Encountering the Sovereign Other: Indigenous Science Fiction by Miriam C. Brown Spiers (review).

Miriam C. Brown Spiers, Encountering the Sovereign Other: Indigenous Science Fiction. Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2021. 184 pp. Paper, $39.95; e-book, $37.95.

This timely and cogent book by Miriam C. Brown Spiers, Encountering the Sovereign Other: Indigenous Science Fiction, provides four clearly written chapters on four generally overlooked but fascinating examples of Indigenous Science Fiction— William Sanders's The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan, Stephen Graham Jones's It Came from Del Rio, D. L. Birchfield's Field of Honor, and Blake Hausman's Riding the Trail of Tears. While Jones is well on his way to becoming a household name in contemporary horror as well as Indigenous literature, Sanders, Birchfield, and Hausman produced novels (in the case of Sanders, multiple novels and award-winning short fiction) that Brown Spiers demonstrates should be more widely read and studied.

Each chapter explores the ways these authors engage with science fiction as a larger genre, how they play with classic sci-fi subgenres like parallel universes / alternative histories or what Brown Spiers calls "radiation monsters," and how they position themselves as Indigenous authors within science fiction, a genre closely associated with first-contact, invade-and-conquer, alien/Other narratives deeply rooted in the colonial project. Encountering the Sovereign Other is divided into two parts with two chapters each, with each part including a substantial overview, as well as an extremely thoughtful introduction, which is worth the cover price alone.

Building on the work of scholars like Grace Dillon and Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Spiers explains that Indigenous sci-fi "exists at the intersection of two disparate critical approaches grounded in two separate worldviews," arguing that where Indigenous sci-fi intervenes in science fiction theory, it expands the entire "horizon of expectations" readers bring to speculative fiction (xii). Her analysis here is an exploration of that place, a site where Indigenous knowledge and sci-fi theory engage with each other through novels that do not "point to assimilation or hybridity; rather such texts reinforce tribally specific values and emphasize the applicability of Indigenous knowledge in the twenty-first century" (xviii).

"Part 1. Modern Monsters, Modern Borders" traces the history of anxieties and hopes swirling around advanced technologies that were already shaping sci-fi tropes, themes, and plot devices before WWII gave such fears new shapes in the form of nuclear apocalypse and radiation-induced mutations. Indigenous sci-fi, as Brown Spiers notes, engages these concerns from a unique perspective. In addition to the long and troubling history of uranium mining, toxic dumping, and weapons testing on or near Indigenous lands in the US Southwest, there exists the long tradition in mainstream sci-fi of imagining genetic mutations resulting from radiation exposure. While the effects of exposure to radiation in white-authored sci-fi are frequently at least partly positive (as with Spiderman or the Hulk, for example), in Indigenous sci-fi the effects are almost entirely harmful, as Brown Spiers explores in the chapters on The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan and It Came from Del Rio, where radiation exposure is disastrous for humans and the environment.

In "Part 2. Reimagining Resistance," Brown Spiers engages two alternate history novels, which, unlike time travel narratives, do not allow for history to be rewritten. However, she explains, "the genre's ability to contemplate the ways that humans shape historical events makes alternate history an especially useful tool for Indigenous writers, who use the subgenre to revisit and resist the history of colonialism and genocide against Native peoples" (45). Birchfield and Hausman's alt history novels are both focused on the forced removals of southeastern tribes in the 1830s, which resulted in the event today referred to as the Trail of Tears. Living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, the protagonists of Field of Honor and Riding the Trail of Tears are less interested in relitigating the history of colonialism than in insisting on their ethical responsibilities and obligations to contemporary Indigenous communities, a move Brown Spiers argues "highlights the agency and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples rather than continuing to cast them as the helpless victims of colonialism" (47).