There’s a new anthology out that I’ve got a story in. Not a new story, but a reprint. “Portobello Blind” originally appeared in Defying Doomsday from Twelfth Planet Press, an anthology about how disabled people navigate the apocalypse. After the past few years, disaster is on everyone’s mind, and so when Speculative Fiction New Zealand, one of the organisations for speculative writers that exists down here, decided to do an anthology about what happens after a disaster, I thought my story would be a good fit. So it proved to be, and Aftermath: Stories of Survival in Aotearoa New Zealand has recently been published.
As you can probably tell by the title, there’s a lot of Kiwi authors here, and a large portion of the stories are cautiously optimistic. This was by design, I think – there’s enough doom and gloom anthologies out there, but this one is more along the lines of “bad things have happened, let’s see how we can get through it,” which I’ve always thought was a valuable perspective.
In “Portobello Blind,” the heroine is a fourteen year old blind girl who’s left alone at a marine biology lab – her dad went for medicine and never came back. Anna, proving competent at obtaining a diet of shellfish and seaweed, has to contend with something else: a lack of purpose. So, while she waits for other people to turn up and let her know that she’s not the only survivor left, she starts doing science experiments… because when disaster strikes, refusing to curl up and sink into uselessness is an act of simple self-respect.
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