Last Stand of the East 12th Street Pirates

"What I loved about this story is the theme… I’m a black individual from Trinidad and Tobago, and black communities, mixed race communities like my country, we have a way of coming together, being resilient and dealing with what we have to deal with. We’re a small nation state of marginalized persons who have rebuilt everything in the ashes left to us after the period of enslavement ending, and then colonization. In a post-colonial society, oftentimes you’re dealing with circumstances that you had nothing to do with, but you have to build a life out of it. We often fall back on building community and supporting each other, because we don’t have enough by ourselves. This short story looks at a climate change world. This community had nothing to do with the waves that have encroached upon their city, but they’re living on top of it. And in that unfair way that often happens, authorities are just letting it happen. It’s easier to just ignore the problem and let other people deal with it than to actually find a solution, so that human beings don’t have to work their way through the horror of living in a drowning city… This story looks at what devotion to capitalism as a solution to everything can create, but it also speaks specifically to issues that black society has to deal with. There’s often a reduction of our places as a threat, our people as violent – we are not human beings, we are a collective unknown to be scared of. This story is told through the eyes of someone who’s intimately familiar with her community – the bad seeds, the good seeds, the indifferent seeds – and she’s just trying to get through her day doing what needs to be done to keep the community going, which is what a lot of black women have to do. She’s just trying to get the mail delivered, and the day takes a horrible turn – because when you’re just trying to get the mail delivered in a neighbourhood that nobody cares about, and which is just an obstacle to getting the important business of the rest of society done, there will be many of these. We’re intimately familiar with what violence from authorities can look like, and how brutally unfair it can be. The story takes an unflinching look at it. It’s a mic drop of a story, and that’s why I recommend it so highly. I think so. I think it’s important that at the heart of the story is a kernel of truth. It may not be for every reader, but it’s definitely got to be a truth for the author. That’s what the great stories have. You don’t have to write a great story always – it’s actually really freaking difficult to do that! You can write very many lovely stories, relatable stories, emotive stories. And then there are actually great stories, that when you introduce them to people, everybody thinks – “ Ah !”. Even if they don’t like it. And that truth is what causes that thought. Yes! People spend their time worrying about audience reaction. Reaction is important, because you are trying to make a living, and you do want to sell. But social media has really taken a hit at the understanding that art is, at the end of the day, a lonely endeavour, and an expression of an individual. To expect it to please everyone is beyond ridiculous, right? Not every artistic endeavour is meant to be mass marketable, You can be a perfectly relatable, important voice without pleasing everyone. I think we’ve lost a lot of that. I love that short stories give people a chance to enter without having to commit. The more people invest time in something that they don’t feel connected to, the more immediately they jump to, “Everything about that was awful. No one else should indulge in it”. But with a short story, you can go, “Hey, here’s 15 minutes. Consider this” – and people are more charitable. Maybe they didn’t like it that much, but they’re not going to go out on Goodreads and make it their whole personality. Exactly, yes! Yes. I think SFF is one of the most welcoming genres. We’re such a small community, basically built out of a fandom with more respect for what the genre was trying to do than most of the mainstream world, so we got used to supporting ourselves and telling stories to each other. A great many of the authors who work in this genre came up as part of that community. It’s many different little communities sometimes. There’s the much older community of the world-con-ers, people who have been fans for a very, very long time; and then fandom is very different now, usually connected on social media, on Reddit or WattPad. It’s a skill that some people have: they can move back and forth from creating their own art, to helping others find their way forward. L. D. has been a huge voice in our community: a voice for change, for activism, for inclusion. She worked very hard, along with Suzan Palumbo – who I really wish I could have added to this list, but she does fantasy, and she’s only just doing her first space opera novella – they created the Ignyte awards, and really try to have a voice for black creation in SFF. She’s really, really important. It’s another reason I included the story. There’s also room for people who are just editors, and are really good at what they do. One of the persons who gave me a big break was Neil Clarke at Clarkesworld . He published one of my earlier short stories, and three of my novellas. All Neil does is edit, and he does a damn good job. Clarkesworld is one of the biggest SFF magazines in the Western Hemisphere (of course, we have bigger SFF magazines in China, for example, where I think the biggest one is Sci Fi World.) The best of the short fiction, honestly, is coming from these magazines. And a lot of them, due to the way that social media works, are forced to put their work up for free in order to get an audience. It boggles the mind. How many young people don’t realize you can just read short fiction for free all day long on the internet? Something by people who are doing this professionally; who are doing something that is intentional and important. So magazines perform this incredible function of giving a voice to those persons. The people who choose to take the time to both be an author, and then turn around and extend the hand to the people who are coming up behind them as editors and curators, are important people. Without them, where would the genre go? All editors are not created equal, and not every anthology or magazine is looking to be as inclusive as some of the best of them, but every single one of them forms part of the community."