DarkerSpace

I publish DarkerSpace to read world science fiction at its source, next to the World Mythology and the skies it grows from. That means writers working from their own peoples’ origins, in their own countries and languages, and the best translations I can find.

Most of the big ideas in speculative fiction are older than the genre. Worlds made and remade, beings who come down from the sky, voyages across impossible distances, time that folds back on itself: I keep finding them in origin stories and in what peoples recorded about the sky. So I go looking for them where they started, and I set the new fiction beside the old stories it carries. Writing from the diaspora will get a section of its own later.

The GriotsWell Universe

DarkerSpace is one of three sites I run under the line Tracing the origins of story. They share ideas and an Academy, and each keeps its own subject:

• GriotsWell (Our world and the worlds of stories) holds the GriotsWell World Story Worlds, each built from one people’s stories, and the Architectures of Story that run through them.
• DarkerSpace (Visions of past and future from the deeper parts of space) is this one: World Mythology, the Cosmological Record and World Sci-Fi.
• AfricanBookMarket (We stand on the shoulders of the past to see into the future) is the catalogue of African writers and books, and the lore behind them.

What World Mythology is

World Mythology is the world’s stories gathered people by people, each with its source: creation accounts, tricksters and culture heroes, descents to the underworld and climbs to the sky, as the Akan, the K’iche’ Maya, the Yoruba, the Māori, the Lakota and many more tell them. Everything else in the GriotsWell Universe is traced back to these stories. Where a people’s sacred stories are theirs to keep, I name and cite them and leave the retelling to them.

Here that means three things. There are essays, told by source and using the names the peoples use. There is the World Mythology Catalog, which lists the stories by people and by source. And there is a Who’s Who of the gods, ancestors, tricksters and heroes in them. The full tellings, in audio and video, are in the Academy’s World Mythology series.

The Cosmological Record

This is what peoples recorded about the sky, and how they kept the record: the star paths of the Hawaiian and Tahitian wayfinders, the dark constellations the Inca (Quechua) read in the Milky Way, the Euahlayi emu in the sky, the Yolŋu moon and tides, the Dogon Sigui and its sixty-year count. I set each one down as its people kept it. Where outsiders have argued about a record, the argument goes in too.

World Sci-Fi

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

What the Cultural Origin Library is

The Cultural Origin Library has one entry for each people’s world: how they see the cosmos, their powers and figures, their sacred things and places, and how their stories move. Each entry is the ground a GriotsWell World Story World stands on. Next to them are the GriotsWell Classic Story Worlds (the Hero’s Journey, Three-Act, Seven-Point and Four-Act), which come from the Greek and European stage and the twentieth-century craft books.

The Academy

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

The publications I read

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

I run DarkerSpace myself. I choose every essay and every book on the Shelf, and nobody pays to be here. If something is on these pages, it is because I read it and thought you should too.

Contact: ifeanyioc@darkerspace.com