Hope Nicholson - Love Beyond Body, Space & Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology (2016).

Hope Nicholson wrote the letter from the editor for Love Beyond Body, Space & Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology (2016). As a non-Indigenous person, she speaks to balancing the tension between her own desire to share stories and Indigenous and LGBT individuals’ right to privacy (p.7). She notes, for example, that there are reasons why Indigenous people restrict certain stories to their community and there are reasons why transgender people “do not discuss aspects of their transition.” (p.7). She says “I selected the genres of speculative fiction, science fiction, and fantasy for this collection as it is my belief that there is a tendency to restrict Indigenous stories to one time, one place, and force culture to be something to be looked at from a distance. I hope that by having stories unburdened by time, place, or space, that it creates connection.” (p.8). She says that all of the authors identify as Indigenous and most of them identify as queer, bisexual, lesbian, transgender, or lesbian (p.8). 

Hope had her own publishing company, Bedside Press. It also published Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection Volume 1. Hope was also the editor of that book. 

In 2018 Tres Dean published an article online about how someone more powerful in the publishing industry sexually abused him at a publishing industry event. In 2019, Hope wrote an article about how she had behaved inappropriately, and announced that she was closing Bedside Press and leaving the industry. Similar to the previous post, when I learned all of this I was again faced with the ethical question around citational politics. And again, instead of choosing to ignore her work entirely, I choose instead to surface the messiness and undertake my own personal reflection about whether or not there is anything baked into her work that is potentially harmful. In terms of the introduction above, I think it's fairly benign. Some people might say "but by promoting her work, you're promoting her, and she stands to gain financially from that." First, I'd be surprised if my post made that much of a difference. Second, I balance that possibility against the fact that in posting her introduction, I'm also promoting the book, including the Indigenous authors of the book. And when I take those two things into consideration, I choose to promote the book. Third, she's already financially penalized herself by closing down the publishing house and leaving the industry. Which is far beyond what most Me Too perpetrators have done, and in removing herself from a situation where she is in a position of power over authors, and by announcing her transgression, perhaps she has created structural changes in her life to safegaurd herself against engaging in similar behaviours in the future. 

Also, just a quick aside. I'm not purposefully seeking out contentious individuals to talk about their transgressions. It just so happens that the topic I'm currently working on involves these folks. Are people engaged in Indigenous science fiction prone to violence? I hope not. I do think it's weird how often it comes up, though. 

Further volumes of Moonshot were published through a different publisher, and the sequel to Love Beyond Body, Space & Time was published by Arsenal. 

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