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language: English
country: Papua New Guinea
year: 2022
form: short fiction
genre(s): science fiction, fantasy
dates read: 31.7.22-6.8.22
World Beyond: An Anthology of Papua New Guinean Speculative Fiction, edited by Kirstin McGavin, was a fun and pretty quick read. it includes nine stories by Indigenous writers from PNG, from a variety of backgrounds and ages (Augustine Minimbi is a second-year university student and Jeremy Hau’ofa Mogi is retired).
as is so often the case with mixed anthologies, the execution of the stories was a bit of a mixed bag. my favorites were Ruth-Ann Kwimberi’s “Seeking Eden” (from which the anthology takes its title), which I would gladly read a whole novel building from, and Kirsten McGavin’s “The Other Side of DeBarge” (for all that it was partly doing a pretty conventional space found family (read: coworkers) thing), but even if the execution was a little rough I enjoyed most of the others as well, and the premises were great. “Seeking Eden” is set in a postapocalyptic world and follows a trio of young “Seekers” as they track down a supernatural threat to their carefully maintained community and find more than they bargain for. in “The Other Side of DeBarge”, a somewhat disreputable space captain helps a member of her crew retrieve a stolen crystal that allows her to maintain her corporeal existence.
in part I think the issue with several of them was pacing: they had to rush in order to fit the short story form. Deborah Salle’s “The Sago Pill” was a cool story about space medicine but the corporate espionage plot felt rushed; Vanessa Gordon’s “Ravalian”, where a young woman has to travel back in time to retrieve a magical artifact that will save the ocean environment of her home but I think it needed some more space for its emotional impact to be fully effective (loved the last few sentences, though!); Martha Schulze’s “A Dance of Stars and Shadows”, where an exiled princess is called home to fight a magical threat to all life on her home island, felt like an abridged version of something meant to be a novel, especially with its abrupt ending. Augustine Minimbi’s “Tomait, Meet Malipu” was a really cool premise (university student travels back in time and prevents the assassination of Malipu Balakau in 1989) but similarly felt like it had been abridged from something meant to be longer.
there were a few I didn’t love, mostly for their being either too heterosexual or too obviously moralizing, but overall I had fun and would recommend this as a reading experience.
moods: adventurous, hopeful