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Unlimited Futures: speculative, visionary blak+black fiction
Unlimited Futures is an anthology of Own Voice speculative fiction from 21 emerging and established First Nations writers and Black writers, reflecting visionary pasts, hopeful futures and the invisible ties between First Nations people and People of Colour.
With works by Tuesday Atzinger, Flora Chol, Claire Coleman, Zena Cumpston, Lisa Fuller, Meleika Gasa-Fatafehi, Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes, Chemutai Glasheen, Genevieve Grieves, Rafeif Ismail, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Laniyuk, Maree McCathy Yoelu, Jasmin McGaughey, SJ Minniecon, Sisonke Msimang, Merryana Salem, Mykaela Saunders, Aïsha Trambas, Alison Whittaker and Jasper Wyld, this is an anthology of the tales they wish had existed when they were growing up in Australia.
With works by Tuesday Atzinger, Flora Chol, Claire Coleman, Zena Cumpston, Lisa Fuller, Meleika Gasa-Fatafehi, Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes, Chemutai Glasheen, Genevieve Grieves, Rafeif Ismail, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Laniyuk, Maree McCathy Yoelu, Jasmin McGaughey, SJ Minniecon, Sisonke Msimang, Merryana Salem, Mykaela Saunders, Aïsha Trambas, Alison Whittaker and Jasper Wyld, this is an anthology of the tales they wish had existed when they were growing up in Australia.
296 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2022
14 people are currently reading
507 people want to read
About the author
Rafeif Ismail
8 books13 followersRafeif Ismail is an award-winning emerging multilingual writer based in Boorloo, WA (colonially known as Perth).
Rafeif’s work explores the themes of home, belonging the so-called 'Australian' identity in the 21st century through the lens of a refugee and third culture youth of the Sudanese diaspora. Rafeif’s work has been published in anthologies and literary magazines across Australia and internationally, with a debut novel forthcoming.
Deeply committed to creating diverse works and spaces, Rafeif is the current managing director of Djed Press and a participant in the 2020 AFTRS Talent Camp.
Rafeif learned English by reading comic books and relearned her first language (Sudanese Arabic) through reading poetry. Rafeif saw Black Panther about 28 times in cinema and can stand with the best of them on Doctor Who and Star Trek trivia.
Rafeif’s work explores the themes of home, belonging the so-called 'Australian' identity in the 21st century through the lens of a refugee and third culture youth of the Sudanese diaspora. Rafeif’s work has been published in anthologies and literary magazines across Australia and internationally, with a debut novel forthcoming.
Deeply committed to creating diverse works and spaces, Rafeif is the current managing director of Djed Press and a participant in the 2020 AFTRS Talent Camp.
Rafeif learned English by reading comic books and relearned her first language (Sudanese Arabic) through reading poetry. Rafeif saw Black Panther about 28 times in cinema and can stand with the best of them on Doctor Who and Star Trek trivia.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
May 6, 2022
Unlimited Futures is more than visionary and needs to be revisited by all in the future, even as it defies the false linear lens of time through its truth-telling. Still haunted by the stories. One of the best speculation fiction anthologies out there.
May 25, 2022
I’m so glad this book exists. I’m so glad it doesn’t talk down to me, or cater to me. It just exists, and I am welcome to step into it. It was quite an emotionally tough read, but it was the stories with the really hopeful futures that got me crying.
January 4, 2023
An amazing collection of short speculative fiction stories by some insightful and extraordinary authors. My thoughts when finishing most of these were "I wish this had its own book!". A must read.
June 27, 2023
enjoyed - as always with anthologies, liked some more than others. overall I was more hooked in the first half of the book. The River, Fifteen Days On Mars, Thylacine, Alt-Dream, History Repeating and Today, We Will Rise stood out to me, as did all of the 'Dispatches from the Future' pieces.
July 28, 2022
A commanding and compelling collection of stories. Stand out pieces for me were ‘Fifteen Days on Mars’ by Ambelin Kwaymullina, ‘The Debt’ by Chemutai Glasheen and ‘The Girls Home’ by Mykaeka Saunders.
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January 25, 2023Unlimited Futures is an anthology of speculative, visionary Blak and Black fiction edited by Rafeif Ismail and Ellen Van Neerven. It includes short stories and poetry by established writers such as Alison Whittaker, Mykaela Saunders and Ambelin Kwaymullina, and also introduces a raft of new and emerging talent. These Own Voices stories by First Nations and Blak and Black writers run the gamut of spec fic, from futuristic technology to sentient creatures and land; the breadth and depth of imagination found in these works is wholly original and inspired.
The introduction to this collection is a series of transcribed conversations between the editors over a period of months, discussing the purpose of the anthology and what it will do. At one point Ellen Van Neerven says:
‘..[this work] makes no apologies; it gives no explanations. Sometimes our communities feel like they have to write for a certain audience, sometimes there’s a pressure as a First Nations writer to represent First Nations people. We wanted to free writers from those pressures.’
Unlimited Futures, page 13
In keeping with this intention, the stories in this work are engaging and profound, their meanings sometimes layered beyond what reading them in English can reach. For example, Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes’s poem ‘I have no country’ is presented in both Amharic – Indigenous Ethiopian script – and English, the texts set side by side. The poem is strange and beautiful, full of movement and place and the intersections of mind, body and spirit. At the end there is a postscript explaining the philosophies behind the poem and what it aims to do. Then it says:
‘The translation is as close to the original Amharic as possible, but with major phrasing changes given English and Amharic have such different syntax structures. Unfortunately, the English translation loses much of the Amharic rhyme and rhythm, but I have tried to make the English as elegant as possible while still communicating the Amharic message.’
Unlimited Futures, page 125
The poem in English is a beautiful piece of writing, but including the Amharic script and then the postscript after it presents the reader with a challenge; knowing that the poem was written and intended to be read in another language, a First Nations language, means that a reader reading it in English will always miss part of it. The script is there in the book, it can be read in its full, original form if the reader learned, or already knew, that language. But in this way, the deeper meaning and experience of this piece of writing is kept within the words of an non-colonial language, accessible only to outsiders if they took the steps to learning that language. English-readers can read and enjoy the poem, but it is not the full, deep, entire work, and thus the writer shifts the power-balance away from colonial, white-centric English to become First Nations-centric.
Later in the anthology Afeif Ismail’s piece ‘White Dunes’ is presented first in English and then in Arabic script, but this piece does not have a postscript; the reader is left to assume that the Arabic version contains more details and nuance than the English one, like Woldeyes’s piece.
There are many names that could be used for the kinds of writing presented in this anthology: magical realism; mythology; science fiction. The broadest of these terms – speculative fiction (spec fic) – is defined as ‘a genre of fiction that encompasses works in which the setting is other than the real world, involving supernatural, futuristic, or other imagined elements.’ This is what the work is marketed as, but it doesn’t quite do justice to the worlds and ideas that are glimpsed through these stories. The collection truly is unique, beyond established definitions for fiction writing – and the ‘visionary’ of the tagline indicates not only the bright and hopeful scope of the work, but also a projected time when such writing – and such ideas and futures – are the norm.
This anthology was published in a collaboration between Fremantle Press and Djed Press and continues a welcome and essential change in the tide of publishing in Australia towards centering and celebrating Own Voices stories. It is essential reading for everyone, not just lovers of speculative fiction and poetry, and debuts many new and emerging voices into the Australian literary scene.
This review was first published here: https://oddfeather.co/2022/03/31/revi...
The introduction to this collection is a series of transcribed conversations between the editors over a period of months, discussing the purpose of the anthology and what it will do. At one point Ellen Van Neerven says:
‘..[this work] makes no apologies; it gives no explanations. Sometimes our communities feel like they have to write for a certain audience, sometimes there’s a pressure as a First Nations writer to represent First Nations people. We wanted to free writers from those pressures.’
Unlimited Futures, page 13
In keeping with this intention, the stories in this work are engaging and profound, their meanings sometimes layered beyond what reading them in English can reach. For example, Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes’s poem ‘I have no country’ is presented in both Amharic – Indigenous Ethiopian script – and English, the texts set side by side. The poem is strange and beautiful, full of movement and place and the intersections of mind, body and spirit. At the end there is a postscript explaining the philosophies behind the poem and what it aims to do. Then it says:
‘The translation is as close to the original Amharic as possible, but with major phrasing changes given English and Amharic have such different syntax structures. Unfortunately, the English translation loses much of the Amharic rhyme and rhythm, but I have tried to make the English as elegant as possible while still communicating the Amharic message.’
Unlimited Futures, page 125
The poem in English is a beautiful piece of writing, but including the Amharic script and then the postscript after it presents the reader with a challenge; knowing that the poem was written and intended to be read in another language, a First Nations language, means that a reader reading it in English will always miss part of it. The script is there in the book, it can be read in its full, original form if the reader learned, or already knew, that language. But in this way, the deeper meaning and experience of this piece of writing is kept within the words of an non-colonial language, accessible only to outsiders if they took the steps to learning that language. English-readers can read and enjoy the poem, but it is not the full, deep, entire work, and thus the writer shifts the power-balance away from colonial, white-centric English to become First Nations-centric.
Later in the anthology Afeif Ismail’s piece ‘White Dunes’ is presented first in English and then in Arabic script, but this piece does not have a postscript; the reader is left to assume that the Arabic version contains more details and nuance than the English one, like Woldeyes’s piece.
There are many names that could be used for the kinds of writing presented in this anthology: magical realism; mythology; science fiction. The broadest of these terms – speculative fiction (spec fic) – is defined as ‘a genre of fiction that encompasses works in which the setting is other than the real world, involving supernatural, futuristic, or other imagined elements.’ This is what the work is marketed as, but it doesn’t quite do justice to the worlds and ideas that are glimpsed through these stories. The collection truly is unique, beyond established definitions for fiction writing – and the ‘visionary’ of the tagline indicates not only the bright and hopeful scope of the work, but also a projected time when such writing – and such ideas and futures – are the norm.
This anthology was published in a collaboration between Fremantle Press and Djed Press and continues a welcome and essential change in the tide of publishing in Australia towards centering and celebrating Own Voices stories. It is essential reading for everyone, not just lovers of speculative fiction and poetry, and debuts many new and emerging voices into the Australian literary scene.
This review was first published here: https://oddfeather.co/2022/03/31/revi...
July 8, 2022
Genuinely some of the best short stories I've ever read, I would 100% read another book like this. It's always interesting to read things from a perspective different to our own and I loved seeing the way people different to me imagined the future and told stories. The poem the book started with was one of my favourites, along with the last story, what a beautiful world we could live in with ideas like that.
June 11, 2022
Unlimited Futures in a collection of short stories and poetry. The speculative fiction is from First Nations writers and Black writers which reflect on the past and the hopes for the future. I found I needed to read the stories slowly and then reflect on what I had read. Sometimes, I had to re-read the story. I thought Fifteen Days On Mars (Ambelin Kwaymullina), and Mami Wata (Sisonke Msimang) were great reads.
June 27, 2022
A collection that inspires and expands the imagination, full of stellar works that bathe the future in their light
May 18, 2022
I liked only one story of 21 included into the collection: Fifteen Days on Mars by Ambeline Kwaymullina. It was really good! (hence the second star)
The rest 20 were terrible: either an interesting idea which went nowhere, or (more often) a political pamphlet written so poorly that it was embarrassing to read.
And so much hatred!!! Judging by this short stories collection, Black people really hate white ones :(
which is understandable. But I still think nationalism is bad, and not something to be proud about, no matter the skin color of the person who preaches it.
The rest 20 were terrible: either an interesting idea which went nowhere, or (more often) a political pamphlet written so poorly that it was embarrassing to read.
And so much hatred!!! Judging by this short stories collection, Black people really hate white ones :(
which is understandable. But I still think nationalism is bad, and not something to be proud about, no matter the skin color of the person who preaches it.
October 25, 2024
There are some outstanding stories in this volume, especially the contributions from Amberlin Kwamullina and Alison Whittaker and the poem from Tuesday Atzinger. The recently revived story from SJ Minniecon is a bit of a standout as world. Unsurprisingly, not every story works, but when it is strong, it is very strong indeed.
September 3, 2023
Such an exciting collection of stories. So many interesting threads from authors I’d read before or can’t wait to read more of.
I’ve had trouble defining spec fic before and this gets me way closer to understanding the genre.
I’ve had trouble defining spec fic before and this gets me way closer to understanding the genre.
October 31, 2023
This would have to be the best collection of work I have ever read. Powerful speculation fiction in both prose and short stories. This book honestly deserves 6 stars and needs to be read by more people!! Some of the stories still haunt me.
April 14, 2022
A must read for anyone who wants to vision a different future and understand who needs to lead us there, and how.
May 26, 2022
Read for PRC
Some great short stories & poetry, quite enjoyed the majority of them. 3.5 stars
Some great short stories & poetry, quite enjoyed the majority of them. 3.5 stars
August 21, 2022
I’m not sure that short stories work for me in this particular genre. I would like to read longer versions. An impressive collection that left me wanting more
January 11, 2023
Full review published by Meanjin: https://meanjin.com.au/review/sparks-...
September 19, 2024
Anthologies of short stories are always a mixed bag. This one had some really good stories, but also some that could have been left out.
April 5, 2025
Uncomfortable, and importantly so.
August 14, 2022
Edit: stunning, moving, inspiring. I enjoyed some stories more than others, but all of them made me think. Can't recommend highly enough.
I've only gotten through the introduction and first two "stories" so far, but this anthology is already worth 5+ stars. So excited to see what else is in store for me on this storytelling journey. I will recommend Unlimited Futures to everyone I know and everyone I meet.
I've only gotten through the introduction and first two "stories" so far, but this anthology is already worth 5+ stars. So excited to see what else is in store for me on this storytelling journey. I will recommend Unlimited Futures to everyone I know and everyone I meet.
January 12, 2024
2022Didn’t finish this
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews