DarkerSpace

DarkerSpace is a publication of visions of past and future from the world’s peoples: world science fiction, and the World Mythology and skies it grows from. It reads each of them at the source — writers working from their own peoples’ origins, in their own countries and languages, and in translation.

Many of the ideas of speculative fiction are far older than the genre. They live in the origin stories and sky-knowledge of peoples everywhere: worlds made and remade, beings from beyond the sky, journeys across vast distances, time that turns back on itself. DarkerSpace looks for them where they began, and sets the new fiction beside the old stories and the old skies it carries. The writing of the diaspora will have its own place, built separately.

The GriotsWell Universe

Our world is a world of stories. The GriotsWell Universe traces where those stories come from — its line is Tracing the origins of story — and it has three sites, each a peer of the others:

• GriotsWell — Our world and the worlds of stories. The GriotsWell World Story Worlds, each built from one people’s stories, and the World Story Plot Architectures that show when those Story Worlds are laid side by side.
• DarkerSpace — Visions of past and future from the deeper parts of space. World Mythology, the Cosmological Record and World Sci-Fi.
• AfricanBookMarket — We stand on the shoulders of the past to see into the future. African writers and books, and the African peoples, lore and history they carry.

Each site holds its own part of the work, in its own voice. The concepts cross between them, and one Academy serves all three.

What World Mythology is

World Mythology is the world’s stories, gathered people by people and tribe by tribe, each with its source: the creation accounts, the tricksters and culture heroes, the journeys to the underworld and the sky, as the Akan, the K’iche’ Maya, the Yoruba, the Māori, the Lakota and many more peoples tell them. It is the ground the whole GriotsWell Universe traces. Where a people’s sacred stories are theirs to keep, they are named and cited, not retold.

On DarkerSpace, World Mythology is a section of essays, told by source and named the way the peoples themselves name things; the World Mythology Catalog, which lists the stories by people and by source; and a Who’s Who of the gods, ancestors, tricksters and heroes who walk through them. The World Mythology series tells the stories in full, in audio and video, in the Academy.

The Cosmological Record

What the world’s peoples recorded about the sky, and how they kept it: the star paths of the Hawaiian and Tahitian wayfinders, the dark constellations the Inca (Quechua) read in the Milky Way, the emu in the sky of the Euahlayi, the Yolŋu moon and tides, the Dogon Sigui and its sixty-year count. Each record is set down as its people kept it — and, where the outside record is disputed, with the dispute.

World Sci-Fi

Speculative fiction from the world’s peoples, in their own languages and in translation: the writers, the books, the works being translated now, and the traditions a novel carries in its shape. The World Sci-Fi Catalog gathers the field by the country or people each work comes from, and by the tradition it draws on.

What the Cultural Origin Library is

The Cultural Origin Library holds one entry for each people’s world: how they see the cosmos, their powers and figures, their sacred things and places, their stories and how those stories move. Each entry is the cultural ground of a GriotsWell World Story World — the Story World is built from that people’s stories, mythology and history, and the entry shows that ground. Beside them stand the GriotsWell Classic Story Worlds: the Hero’s Journey, Three-Act, Seven-Point and Four-Act, from the Greek and European dramatic tradition and the twentieth-century craft tradition.

The Academy

The Academy of the GriotsWell Universe: one Academy for GriotsWell, DarkerSpace and AfricanBookMarket. Go to the Academy →

The publications we read

Reactor (formerly Tor.com), Clarkesworld, Locus, Strange Horizons, Samovar, Omenana.

DarkerSpace is an independent publication. It has no algorithm, no engagement optimization, no sponsored content. What publishes here is what merits publishing.

Contact: ifeanyioc@darkerspace.com