboy, an independent network that creates, produces, and publishes Indigenous media projects across multiple platforms, hosts Métis in Space. Swain says the network is a “fabulous, fabulous idea” in how it allows Indigenous people to build relationships and communicate with each other in new ways.

With episodes gaining thousands of listens on Indian and Cowboy, SoundCloud, and iTunes, Métis in Space frankly, and often hilariously, analyzes shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, and Supernatural, picking out common Indigenous representations that surface in mainstream pop culture. Vowel, who has been an avid fan of sci-fi since she was young, says she knew the tropes had always been there.

Recording Métis in Space, however, forces the friends to actively look for stereotypes. They’ve found that in science fiction, Indigenous people are often associated with mystic flutes and drum music, or the ability to turn into an animal.

Métis in Space recognizes that sci-fi creators are predominantly white men, who “explore concepts and anxieties related to colonialism in order to reassure themselves,” Swain says. Vowel adds she can’t “unsee” a pattern in science fiction that is often representative of colonial fears: the storylines often feature Indigenous people and societies who are “wiped out” or about to be erased.

“People don’t expect Indigenous people to be interested in the future,” Swain says. “That’s partially because nobody expects Indigenous people to have a future, which is what colonialism is.”

According to the hosts, Métis in Space listeners cite the “Ask a môniyâw (white man)” segment as their favourite part of the podcast, in which Swain and Vowel ask a stereotypical “white man” a question. Vowel’s husband, to his chagrin, participates in the segment by playing the môniyâw. After uploading episodes to SoundCloud, Métis in Space started receiving earnest requests from several men who wanted to be the guest môniyâw.

Métis in Space also actively confronts sci-fi creators. In Episode 5, they recorded a live-report podcast from the 2014 Montreal Comiccon. Knowing that Indigenous people are so often a part of science fiction, Swain and Vowel expected guests at the pop-culture fan convention to have some knowledge of Indigenous history, but they were surprised to find that wasn’t case. On top of that, there were vendors selling products with racist or inaccurate portrayals of Indigenous people.

“They had no consciousness. It was completely divorced from the fact that there are real Indigenous people out there,” Swain says. “It wasn’t only that we were confronting them about their lack of knowledge, but I think to a certain extent, we were almost confronting them with our existence.”

Despite the problems in science fiction, Swain and Vowel are still huge fans of the genre. For the second season, the hosts plan to uncover new ground by exploring what an Indigenous future look like 300 years from now.

“I think science fiction is almost inherently Indigenous because it is so much about world building and future building and telling stories in a way that points to where we want to go, or explores questions of, if this were to happen, how would we deal with it?” Swain says. “We’re going to reclaim ourselves from science fiction in order to create science fiction.”

Photos by Jim Tinios

Toronto author J.M. Frey gives sci-fi a jolt of much-needed diversity

It’s not every day you read a science-fiction novel that features a polyamorous relationship, with one of its partners being a blue-skinned, bat-wing-eared, short- snouted alien, and a plot that involves time travel, a murder mystery and a near-future look at sexuality, bigotry, immigration and gender politics.

Welcome to Triptych, and the science-fiction and fantasy worlds of Toronto author J.M. Frey.

Frey doesn’t write the kind of sci-fi or fantasy you find in Star Wars. She writes the kind of genre fiction we need more of: progressive, representative and accepting, like her critically acclaimed Lambda Literary Award–nominated debut novel Triptych. The novel is a story of acceptance and hope about two humans (Basil and Gwen) who take in a polyamorous alien refugee (Kalp), come to accept Kalp’s way of life, and eventually participate in it to their betterment.

Triptych reflects Frey’s passionate belief that genre fiction can help us live better. “Science fiction and fantasy writers have the great privilege to be able to be on the front line of the battleground. It’s always been the frontier of the new,” she says. “Science fiction and fantasy can change the world.”

Of course, changing the world happens one person at a time, and Frey discovered sci-fi’s power to do that firsthand when she was eleven year old. When a crush on young actor Wil Wheaton led her to reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Frey found a deep love for Gene Roddenberry’s accepting universe, and a feeling that she was understood. “What I really liked about The Next Generation was that they really explored alternate cultures, societies, and what it means to be different,” she says. “As a kid in rural Ontario who felt really different from everybody else, that really appealed.”

Star Trek’s influence led directly to Frey becoming, as she calls herself, a “professional” geek and a published author. It also left a lasting impression on her work. As someone who continues to feel underrepresented in fiction­—because, as Frey explains, “I walk with a cane, I’m going blind, going deaf, and I’m queer”—much of her playful revisionist and meta stories are propelled by questions of representation: “Where’s the gap? What’s missing? Whose perspective has this story not been told from yet?”

“Women,” is often the answer, and works like her novella The Dark Side of the Glass and the short-story anthology Hero is a Four Letter Word tackle female empowerment and the problematic male attitudes that can be found in sci-fi, fantasy and its fans.

Attitudes Frey’s very familiar with. It’s no accident she uses a gender-neutral pen name. Several years ago when she began seriously pursuing writing, she overheard two men talking in the science-fiction section of a Chapters bookstore. She recounts that “one of them pulled a book out, turned over to the back, read it and said ‘Oh my god, this sounds amazing. Dude, read this! Doesn’t it sound great? I wonder who it’s by… Oh, it’s by a chick. Never mind.’ And he put it back on the shelf.” That was the day she became J.M. Frey.

It’s a testament to Frey’s abilities as a writer that despite the issues she tackles, her writing doesn’t feel political or read like an after-school special. “I try to write books that look like the world I live in. I don’t set out to write issue books.” After a beat, she adds: “But the issues are there because they’re there in real life.”

When asked what she hopes her work will achieve, Frey answers in metaphor. “If you think of a pond and throw a pebble in the pond, it ripples. But then the surface of the pond goes still and you go back to being the person you were when you finished reading the book,” she says. “But that pebble is still there. It’s still at the bottom of the pond. That’s what I want to do. I want to change the world. I want to just drop a lot of pebbles in a lot of ponds.” Gene Roddenberry would be proud.

There are two significant things to note about District 9. First, the hypermodern you-are-there visual style, clearly influenced by CNN, reality TV, embedded reporting, and the other techniques that have characterized the “War on Terror” aesthetic. This same kind of shaky camera work, complete with documentary-style zoom lenses, harsh lighting, and choppy focus-pulling, was the hallmark of another recent grim science-fiction series and clear 9/11 fable, Battlestar Galactica.

The second and more important thing about this movie is its setting and context, in Johannesburg, South Africa. The director, Neill Blomkamp, has adapted this feature from a short film he made, Alive in Joburg, about alien refugees living in deplorable conditions in refugee camps and shantytowns around South Africa’s largest city. The racial overtones at work here are pretty obvious (science fiction has been making hay out of racial metaphors since the beginning) but the specific location here—post-apartheid South Africa; a continent struggling to cope with massive flows of migrants, within and across borders; booming exurban slums—is particularly contemporary. (Klaatu and Gort clambering out of their spaceship onto the White House lawn this ain’t.) In the original short film, there’s an explicit political connection to the apartheid government and the racial divides that defined the country for decades. Can that message survive the transition to a mainstream feature co-financed by Sony/Tristar? Even if the overt political message is diluted, there’s still an implicit one in setting this story in Johannesburg, away from obvious trappings of Western political, economic, cultural and military domination. In a culture where non-westerners are usually depicted as either helpless, expendable, irrelevant, villainous, or hopelessly sentimentalized, this flips the perspective and makes them the centre of the action. That’s not an insignificant achievement for a big Hollywood science-fiction movie.