Five Views of the Planet Tartarus

"So first off, I had to include something by Rachael. She wrote my favourite short story last year, which was The Sound of Children Screaming . I had the great honour of being nominated alongside her, and then she did me the great honour of reading my speech when I could not be there to collect; so in addition to being an incredibly talented writer and a teacher, she has been a lovely person to me. I didn’t pick the story because of that! – I just wanted to give you an idea of who she is. I picked the story because it socks you in the eye in 600 words. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a science fiction story that short, and I wanted people to understand that flash fiction is also an area in which incredibly talented people are working – like Mari Ness, and Nino Cipri, who can produce flash stories that are just as effective as an entire novel. They just live in your head: for days after, you’re like: “… Huh.” You’re reading your book at night: “…Huh.” You’re drinking your tea at the cafe two days later, and your friend is telling you about what her husband did, and it’s still playing on repeat in your head. “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” is… I wouldn’t want to give away too much, because it’s just 600 words, and those 600 words matter, and I would love for people to just absorb it the way I absorbed it! It’s about the tremendous heartlessness of Empire, and the tiny, sometimes horrible mercies that we have to bestow upon ourselves and others when you are truly grist for the mill, a cog in the machine. Her story The Sound of Children Screaming is about gun culture and the scourge of school shootings, and she’s a teacher, so she writes the truth of being somebody in the path of this. And it’s the same thing with this story: the understanding that many countries right now are in the path of an uncaring, brutal machine that demands submission to inhumane policies. It doesn’t fool you with the idea that revolutions just happen without a tremendous cost to persons, whether they are ready to pay it or not. Yes, I love that it’s in a circle. My favourite short stories tend to go in a beautiful circle: you’re back at the beginning, and you understand what you read at the beginning finally. The same thing happened in Performance Review : you finally understand why the protagonist’s boss had forgotten about his dog, and why he’s a completely different person. And with Tartarus , when you read the first set up, you think, “How unimaginably cruel”… And then at the end of it, you think, “Good God , how unim aginably cruel”. The last line really is the sinker. I think just this… I’ve been in this business for over 20 years now, and when I started, there weren’t any other Trinidadians around, and very few other Caribbean people. Nalo Hopkinson was a tremendous inspiration to me; I found Midnight Robber in that same library that I found Best Science Fiction of the Year , and those were my two introductions to who I was going to be. I read the first and I thought, I’m going to be a writer. And then I read Midnight Robber, and I said, “Wait – you mean I can write science fiction about me ?” I have loved watching us grow up about inclusion in SFF. It’s still struggling with being less of an unwelcoming place for people like me; still struggling with being representational as opposed to simply tokenizing; still struggling very much with the reality that you’re allowed to be a failure or to be mediocre unless you’re a person of colour, in which case your sales results stand for everybody who looks like you, and therefore no one else gets another chance. But there has been a lot of positive change in a relatively short space of time. So I am very, very happy to be a Trinbagonian achieving this award, because everything I’ve written has been about my people, speaking to what I believe my culture values. We’ve got our problems like everybody else; we’ve got our bad seeds and our issues. Nobody is free of those. But I do think there is something uniquely joyous about my people, uniquely funny, uniquely loving. We’ve learned how to survive the brutalities, the negligence, and the pure incompetence that leads us; and we’ve done that through community and joy and song and ancestorship, and through traditions, and showing each other love. I think everybody everywhere loves the place that they come from, but few of us get the chance to tell other people. So I’ve been very blessed in that way. I have been blessed to see Trinidadians come into SFF, and begin to achieve big things – Suzan Palumbo, Shari Paul, Tobias Buckell, Nalo Hopkinson, Karen Lord: all of these persons have laid down foundations for everybody else to walk on, and we’re all busy trying to reach back and pull people up. It’s good to see the industry changing so that they can make space for these people, and the place that started this was SFF magazines, and the short fiction community. They opened their doors to people like me long before the publishing world was willing to give you a book deal, or Hollywood was willing to give you a movie. I would not be here today if it were not for the wonderful place that I came from – the country, the education system, the people, the culture – or for the people that welcomed me into their own family, the thing that I love so much: the SFF community. Just a huge thank you to all of them. I hope people support our short fiction community going forward. It is in danger of dying out because people don’t know it’s there, and they’re searching all over the internet for something that’s staring them right in the face: free, professional, beautiful, short work that has something to say, that is artistically true and authentic, and that just wants you to think about it. The Murderbot Series – Martha Wells Second Variety – Philip K. Dick Douen – Suzan Palumbo Midnight Robber – Nalo Hopkinson Umbernight – Carolyn Ives Gilman When We Were Starless – Simone Heller Airbody – Sameem Siddiqui Axiom of Dreams – Arula Ratnakar Light Speed is Not a Speed – Andy Dudak Wild Meat – Shari Paul Sour Milk Girls – Erin Roberts Rage / The Long Walk / The Mist – Stephen King Kushtuka – Mathilda Zeller The Sound of Children Screaming – Rachel K. Jones Navajos Don’t Wear Elk Teeth – Conley Lyons The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society – T. Kingfisher Ivy, Angelica, Bay – C.L. Polk The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington – Phenderson Djèlí Clark Sonny Liston Takes The Fall – Elizabeth Bear Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance – Tobias Buckell Open House on Haunted Hill – John Wiswell"