AIs that can simulate emotions, synthetic beings more human than their creators, worlds devastated by climatic upheavals, giant ships fleeing to unknown planets: all the elements specific to postapocalyptic stories are well in place in Love in times aftera collection of nine short stories edited by Joshua Whitehead (Jonny Appleseed, Inkwell memory, 2019). However, none of these stories take us into familiar territory. And this is what makes their originality, their charm and their interest.
“While initially this project was intended to focus on dystopias, we decided, after in-depth conversations, to make it take a turn that was both queer and utopian. Which, in my view, introduced an important policy shift in our thinking about the temporal aspects of Indigenous ways of being Two-Spirit, queer, trans, and non-binary. Because, as we know, we have already survived the apocalypse; this present, here, now, is marked with the stamp of dystopia,” explains Whitehead, two-spirited and indigiqueer, in his introduction.
In addition to the inclusive writing and the use of words from different languages, including Ojibway and Cree, what is surprising are the themes explored from one story to another. The authors do not strive to emphasize technology or create anxiety-provoking atmospheres, but rather to highlight what is dear to them. At the heart of these stories set in a more or less near future, we find the attachment to Mother Earth, respect for the elders and the firm desire to recall to memory the tragic consequences of colonization on the First Nations. In addition to a history lesson, the foreign reader will more than once receive a lesson in humility.
While science fiction stories often depict selfish beings, devoid of empathy and ready to do anything to save their own skins without worrying about the planet they are about to colonize, “those” we meet in Love in times after refuse to let history repeat itself. “Don’t fool around. These are people. Not like us, but still a kind of people”, launches the narrator cries of “History of the New World”, by Adam Garnet Jones, to his white wife, who wants to force her to flee the Earth with their mixed-race daughter.
In “The Arch of the Turtle’s Back”, Jaye Simpson salutes the resilience of his people while the central character, a trans woman awaiting her operation, summarizes the unfulfilled promises of politicians: “We receive even less water at the moment, but we have been used to it for two hundred years that tap water is unfit for consumption at home. »
Combining futuristic vision, indigenous traditions and environmental reflections, the stories do not adopt a vindictive or alarmist tone, but convey an unshakable faith in human nature and an optimism to reassure the most eco-anxious among us.