The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing and Listening in 2025, pt. 20: Andrea Hairston

 

We have made it to December 2025!

Storytellers saved my life every day this year! Writers, musicians, and filmmakers too. Imagination sustained us all, as we cruised on this death-defying rollercoaster ride, plunging into janky ravines and scaling treacherous cliffs, hurtling into 2026.

Blessings on people of the good word; they conjured stories to ignite the imagination and fuel our spirits: Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, Contraband Camp, Jess Craven, Rebecca Solnit, Jamelle Bouie, Strength in Numbers, Jasmin Crocket, Brian Tyler Cohen, and The Guardian. In the midst of narrative civil war, they asked important questions and offered clear analysis. They also proposed actions to get us where we want to go. Hope.

In 2007, I wrote an essay on Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, “Stories Are More Important than Facts: Imagination as Resistance.” Numbers and facts never speak for themselves. Storytellers make truth with the data. Going against the dominant stories of one’s society is very difficult. To resist the prevailing master narratives, the magical Zeitgeist that is everywhere and nowhere, requires fierce imagination. Facing a fascist public and private world, Ofelia, the young heroine of Pan’s Labyrinth, is a marvel of imagination. Watching the film again was inspirational.

The third volume of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy came out this fall. I waited for this final volume to be published to start reading the trilogy. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, Pullman offers a marvelous tale of resistance and resilience. In a parallel universe, fascists attempt to steal the world. They claim absolute moral and political authority. In a hallowed past century, power was supposedly delegated to the Magisterium to interpret reality for everyone. In the present moment, a wannabe dictator from the Magisterium stages religious wars and works to crush any dissenting voices. Imagination is being denigrated as inferior, irrational, the opposite of truth. There is also an assault on spirit and the very possibility of truth. Many declare the universe void of meaning, a dead place. Of course, if we reject/degrade/ban imagination, it becomes difficult to access truth. Lyra, one of the protagonists, finds herself falling prey to the meaningless-epidemic. She once believed that we, from rock to fire to breath, leaf, and blood, were embodiments of the universe’s spirit. Now Lyra inhabits a dead realm, inside and out. In addition to resisting the wannabe dictator, Lyra must find a way to recover her imagination.

As I read, I relished the image of people of all ages reading Pullman’s 1700 pages dedicated to imagination as resistance. I felt my heart beating with other readers, as in the audience of a great performance. An exhilarating feeling!

So much of what I enjoyed this year was about the quest for imagination.

In Lessons in Magic and Disaster, Charlie Jane Anders gets us lost in the murky Massachusetts woods, lost in the jumble of our hearts and spirits, in search of magic. Her characters face a tangle of joy, grief, despair, and hope. They long for a world that was, and also ache to create that world which will hold all of who we mean to be. The past ain’t gone and the present is unfinished, rich with loss and potential. Charlie Jane’s characters are touched by magic and so are the readers. She shows us that we actually have what we need to cast spells. She challenges us to study our magic and conjure the world we want.

I appreciate all of P. Djèlí Clark’s excellent work, but in preparation for a panel at Readercon (July 2025), I reread his novella, Ring Shout, which like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (one of my favorite films of the year) is a Hoodoo tale. The book and the film are conjurations. The readers/audience find themselves caught in the spells of root workers and Blues musicians. Clark and Coogler know where your imagination done run off to and give you a way to other worlds, other possibilities. Sublime prose and stunning cinematography allow readers/audience to feel our creative power: We are the crossroads from the ancestors to the unborn.

One of my great joys this year was reading manuscripts that were about to be published. We could all drown in a deadly deluge of data, but Sunward (Sept 2025) by William Alexander is the book to take you to stars. Heroic bots, ethical assassins, jealous siblings, and renegade daughters risk everything to sustain truth and make family and meaning.

The People's Library by Veronica Henry (coming in February 2026) is also about a post-AI future. People enjoy Universal Basic Income and access to marvelous AI tech. At the People’s Library, everyone can access maker spaces and engage with digital historical figures. Yet as book libraries are closed down, there’s an undertow of discontent and resistance to the official narrative. A librarian who curates digital consciousness risks her life to save books, and also our spirited humanity, of course.

I have also read manuscripts on the way to final draft. Daniel José Older’s Last Laugh has machete sharp wit, wisdom, and insight. This in-progress novel is like the best episode of a favorite, long running epic that I somehow missed and am so glad I found. Good words, good questions, laugh out loud sustenance on the roller coaster ride. Pan Morigan’s Swallowing Moons (working title) is a praise song to the spirits in us all. Imagination and spirit might have been paved over—after years of struggle, disappointment, and despair. But as with Pullman, Del Toro, and all the artists that sustained me, Morigan writes a way out of no way to day light truth and celebrate the power of the imagination.  

Thanks to Daniel, Pan, and all these artists and word wizards, I am looking forward to 2026!

Andrea Hairston ran away from the physics lab to the theatre when she was a young thing and has been a scientist, artiste, and hoodoo conjurer ever since. She is a novelist, poet, playwright, and L. Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor Emerita of Theatre and Africana Studies at Smith College. Andrea is the author of Archangels of Funk, shortlisted for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction; Mindscape, a Carl Brandon Award winner and finalist for the Phillip K. Dick and Otherwise Awards; 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, a Washington Post Best Book of 2022, Otherwise and Carl Brandon Award winner; and Master of Poisons on the Kirkus Review’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2020. Andrea bikes at night year-round, meeting bears, multi-legged creatures of light and breath, and the occasional shooting star. The Redemption Center is Closed on Sundays will be out in May, 2026.

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.