Reaching New Orbits with Feminist Speculative Writing by Angela Acosta
By Angela Acosta, written September 2024
The worlds of feminist speculative fiction and poetry are vast. They are filled with spacefaring humans creating homes on new planets, Earth dwellers seeking respite from the sun, ferocious river-born monsters, and high fantasy cities full of spells and runes. You may have read stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, or CJ Cherryh that made you rethink what you thought you knew about science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Works by these writers offer alternate histories, examine human nature alongside aliens, and ask their readers tough questions. Feminist speculative fiction decenters whiteness and dismantles colonialism. It walks away from the Omelas to envision more just queer, trans, crip, Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian futures.
When I joined the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) in early 2022, I was in awe of the ecosystem of speculative poets, journals, and presses that awaited me. Since then, I have published my work in over 30 speculative literary magazines and worked with small presses to publish two Elgin nominated collections, Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023). Before then, I had only published a handful of nongenre poems and often got lost in the maze of poetry contests, vanity publishers, and beautiful literary magazines for which my work was simply not a good fit. I had read plenty of science fiction novels, YA dystopias, and literary classics, but I had yet to experience SciFaiku, experimental work, and narrative speculative poems.
I got my start as a speculative poet publishing “The Optics of Space Travel” in Eye to the Telescope. This piece, like much of my speculative writing, grapples with questions of cultural erasure, multilingualism, and family legacies:
My eyes are the bridge between worlds and generations,
when languages and cultures have been assimilated out of me.
I can still see the road ahead, of stories yet to be told,
onward towards Mars and the deceleration of the universe.
Feminist speculative literature is multilingual and multicultural, held steady with the promise that the cultures and languages of Earth will be spoken and celebrated in the future. As a child, I yearned to speak Spanish and to know the recipes and cultural traditions of my Mexican ancestors. Though I didn’t learn Spanish from my family, the language in all its linguistic diversity has become a part of who I am. I have grown from this cosmovisión, a worldview amplified by the many cultures where Spanish and indigenous languages of the Américas are spoken. The literature of Abya Yala, a Kuna word for the misnomer that is Latin America, is full of myths like El Dorado and La Malinche, fantastic journeys and lost homelands, and the recuperation of indigenous cultures and voices. For those who speak Spanish, I recommend Rodrigo Bastidas Pérez’s anthology El tercer mundo después del sol, a collection of stories from across Abya Yala that bring together techno futurism, folklore, horror, and many other speculative subgenres.
My science fiction poetry seeks to envision Latine characters thriving in worlds beyond Earth. I write in English and Spanish about a city built over the Chicxulub crater in “Paradise of the Abyss,” cook tamales with Martian cheese in “Tamales on Mars,” find a new home for the delightfully resilient axolotl in “Rewilding the Axolotl” (Star*Line vol. 47, no. 2), and celebrate a quinceañera (15th birthday celebration) en route to a new galaxy in “Andromeda’s First Quinceañera” (Space and Time issue 142). My bilingual collection A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness contains poems that envision the dailiness of human emotions and experiences in settings beyond Earth, from parties onboard a spaceship to creatures gathered around a campfire listening to filk music (sci-fi folk music). I wrote the collection to capture the wonder and possibility of Latine futures, even when our names and histories cannot be found on star charts.
Recent fiction by Valerie Valdes and Becky Chambers has shown me that space can be for every human and alien species. Their books depict a future where people of all backgrounds and abilities can make their way to crowded space stations and settle on exoplanets without destroying the local flora and fauna. Theirs is a future of accessibility and acceptance of ourselves and our pasts, a place full of found families, multispecies communities, and heartfelt laughter.
For those entering the world of speculative fiction, there are many journals accepting feminist work. The Sprawl Mag, edited by Mahaila Smith and Libby Graham, is a feminist speculative journal “focused on publishing perspectives that have historically been left out of canonical sci-fi and fantasy.” Radon Journal publishes antifascist and anarchist poetry and prose, including science fiction, transhumanism, and dystopia. Most importantly, these journals offer excellent feedback and support their contributors. Other venues for speculative work that I enjoy reading and writing for are Solarpunk Magazine, Heartlines Spec, If There’s Anyone Left, Utopia Science Fiction, and Shoreline of Infinity. Speculative writers of color should consider submitting to FIYAH (Black writers of the African diaspora) and Anathema (on hiatus, planning to return in 2025). For those with poetry manuscripts ready for submission, Interstellar Flight Press is a mainstay of the genre, Aqueduct Press publishes feminist science fiction, Prismatica is for LGBTQ+ writers, and I have personally enjoyed working with the editorial team at Red Ogre Review.
When I first watched the Diné science fiction short film “Sixth World,” written and directed by Nanobah Becker, I was excited to see Diné astronauts tackling the challenges of a mission to Mars. These feminist, anticolonial futures are not without the conflicts of present-day society but offer new perspectives on age-old challenges. Feminist speculative futures are not necessarily utopian, nor do they portray an amalgamation of existing human cultures. They are as specific to the cultures and peoples they depict as they are vast, always venturing for the journey through space and time to be inclusive and accessible.
Angela Acosta, PhD (she/her), is a bilingual Mexican American poet and Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. She is a 2022 Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Writers finalist, 2022 Somos en Escrito Extra-Fiction Contest honorable mention, and Utopia Award nominee. Her Rhysling nominated poetry has appeared in Heartlines Spec, Shoreline of Infinity, Apparition Lit, Radon Journal, and Space & Time. She is author of the Elgin nominated poetry collections Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023).
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