“There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” –Octavia Butler

Editor Nisi Shawl chose this quote as the epigraph for New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color as both a promise and reminder. The pages of this anthology are filled not only with worlds many of us have never seen before but also with worlds that have been deliberately buried by the old guard of speculative fiction, lest that old guard lose its relevance and be abandoned on a barren rock as a more innovative, talented, and diverse crew leads readers into a spectacular universe of story.

Quite frankly, the old guard has it coming. Out there, giving Retrospective Hugos to racists and allowing their presenters to mispronounce the names of award winners when there were guides right there and when the show was prerecorded and he had a chance to fix it but was too blasé and lazy to do it and the organizers didn’t make him. And then airing the bit where the same dude rhapsodized about another gross racist who no longer has an award named after him because he’s a… wait for it… gross racist.

So many people are clamoring for this white, cis, het, beardy dude to finish his Eurocentric, Middle Ages analog, incest fest… and personally, I don’t see the attraction, but you like what you like and you do you. Even if that is your bag, though, have you considered, instead of screaming into the void while you wait, perhaps reading something else? If you’re not sure where to start, might I recommend a short story anthology that will allow you to sample the work of several authors?

Might I recommend New Suns specifically because the stories in it are really very good (I liked or loved 13/16, which is a stellar percentage, and only ended up skipping or DNFing 2, which is a very tiny percentage). In addition, it will present you with an embarrassing wealth of riches: new versions of old stories, stories set in universes you’ve never even considered, traditions so ancient you’ll have difficulty grasping and holding on to them, and language so beautiful it will make you cry?

Every one of the authors presented in this anthology is an author of color. Some you will have heard of (Darcie Little Badger, Rebecca Roanhorse, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Chinelo Onwulu, Minsoo Kang), and some will be invariably new to you, but that’s another fantastic feature of an anthology: new material by your favorites and an introduction to writers all in the same book.

Every one of the stories herein truly is a world unto itself, no more than 30 pages or so and yet somehow, they’re big enough to crawl into, walk around in, and explore. They’re alive in a way that allows you to interact, ask questions, be educated, and understand – at least a little bit – where it came from and how it got here.

And if you don’t know more about the people and places and legends and heartbeats that populate these short works when you surface, if you don’t immediately go to your favorite bookshop and buy at least three or four novels or novellas or other anthologies well, then, I can’t help you.

The universe is big. Really, really big. Which means the universe of books is also really, really big. Why limit yourself to one option when there are so many good ones. I’m sitting in my bedroom writing this, a space that contains a fraction of my physical book collection, and here’s what I can see without even shifting: European art, surveys of various home and decorative arts, three books on color theory, European history/biography, two books on Sikh art, Be Gay Do Comics, Fierce Heroines, a biography of Anna May Wong, a shit-ton of manga (various genres), a book of Vietnamese folk tales, a graphic biography of Kusama, fantasy, sci-fi, YA romance, some books on spiritualism, a book about Japanese pearl divers, and a couple of graphic novels.

And here’s why I have all that stuff: it’s interesting. The world is interesting. There are so many things in it I don’t know anything about, and I want to learn about them. Why? Because they’re there. There’s a museum in England that has a jar of moles. Who needed a jar of moles? Why did they need it? How can you not want to know?

Don’t you want to know where these new suns are? Where they came from? Who created them? I do. Come exploring with me.

As they used to say, “Take a look, it’s in a book.” And I think it’s safe to say LeVar Burton approves this message. He wrote the introduction to New Suns. 

New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, edited by Nisi Shawl, is out now from Solaris Books.