Eugen M. Bacon Reviews New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color edited by Nisi Shawl

New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, Nisi Shawl, ed. (Solaris 978-1-78618-857-1, $16.99, 352pp, tp) March 2023. Cover by Yoshi Yoshitani.

Nisi Shawl’s New Suns 2: Original Specu­lative Fiction by People of Color is a showcase anthology that features some big names and which enters the scene with big shoes to fill, following as it does hot on the heels of its World Fantasy, Locus, IGNYTE, and British Fantasy award-winning predecessor. The earlier New Suns, with its effusive foreword by LeVar Burton, cast seasoned and emerging writers in cross-cultural stories of chants and altars, harvests and intergalactic odysseys. This was in the wake of similar pacesetter anthologies which featured stories by people of color, including Sheree Renée Thomas’s Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and, perhaps, earlier Afrocentric predecessors such as Ivor W. Hartmann’s AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers (2008).

Unlike those earlier anthologies, which focused on stories and writers from Africa and the dias­pora, Shawl has a broader focus in New Suns 2, wherein stories traverse global cultures, including Indian, Bangladeshi, Japanese, Indigenous Ameri­can, African American, Filipino, South American, and more. And new stories by some of the authors from the first anthology, including Alex Jennings, Kathleen Alcalá, Minsoo Kang, Jaymee Goh, Hiromi Goto and Darcie Little Badger, promise much. So, if you’re looking for an Afrocentric anthology, New Suns 2 is not it. There is a hint of the Afrocentric in Walter Mosley’s introduction, in Alex Jennings’s, and perhaps Tananarive Due’s short stories, but the grassroots lived experience of Africa is contained to Tlotlo Tsamaase’s gen­derfluid narrative ‘‘Haunted Bodies of Wombmen’’ that heartens you to engage with difference.

In the remainder of New Suns 2, Shawl uses their penchant for inclusive representation to remind you of the radiance of a promised sun. You’ll find yourself between worlds, perhaps in Geetanjali Vandemark’s ‘‘Neti-Neti’’; or touching fingertips with metafictional text that startles you with its direct readerly address, as in Minsoo Kang’s ‘Before the Glory of Their Majesties’’. You might ride shotgun along the maze of a layered story that cunningly experiments with voice, form, perspective, tech and timeline, as in Chris­topher Caldwell’s ‘‘Counting Her Petals’. You may encounter a story engine churning out legends and fables in stories-within-stories, and more.

The big question is: does New Suns 2 deliver? The foreword by versatile and renowned Walter Mosley – with its jazz metaphors that recall Toni Morrison’s powerful novel Jazz – suggests it does. But have you ever read a foreword whose author warns that what you’re about to read is no good? I did connect with Mosley, and he charmed me. Truly, what New Suns 2 does is attune you with rhythm and nature. Think of jazz and its essence of intimacy and truth, timelessness and depth, mood and sooth – whole and stimulating beats that set you free. Some stories in New Suns 2 shake you to this rhythm and you feel alive. They make you buzz and sway in tune with yourself, and they speak to your soul at its most intuition.

Daniel H. Wilson’s ‘‘Ocasta’’ touches you this way with the uniqueness of its multifaceted array, data mining, and autofocus: the voice of a ma­chine, an inner algorithm that watches, analyses and redefines itself. This story leaves you ponder­ing: when those in the future look at this past, our now, what will they see?

K. Tempest Bradford’s ‘‘The Farmer’s Wife and the Faerie Queen’’ speaks to parenting: the love and sacrifice of a mother and the wisdom of woman in a transporting tale of stories-within-stories, alluring in its dialogue. You’ll forget the flashbacks as you read, because they’re innate to the story, they’re integral to your enchantment with the characters and the text all the way.

Lean forward and encounter Alex Jennings ‘‘Good Night Gracie’’ and its hooking opener:

Sometimes you feel the rollover. You’re just gobbling freeway, and then there’s a snap, and for a moment, everything seems too real, or not real enough, and then, just like that, you’re somewhere else.

This story, as charming as it is crafty, is more than it seems: dark as hell in the worlds of Runts, Gracie and our strange yet relatable first-person narrator, Laurel. It will leave you vibrating in the entrancement of a fine, fine story.

Karin Lowachee’s ‘‘A Borrowing of Bones’’ in­vites you to consider the nanocedes of a person’s life, truly reminding you what it means to be alive yet part of dust. What if we were the sum of many, literally? One hand here, one eye there, a

spleen, a beating heart all from some place other than you: ‘‘Their menagerie so far consisted of five body parts and a dozen lives. The first acquisition had been their eyes – windows to the soul and all of that.’’

You transition in this alluring tale with each borrowed part to the intensity of friendship, or something else.

Whichever story in whatever odyssey, rein­carnation or world infested with dragons, elders, revolution, exile or gods… know this: it’s the nature of an anthology that some stories will talk to you more than others. The astonishing ones are those unexpected shimmers from authors you don’t so much know.

New Suns 2 delivers in the subjective way of an anthology – you will find something mesmeric for you. I found the secret to its jewels is hidden in those quiet authors not on my library shelf. Don’t approach the book looking for big names. Instead, settle into the reading, story by story, and a crafty rhythm, a catchy tempo will irradiate you and bebop your body and soul to the groove of text like jazz.

This review and more like it in the March 2023 issue of Locus.

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