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Books We Love

P. Djèlí Clark’s The Black God’s Drums is fast-paced and fun, with characters that play off each other’s quick-witted banter. The world created in this novella is a slightly off-kilter version of our own, with recognizable politics (where the bad guys are Confederates singing songs about Andrew Jackson) juxtaposed with airships and mind-numbing “drapeto gas” which keeps a slave economy running after emancipation.

The part of this book that is so interesting to us is the orisha magic wielded by main characters Jacqueline (or Creeper) and Anne-Marie. This magic is what makes the book fantasy rather than alternate history, and it is also the element which connects the narrative so strongly to place. The Black God’s Drums is set in New Orleans and of the city Creeper has this to say:

The magic of those old Afrikin gods is part of this city, ma maman used to say, buried in its bones and roots with the slaves that built it, making the ground and air and waterways sacred land.

Creeper — who has the goddess Oya residing with her and can, through Oya, sometimes channel storms — is a kind of extension of the power that Oya demonstrated in a “tempête noire” that flooded New Orleans and the surrounding lowlands. That a catastrophic storm is Creeper’s origin story, and the origin story of the New Orleans that P. Djèlí Clark creates in the novella, suggests deep-rooted connections between the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the future of the descendants of those slaves, and the ways in which air, land, and water are implicated in that historic atrocity which continues in altered forms. Creeper’s power, and also that of the airship captain Anne-Marie (who harbours Oya’s sister-goddess Oshun), is the power of “Lafrik” enacted on American soil; and the book uses orisha magic to make tangible the idea that slavery has still-unimagined consequences, consequences which are linked to land, air, and water as Creeper’s maman said.

In our own world, this connection is, of course, true. The slave labour of kidnapped Black people is the foundation of Western development and Western accumulation of wealth, both of which are responsible for the West’s still-rising CO2 emissions and the changed climate which we will inflict upon the world. But we mustn’t imagine that the increased storms, flooding, and heatwaves are the goddesses of “Lafrik” taking their revenge as they might in The Black God’s Drums. No, we must acknowledge that the effects of atmospheric warming that become more frequent and more extreme every year are the fault of no one and no thing but us and a culture that demands gratification and comfort at any cost — even at the cost of any future comforts.

Books We Love

The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander was a favourite in 2018. It is an alternate history intertwining the true story of the Radium Girls with the equally true story of the electrocution of Topsy the elephant. To these truths, the novellette adds elephant mythology and diplomatic negotiations between what remains of humanity and the emerging sentient elephant race. The rage that propels the former two narratives sometimes results in the overshadowing of the latter two stories; but it is crucial to remember that all of these stories are working together in this book — that rage has a place amongst the other reactions we have when we are witnesses to the destruction of the Earth and all that live in its ecosystems, but it is not the only thing we should feel.

Both rage and hope can be detrimental to developing the kinds of responses to the climate emergency that we need to restructure society (and the kinds of stories we tell ourselves). Certainly, rage can motivate, but it can also turn on itself; hope can push relentlessly toward unrealistic, unachievable goals when good-enough is right in front of us.* Bolander’s novelette is certainly a rage-packed pill that is, at times, tough to swallow; but it is easier if the book’s moments of beauty are not overlooked. The book begins not with the dying Radium Girls, nor even with Topsy the elephant’s plight; it begins with an address to the future.

The book opens with the new inheritors of the Earth: an elephant matriarch addressing her “best beloved mooncalf,” telling a story as if she is tucking a little one into bed. Similarly, the book ends with verse as if the elephant Mother has been telling us the whole story. But the Matriarch’s voice isn’t only relegated to the final word. After the horror of Regan and Topsy making a final decision to end their lives by nuclear explosion in a crowd of onlookers, the elephant Mother resumes the narrative, telling us how Regan and Topsy should be remembered. What we take away from their story, the gift that the elephant Mother gives us, is the idea that sometimes we endure difficult things, sad things, but together we are witnesses for each other. We are not alone in these hardest of times.

As an alternative history, The Only Harmless Great Thing is a fascinating book about memory and the function of memory to shape the future. Indeed, the elephants — animals known for their ability to remember — relate their memories through the telling of myths. These are myths recounting Topsy’s life and the effect that it had on the elephants who remember, and older myths of the “Fur Mothers” that teach the reader about the structure of the emerging elephant society and its long history on Earth.

But this is also a book about the long “memory” of nuclear waste, and (more broadly) the long memory of the destruction that Western civilization has heaped on the Earth and the beings that live here with us. Bolander’s narrative contemplates a time when our destruction might not be so obvious, a time when we (and those that come after us) might need to be reminded of the dangers we have created. In this way, she reminds us of the importance of myth and story to the formation of cultures, suggesting a place for this story as we begin our necessary transformations.

*Let it be clear, that when we talk about hope sometimes pushing us toward unrealistic or utopian ideologies, we’re referring to Western lifestyle aspirations (what we might broadly call the North American Dream, what some might call colonization) and the effects of that continual striving. We are not referring to whatever feeling might be necessary in order to sustain an appropriate response to the climate crisis.

At Stelliform Press, we want to disseminate stories which change the way we think about human relationships to the environment and the non-humans who live in it with us. We want to disrupt the cultural/capitalist imperatives which influence how we behave in this space. How we affect this space.

But like any environmentalist who has heard the wailing of the absolutist or essentialist responding to political protest (“How did they get there? By car! Using fossil fuels!”), we know that we exist within the system. We know that “primitivism” and other isolationist approaches are not answers to climate change. We know that most Western lives have the biggest ecological footprint.

Our Sustainability Plan

We are starting small, but we have a plan to ensure that we take each step forward with our effect on local and global ecologies in mind. Our About the Press page now outlines what we are currently doing toward environmental sustainability and what actions we plan for the future.

As a new press, we are implementing the following policies and protocols to reduce our impact on the environment: 

No or very limited printed proofs during the editing process

Post-consumer waste (PCW) paper for some editions

Use of vegetable inks; no metallic inks which pollute waterways

Some use of Print on Demand technology reducing carbon emissions from long-distance shipping

Engagement with local printers, bookshops, libraries, and festivals and conventions

Use of conferencing technology for long-distance events

Maintain a no air travel policy and reduce fossil-fuel burning travel

Within 5 years, we are aiming to implement the following policies and procedures:

All editions printed on PCW recycled paper

All editions printed using a waterless printing process

Participation in the Tree Neutral or Tree Canada Programs

A Note about Acquisitions and Authors’ Rights

Some authors have asked what rights we are buying. Currently we are buying first world English electronic and print rights. As we grow, we will also consider audiobook rights. Our contract includes clauses for rights reversion in different situations should the author and/or publisher wish to terminate their relationship.

This information is now included on our Submission Guidelines page.

Books We Love

Rivers Solomon’s The Deep demonstrates a literal transformation of human bodies as a result of a change in environment. In this novella, the descendants of kidnapped African mothers thrown from slave ships as they cross the Atlantic ocean become the wajinru, an deep-sea dwelling merpeople who live in blissful forgetfulness of their history. The wajinru’s forgetfulness is enabled by a social structure in which a Historian is tasked with the remembrance of the people’s entire history. The Historian holds all wajinru memory within their body, feeling the physical pain and emotion of those memories, until those memories are passed on to the next Historian.

The untenable nature of this system of remembrance is made explicit in the main character, Yetu (the current Historian), as she struggles to cope with the pain and horror of wajinru history. Solomon raises questions around the idea of communal versus individualistic social structures when they depict Yetu simultaneously acknowledging the value of her role as a keeper of memory — even memory that is so painful that it is literally transformative — and her real need for care and acknowledgement as an individual.

While previous wajinru Historians were able to thrive — or at least survive — under the burden of the memories, Yetu is different. She is often anxious and agitated, overwhelmed by the expectations that the other wajinru have of her. In this way, Yetu not only helps the reader to understand the wajinru as a diverse people, but her neuro-atypicality opens the door to large-scale changes in wajinru social structures. Because of Yetu’s inability and refusal to continue on as the Historians have always done, her society as a whole changes in a positive way.

The Deep is about the many ways that our environments — whether they be ecological, social, or psychological — can change us; and in depicting a variety of changes throughout the novella, Solomon acknowledges the interconnectedness of human and non-human histories and their reverberations through spaces and bodies. Fundamentally, The Deep shows us how change comes through interconnectedness, through the relationships we have with each other, and how we understand and respond to one another’s pain.

Stories We Love

This story from Reckoning Magazine packs a ton of heart and hope into a diminutive novelette. It also packs eldritch horror into the unsuspecting body of a young girl whose family is responsible for the dam and diversion project which dramatically altered the ecosystem of its small-town setting. Lanny Boykin is a shape-shifter; but she is not the only shape-shifter in the story.

While the reader is fascinated by the mystery of Lanny’s transformations — and Lanny’s desperate efforts to escape her hometown — the story of the town’s transformation quietly expands in the background, not unlike Lanny in her sea-monster form, spreading out below the surface of the water, displacing lakes with sheer mass. There is desperation in the lives of Lanny and her best friend Junebug, and in the lives of their parents and other townspeople who are tense and exhausted, living their lives on the cusp of failures very much connected to their surrounding ecology. Lanny’s home is a mill-town poised to become a mining town, the pollution of water from the mill about to become pollution of the air from the mine. But the story stresses that it is insufficient to criticize the mill workers (or even the future miners) who have little say in the progression of industry in the town; Barber makes this clear in her portrayal of poverty, quiet desperation, and the seemingly impotent protest of Junebug and Jack against the mine.

The town’s industrialists seem unstoppable, not unlike Lanny’s transformations which at first come over her unexpectedly, forcing her to stumble — more than half out of her mind — toward water. But as the story reaches its climax, it becomes apparent that that which can stop the town’s further development is Lanny herself, a girl who is connected through ancestry to the place’s first environmental devastations, and through her heart to the town’s future of which she has never felt a part. In this way, Barber has created an intricately interconnected narrative, wherein those who are responsible for ecological devastation pay for it with the lives of their descendants, but the sacrifice is made willingly, for love and hope.

The love between Lanny and Junebug and the care they show for each other even when they disagree drives this narrative. It is desperately sweet. Even the destruction of the story’s final scene barely touches the palpable connection demonstrated by these two characters. If Lanny and Junebug stand at odds as representatives of the disconnection of industrialized development of an ecosystem and the struggle of the poor and dispossessed to withstand detrimental changes , they also represent a deep care and connection that can right wrongs and maybe even rehabilitate damaged worlds.