The open calls are completely democratic and put up on the internet, but just because something exists on the internet doesn’t mean everyone sees it. The way anthologies like this work is that the editors solicit some well-known authors they think may be interested in writing for the theme, while they also circulate an open call for submissions with a fairly long deadline. Butler Scholar from Clarion West, as am I. There is exactly one other South Asian name in the book: Indra Das, who is also an internationally published SFF author as well as a former Octavia E. There are very few South Asian names in the book. So I started working only from that stage: selection of received works, line and copy editing, giving opinion on the cover, the final title and everything else. I have in the past been an editor at Penguin India, so I was a good match. Butler Memorial Scholarship community – which covers the Clarion and Clarion West SFF-writing workshops – for a potential replacement editor, and found me. He had to retire for personal reasons, and Alexandra sent out feelers in the Octavia E. Originally, the team had a different second editor. Letters to Tiptree won several awards, so the concept was already there when Luminescent Threads was conceived. In 2015 she edited Letters to Tiptree, the first book on a similar concept, in which the contributors wrote letters to James Tiptree Jr., which was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon. Pierce is one of the in-house editors of Twelfth Planet Press. I am the editor, as opposed to Alexandra Pierce, who is the senior editor, for Luminescent Threads, which means I did a little less for the book than she did. The results of the elections added an unprecedented vitality to the letters we received for Luminescent Threads, because now many contributors were talking about Butler’s works with respect to the world they were beginning to foresee in the near future. Through a coincidence that’s hard for me to qualify as fortunate or unfortunate – fortunate for the book but unfortunate for the rest of the world? Is that even fair of me to say? – it was also the year of the US presidential elections. The year 2017 was the 70th birth anniversary of Butler, who passed away in 2006. Luminescent Threads is a first-person account of triumph in a hostile space like this, written in several voices. People are bullied, their lives and loved ones threatened, their home addresses and other personal details found out and abused by a certain section of gatekeepers and “fans” in the genre. Even white women struggle very hard to succeed as well as actually feel safe in SFF. The reason a book like this exists is that international (largely American) science fiction and fantasy has for a long time been nearly impossible for minorities to exist in. The contributors have written first-person letters, almost like fan mail, to Octavia Butler, who was the first major African American woman writer of science fiction and fantasy. It’s closer to a concept book that champions a certain ideology. It’s an anthology, but not of scholarly or critical articles. Butler has been edited by Alexandra Pierce and me, and published by the Australian feminist science-fiction-and-fantasy publisher Twelfth Planet Press. Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Please tell us about Luminescent Threads, the book of non-fiction on Octavia Butler’s impact that you have co-edited, and which has been nominated for the Hugo Award. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and style. Mondal corresponded with Omair Ahmad, writing for The Wire, about the book, the nomination, the rise of racist and exclusionary movements, the impact of Butler – a pioneer in speculative fiction who discussed race and “otherness” – on the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) genre and South Asian SFF, among a variety of other issues. Mimi Mondal was one of the two editors of the collection, and with this book became the first Indian to be nominated for the award. Butler, a book of non-fiction essays addressed to the first major African American woman writer of science fiction, has been nominated for a Hugo Award, the highest awards for science-fiction and fantasy writing. Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E.
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