Where Do Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction Fit in a Language Arts Program for Adolescents?
In the by few years, as I've been working on my own book almost applied science, I've been reading books about technology—critiques of Silicon Valley, of internet culture—and wondering: where are all the people of color? Sure, Silicon Valley is known as the domicile of the tech bro—a white man, probably wearing a Patagonia jacket and a pair of Allbirds. But nonetheless. People all around the world, of all races, apply the cyberspace every 24-hour interval, utilize social media every day—where are these stories virtually applied science?
I was thinking about other questions, too: What is the feel of a adult female of color in a globe of tech bros? How does the algorithm try to standardize united states as people—to propose that at that place's 1 way to be? How does it experience to be a person who doesn't fit into the algorithm?
These are some of the questions I grappled with in writing my debut novel, Happy for Y'all, which follows half-Japanese one-half-Jewish Evelyn Kominsky Kumamoto equally she leaves a PhD program in philosophy to join the tertiary-near-popular internet company, where her squad is developing an app that considerately measures user happiness. Even every bit she tries to convince herself that the project is worthwhile—that she is doing good—she confronts the limitations of technology in agreement the nuances of race and cultural context, and, more mostly, the algorithm's full general button to make all of us arrange to a unmarried standard of success and of happiness.
For this reading listing, I wanted to include books that middle people of color in stories about contemporary engineering, every bit well as books that centre people of color in considering how the manner we relate to technology could be different in the future. I've besides included two books of poesy that I've found securely impactful, works that defamiliarize our gimmicky technologies, using programming code and Google Translate to new and surprising linguistic ends. Spanning past, present, and future, these books prompt us to consider the ways technology perpetuates racial biases and injustices—and how we might liberate ourselves from its insidious control.
Border Case past YZ Chin
Edge Case is narrated by Edwina, the sole female employee at a AInstein, a New York Metropolis startup that is developing a joke-telling robot. She is likewise an immigrant from Malaysia with a work visa that will soon expire. When the novel opens, Edwina's husband—also a Malaysian immigrant, also working in tech, and also on a work visa (that is similarly most to expire)—has gone missing, and the novel follows Edwina as she tries to track her husband downward and cope with the possible dissolution of their matrimony while simultaneously trying to figure out how to get a green card before she has to either move back to Malaysia or remain, undocumented, in the United States.
Days of Distraction by Alexandra Chang
This funny, deeply-thoughtful novel is narrated by Alexandra, a 25-year-old Chinese American writer who —at the novel's start—works equally a reporter for a prestigious tech publication in San Francisco. Every bit she grapples with her relationship with her white beau, J., she simultaneously grapples with her predominantly white newsroom and reporting on the predominantly white companies of Silicon Valley. The novel's fragmentary narrative covers microagressions at the workplace, pay disparities, interracial relationships, and histories of anti-Asian discrimination, forming a kind of collage of idea that is e'er grounded in the narrator's specific longing to find her place in the world.
Soft Scientific discipline past Franny Choi
This collection of poems expresses what information technology feels like to exist an Asian American woman—to be objectified, to be fetishized—both in real life and in the virtual world. Choi writes about technology and incorporates technology itself into her poetry every bit a formal device; in "The Cyborg Wants to Make Sure She Heard You Right," for example, she runs a series of tweets that were directed at her through Google Interpret, showing the startling persistence of Orientalizing linguistic communication fifty-fifty as it moves through multiple rounds of translation. Some other poem inhabits the voiceless android Kyoko from Ex Machina, writing back to the moving picture'southward techno-Orientalized vision of the future and insisting on an Asian woman's right to speak and to be heard.
Travesty Generator by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
In Travesty Generator, Bertram uses computer code and programming to create verse that responds to the hidden racial biases of coding, algorithms, and digital engineering science and to offer new narratives for the relationship betwixt Black lives and technology. Equally Bertram writes in the afterword:
"I utilise codes and algorithms in an attempt [to] create piece of work that reconfigures and challenges oppressive narratives for Black people and to imagine new ones."
Bertram uses Python, JavaScript, and Perl to produce poems about anti-Black violence, Harriet Tubman, codeswitching, and being a person of colour in a zombie apocalypse. The book interrogates the human relationship between race, technology, and narrative, producing iterative permutations that are sometimes beautiful, sometimes shocking, and always haunting and alive.
High Aztech by Ernest Hogan
Originally published by Tor in 1992, this cult scientific discipline fiction novel was reissued by Strange Particle Press in 2016. It's 2045, and the journalist Xólotl Zapata is living in Tenochtitlán, formerly known every bit Mexico City. The U.S. is in decline while Africa and Latin America are ascendant centers of technology. The story follows Xólotl after he is infected with a highly-contagious virus that can download beliefs into the homo brain; it can instill any kind of behavior, but in Xólotl'southward case, it has made him into a carrier for converting everyone he meets to the Aztec religion. Antic and fast-moving, filled with Castilian, Spanglish, and Nahuatl, the novel upends the typical U.S.-focus of scientific discipline fiction and technology-driven narratives, offering a vision of a decolonized technological future.
The Old Migrate by Namwali Serpell
Built on an ballsy calibration, The Former Migrate weaves together the stories of three Zambian families (Black, white, and Brown), spanning the course of more than a century (1903 to the nigh time to come) and mingling multiple genres (historical fiction, surrealism, fantasy, science fiction). The final section considers an array of technologies, both real and speculative: nanorobots and microdrones, gene-editing and CRISPR, and devices called Digit-All Beads that are implanted in users' hands and work similarly to smartphones (with similar problems of surveillance). Serpell traces the connexion between by colonialism and present-day authorities control, looking toward a time to come when engineering no longer forces people to submit, but allows them to revolt.
Table salt Fish Girl past Larissa Lai
Moving betwixt xixth-century China and the virtually-time to come Pacific Northwest, Salt Fish Girl centers on two female characters: Nu Wa, who escapes her Chinese village subsequently an arranged marriage goes awry, and the teenage Miranda, who lives in the corporate-controlled city of Serendipity on the coast of what used to be Canada in 2044. Dissolving the borders between myth and science fiction, Lai creates a mash-up of genetically-engineered beings, shape-shifting, creation stories, reincarnation, virtual reality, and a mysterious sickness called the Dreaming Disease, whose sufferers ultimately voluntarily walk into the sea and drown themselves. Similar Serpell, Lai draws a connection between by and futurity, destabilizing the primacy of Western science and technology. The book is not an easy read; rather, it is poetic, mystical, and sometimes confounding, a kind of fever dream of the body, feminism, and queer intimacy. Its narrative chaos and sensory overwhelm are part of its beauty.
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Source: https://electricliterature.com/7-books-about-people-of-color-and-technology/
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