Baggage

I’m about to embark on a big essay. As a prequel to it, however, I want to introduce you to a book.

A-many years ago, when I was young and charming, I edited an Australian anthology called Baggage. It’s still in print, published by Wildside in the US. The Australian original was taken out of print when the collapse of Borders in Australia imploded the publisher. Every piece Eneit Press published was special (maybe excepting my novel – I cannot judge my own writing) and the loss of the press shut many doors for readers.

Why is Baggage so important to me today? I asked writers for stories of science fiction or fantasy that discussed the cultural baggage we all carry. I had an initial list of the perfect people to make the best anthology. It had two parts, since I couldn’t ask everyone at once. I emailed the writers on the first part of my initial first (obviously) and all but one of them agreed. The rest of the wonderful authors I had on my list don’t even know they were on my list, which I find sad. I still want to read stories by them. Every single story I was given by those writers is a treasure and thought-provoking and none of them overlap and they created such a fine anthology that I’ve been nervous about trying another.

These are not Jewish stories. For those most part, these are not Jewish writers. Yet the collection is one that will help anyone trying to understand about the current wave of antisemitism. How? It demonstrates, through story, some of the massive differences in the cultural baggage we each bear. What we carry, how we carry it, how much of a burden it can be and how different people see it quite, quite differently. It achieves all this through very well told story. Which means, if you don’t want to jump straight into theory and definitions and cultural analysis, you don’t have to. You can read some of the best short stories I’ve ever edited.

Then I’ll bring in the heavy stuff, either here or on my own blog. In this difficult few years, however, we don’t always need to confront. Sometimes we can simply read and enjoy and find our own paths from what we read. This is why I’m giving you a prologue, which is Baggage.

It’s been a difficult fortnight. Every time this happens all I want to do is cry in a corner. Alas, for me, I’m not really a crying in corner kind of person. I’m a “What can I do?” person, mostly. (If I’m not, you know there is something really, really, REALLY wrong.) This means I’ve done two things this fortnight that are over and above my usual. One is to do with writers and the other is to do with a book.

The book is probably the best thing I will ever work on. I was wondering why I hadn’t heard from the publisher in years. We sorted out what had happened and all is well in terms of communications, but I looked at the sales and realised that the word never got out about this book when it was published in the US. It sold nicely in Australia, then was taken up by a US press then fell into a black hole. This happens to a surprising number of books. This one volume, however, is special and needs to emerge from its black hole.

So what is this mysterious book? It’s an anthology called Baggage, and I was the editor. Let me give you a link.

I work (a lot, and for many years) on the subject of culture. I’m not only an ethnohistorian, I’m passionate about how we depict and share culture. When I told some of Australia’s best science fiction, fantasy and horror writers that I was interested in them writing me stories that explained cultural baggage… this book was the result. In a perfect world, I’d also edit one for, say, US writers, and French writers and Polish writers and more and we’d all have a marvellous ongoing conversation through short story about how fiction can explain cultural baggage. That was my dream. My reality, now, is that I’d be happy if these wonderful stories in this very Australian volume were read. I want everyone to enjoy everything from the sentient glacier to the way societies can fall apart and the way we can carry our history with us everywhere.

The second thing is that Australian science fiction circles are ready to deal with the ongoing affects of people being cut off from each other, and I’m a part of how we’re handling it. Prior to this some of us meet once a month, but it’s private. Now the Australian Science Fiction Foundation is setting up a room online where writers can meet up once a week, just to chat. Most of the writers interested so far are in rural and regional Australia, which may make this a longterm proposition. All our other ideas (“our” being the Australian Science Fiction Foundation, of course) will appear in due course, but our chat starts this Thursday.

This is another type of dream, I think. I want people to have more tools for talking about culture and about heritage and place in society, and the best short story writers give us those tools. I want people to be less isolated, full stop. The pandemic has given us all sorts of capacities we didn’t have earlier that help along these lines. In my perfect world having a bad fortnight, or living far from people, or having physical limitations due to disabilities should be an excuse for pulling together, not falling apart.

I’m still dealing with the effects of my bad fortnight, but at least I’m up to the pulling together stage.

Tag: Baggage

Two Things