The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt. 14: Andrea Hairston

Taking Pleasure in 2024

by Andrea Hairston

We always face an uncertain future. However, right now, these very moments as I write or you read, these are our good times, when we hold on to life with and for each other, when we pass on the miracle.

So many people have told me that they don’t know who or what to trust. They’re not sure what to believe. They don’t know what is true anymore or perhaps there are multiple truths, and what to do with that? Since the pandemic, traveling around the USA on book tours, people have been asking me, a SF & F writer, isn’t it time to get real? They expected/hoped that I would have if not the answer, an answer.

I have mostly questions, speculations, experiments. A riff on what might be. That’s what gives me pleasure when I read. As I like to say: Good SF & F is a polyrhythm: you know it ain’t so, but it sure is true. SF & F is brain food, a rehearsal of the possible and the impossible—Speculation—finding that way out of no way.

In the photo above, I am on tour in May 2024, traveling across the USA--A VOYAGE INTO GENRE with three fabulous authors. We hit it off on day one and by the final hug on day five had tears in our eyes saying good-bye. From left to right: Rebecca Thorne (Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea), Nghi Vo (The Brides of High Hill), me, and Veronica Roth (When Among Crows). Read their books for elegant storytelling, delightful horror, and delicious intrigue, for women in love going beyond the intro level, for that wedding from Hell where the monster party guests just let it all hang out, and for Baba Jaga living over a chicken joint in 21^st century Chicago and getting the most out of every deal she makes.

 

I had the great pleasure of reading an advance copy of Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions, a collection of stories by Nalo Hopkinson. I am always looking for stories about people making a way out of no way, people who have been left out of the stories we tell ourselves. I take great pleasure in the tales of resilient beings who improvise a reality different from the limited, narrow one scripted for them (for us). I love characters who discover possibilities that no one could or would have imagined before. Conjurers, inventors, magicians who change the rules, the frames, the narratives of our lives. Nalo Hopkinson does all that and more in Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions.  

 

This collection is a treasure box, a mojo pot of stories to break your heart and mend it too. Hopkinson’s fables, ghost tales, alien encounters, and automaton adventures are a sheer delight. Magic on the page. As usual Hopkinson’s language carries you to revelation and joy. Characters you’ve been lusting after do tricks with your mind. These dazzling stories will reacquaint you with your spirits. Just what we need right now or anytime!  

    I got to read two other advance copies:

  In The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar explodes the willful ignorance of those of us who live in excess luxury while anonymous others labor at the edge of endurance to provide those luxuries. Samatar conjures a familiar university setting on a fleet of ships exiled from an Earth that is no more. The fleet exploits any rock they encounter. As an underclass labors in the hold, the learned and their students sidestep the horrors their research and scholarship legitimizes. The underclass does not become the conditions they are chained to, nor do the learned professors. Samatar shakes up what we accept as normal, inevitable, and fixed. And talk about looking for a way out of no way!

 

 

The Adventures of Mary Darling by Pat Murphy will be out May 6, 2025. The is a rip-roaring tale of magic and mystery set in the age of Sherlock Holmes and Peter Pan. Murphy shakes up what we take for granted as an heroic adventure. A swashbuckling woman detective faces off against bad boy spirits, fairies, and mermaids. These inexplicable forces of nature, of the universe toy with humanity, playing by their rules, rules that only vaguely make sense to us. But let us not forget that the sun never set on the Empire—on the colonial land- , mind-, and spirit-grab. Murphy creates a bevy of engaging characters who must navigate Empire strictures, who must hide their full powers while devising elegant strategies to save their world. As I turned the page to get to the next delightful reversal, revelation, surprise, I had to laugh out loud and do a little dance. Put this book on next year's to-buy list!

    All these books conjure truth I can trust. Pleasure indeed.

 

Andrea Hairston is a novelist, playwright, and scholar. Aqueduct Press published her first three novels, two have been reissued by Tor: Will Do Magic For Small Change, a New York Times Editor’s pick and finalist for the Mythopoeic, Lambda, and Otherwise Awards; Redwood and Wildfire, winner of the Otherwise and Carl Brandon Awards. A third, Mindscape, winner of the Carl Brandon Award, will be reissued in August 2025. Aqueduct also published Lonely Stardust, a collection of essays and plays. “Dumb House,” a short story appears in New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color edited by Nisi Shawl. Andrea has received grants from the NEA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Master of Poisons, came out from Tor and was on the 2020 Kirkus Review’s Best SF and F list. Tor published Archangels of Funk in May of 2024 which is on Esquire Magazine’s list of Best SF and F list.