7 Books That Explore the Many Worlds of Indigenous Science Fiction & Fantasy

Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse
Rebecca Roanhorse is one of the biggest names in science fiction right now, Indigenous or otherwise—though her cultural background informs her work in absolutely essential ways (her heritage is Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo and African-American). In just a few years as a published writer of short stories and novels, she’s won or been nominated for a pile of major awards, including a Locus Award for Trail of Lightning, the kick-off to her Sixth World series. In that novel, a global climate apocalypse has wiped out most of the United States, but spared the former Navajo reservation at Dinétah and given birth to gods of legend, as well as monsters. Superhumanly gifted monster-slayer and bounty hunter Maggie Hoskie is called upon to help find a missing girl in a world in which magic is on the rise and technology is failing. The sequel, Storm of Locusts, came out earlier this year. The author’s next novel, Resistance Reborn, one of the key books in the run-up to the new Star Wars movie, arrives in November.

Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones
It’s hard to know where to begin with Blackfeet author Jones, whose bibliography runs to a couple dozen books and counting, several of them modern classics of science fiction and (especially) horror. His works frequently deal with themes of belonging, and often spotlight outsider characters who struggle with identity in ways that are sometimes metaphorical, but are just as often explicitly about what it means to have Indigenous roots in modern America. 2016’s Mongrels is not only one of his most popular and accomplished works, but also a great example of the author’s treatment of these themes: it’s the story of a boy from an outcast, mixed-blood family struggling to invent and reinvent himself over the course of a decade—a boy who may or may not be a werewolf. Jones’s intense novella Mapping the Interior is also excellent; it follows a boy who encounters the ghost of his father in a strange house. The father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation, is not the entirely benevolent spirit you might expect. His next book, The Only Good Indians, billed as an American Indian horror story of revenge on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, is out next year.

Robopocalypse, by Daniel H. Wilson
In this blockbuster novel, Cherokee citizen and robotics engineer Daniel Wilson unleashes Archos R-14, a super-intelligent Artificial Intelligence that quickly determines to wipe out humanity and recreate the world with blended organic and robot technology. With the A.I. uprising upon us, humanity doesn’t seem to have much of a chance—until members of the Osage Nation lead a counteroffensive. In Wilson’s imagining, the challenges of reservation life and the Osage willingness to preserve traditional ways has left its rebels uniquely suited to confront a challenge that is deadly effective at crippling the more homogenous, technologically reliant broader world. A film adaptation has been in and out of development hell for a few years now, with Stephen Spielberg and then Michael Bay attached. Wilson’s next book, The Andromeda Evolution, is an authorized sequel to Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain.

Love Beyond Body, Space and Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-fi Anthology, edited by Hope Nicholson
This groundbreaking anthology from Winnipeg-based editor Hope Nicholson spotlights the experience of queer Indigenous/First Nations writers, with characters from across the LGBTQ+ spectrum—including trans and two-spirits individuals—in sci-fi stories. The array of stories is wide, but one of the most entertaining is from Lipan Apache writer Darcie Little Badger, a tale in which a richly imagined, Indigenous-inspired future dovetails delightfully with a space-based f/f love story involving troublesome chihuahuas. It’s just one of the many stories, essays, and poems that make up a collection that sits at the intersection of queer and Indigenous identities.

Take Us to Your Chief, And Other Stories: Classic Science-Fiction with a Contemporary First Nations Outlook, by Drew Hayden Taylor
Another short story collection, this one from Drew Hayden Taylor, a Canadian writer with a half-Ojibwe/half-caucasian background. The nine stories collected here are playfully inspired by golden-age science fiction from the likes of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. In these stories, a Haudenosaunee song serves as a beacon for interstellar visitors, ancient Native petroglyphs reveal the secrets of time travel, and a computer develops a conscience in coming to understand atrocities committed against modern Canada’s First Nations. The stories are varied, but Taylor revisits old colonialist science fiction tropes and imagines stories of, say, alien contact from the perspective of people who didn’t always benefit from the arrival of explorers.

Future Home of the Living God, by Louise Erdrich
Louise Erditch, an enrolled Turtle Mountain Chippewa, is an author for whom genre has always been a secondary consideration, but this Atwood-esque novel more than qualifies as speculative fiction, inasmuch as we’re concerned about such things. Erdrich’s work as a leading voice of the Native American Renaissance predates the more recent rise in Indigenous science fiction, making Future Home of the Living God a fascinating hybrid. Cedar Hawk Songmaker is four months pregnant in a world that’s begun to run backward. Evolution has reversed itself, and children are being born with the characteristics of earlier and more genetically primitive humans. Raised by a white couple in Minneapolis, Cedar is compelled to seek out her birth mother living on the Ojibwe reservation. As she explores her past, humanity regresses into its own while an increasingly repressive and fearful government works to bring pregnant women to heel through new laws, the police, and appeals to religion. Intersectionality is the subtext of many of these works, and Erdrich’s book explores themes specific to Indigenous people without shying away from feminist issues.

Trinity Sight: A Novel, by Jennifer Givhan
Finally, one of the most recent novels from an author with indigenous ties (Jennifer Givhan’s family has connections to the Laguna Pueblo of west-central New Mexico) offers up the kind of unique perspective that a writer with native roots can bring to bear. Following a car crash, anthropologist Calliope Santiago awakens to discover that she’s entirely alone, everyone having vanished except for her six-year-old neighbor, Eunjoo. Together, they flee a volcano-ravaged Albuquerque for the Gila Mountains to the south, gathering others who’d been left behind on their journey, and facing dangers inspired by indigenous (particularly Zuni) myth, religion, and history, such as the monstrous Suuke who pursue them). First-time novelist Givhan (author of several poetry collections) brings Southwestern Puebloan mythology to life as Calliope is forced to confront the history and family that she’d abandoned in order to find a place in this new world for herself and for the twins she’s carrying.