The two best stories in the collection, Vandana Singh's "Delhi" and Greg van Eekhout's "Native Aliens," are also the only stories that don't read like they were originally intended to be taught to students. They are stories that allow complexity of interpretation and that allow readers to construct their own meanings from the narrative.

"Delhi" is a particularly good example of this, telling the tale of a man who can see into possible pasts and futures and who is charged with finding someone whose fate is a mystery to him. It is a truly postcolonial story according to all of the criteria laid out by Mehan and Hopkinson, but also a subtle tale of possession, humanity, and history that is compelling to read and written with a great sensitivity to language and detail. Singh combines a few different SF concepts in a rich and vital story, one that succeeds at provoking thought by creating multifaceted characters and situations.

"Native Aliens" is somewhat less successful, partly because the science fictional story it uses as counterpoint is less compelling than the mainstream story that is the meat of the tale, but it is ambitious and carefully told. The narrative alternates between scenes from the twentieth-century life of a Dutch-Indonesian family and scenes from the twenty-fourth century life of a man being returned to Earth because that's where his people originally came from, even though he knows nothing of them and his body has adapted to the local environment. The twentieth-century scenes are sparingly and effectively constructed, while the twenty-third century scenes are tantalizing, causing me, for one, to hope van Eekhout expands "Native Aliens" into a longer form.

Other stories in the book deserve some attention, though they are unsatisfying in one way or another. "Rachel" by Larrissa Lai is a great idea -- retelling some of the events of the movie Blade Runner from the point of view of one of its characters, but the story is more tease than treat. Nonetheless, Lai's technique is a smart one, and I could imagine a gratifying anthology of such stories, wherein writers retell, for instance, Gulliver's Travels and Farnham's Freehold and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Tobias Buckell takes a stab at retelling quite a few stories in "Necahual," where everything from the Aztecs to Heinlein is thrown in a blender and turned into a space opera smoothie that would have benefited from having some of its expositional chunks strained out. Buckell's is the last story in the book, and it complements well the first, "Deep End" by Nisi Shawl, an unpretentious SF story with some provocative ideas and not much else. Both stories have virtues, but the premise of this anthology has pushed the authors, who have each done better work elsewhere, to sculpt their narratives with a preference for theme and at the cost of other elements.

Just as Hugo Gernsback required early science fiction stories to be technological diagrams, the worst stories in So Long Been Dreaming are political diagrams whose narratives bend and strain against the rigors of their authors' ideologies. The following paragraph from "Journey into the Vortex" by Maya Khankhoje is unfortunately not unique:

This is one of the many truths that she understood but failed to accept: that men are rewarded for destroying life and women for creating it. But that seems to be in the nature of all dualities, for how can we see the radiance of goodness when there is no shadow of evil to set it off?

There are other stories in So Long Been Dreaming, some of them not terrible (stories by Eden Robinson, Karin Lowachee, and others), some of them quite bad. Readers who desire art that is a form of propaganda will enjoy much of the book; the rest of us are left with only intermittent pleasures. It is, I suppose, the danger any anthology of this sort faces, the danger of choking on its own best intentions. There are worse crimes in the world, and I hope more editors and writers will tackle the difficult, perhaps impossible, task of rewriting the future history of colonialism. If they do, So Long Been Dreaming will be justified as a founding text and celebrated as a nudge toward greater things.