Sakinah Hofler, winner of the 2023 Analog Award For Emerging Black Voices, made an impressive acceptance speech to the audience of the online 8th Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium this past November 30. Hofler has given permission for File 770 to publish her remarks.

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I am thrilled and humbled to be selected as this year’s winner for the Analog Award for Emerging Black Voices. Growing up in an ultra-conservative Muslim community in New Jersey where the line between “RIGHT and “WRONG” was drawn with a thick black marker, I discovered complication and nuance through reading and writing. I met characters who were different races, from different backgrounds, from all around the world or different parts of the universe. I witnessed other spiritual practices. I observed how a monster could become a person and a person could become a monster. I started to see gray all around me. I questioned everything. My questioning always got me into trouble, so I spent a lot of time on punishment, banished to my room where I reread and eventually rewrote the endings of my favorite books, always asking “What if…” “What if life doesn’t have to be this way?” “What if I also lived on Fear Street and had to battle ghosts and murderers?” “What if Jim Crow had never happened? Where would we be?” I could build worlds, and no one could stop me. 

For a while, though, reality did. We have not figured out a way to live without money and, so, we have bills. I buried my questions and became practical, pursing a degree in chemical engineering. I spent years sitting in more rooms, but those rooms were filled with people dressed in uniforms and suits, making decisions about weapons while we were in the midst of two wars. Those rooms were cold. Logical. Full of statistics and devoid of empathy. Deadly. In those rooms the walls were decorated with photographs of soldiers firing mortars or howitzers or shooting M16s, the type of photos taken on bright days with expensive cameras able to capture the taut look of concentration on each soldier’s face and the billowing smoke right after the moment of fire.

I once asked my boss why we didn’t have any pictures of the weapons hitting their target. Where, I wondered, were the pictures of demolished homes, collapsed buildings, wailing children, dismembered bodies, dust?

His response: Why would anyone want to come to work and see that?

What I didn’t say at that time, but I wished I had was: because we need to see. By stripping people from their multi-faceted stories and narratives, by stripping them from their humanity, we will continue to Other. We will continue to be the protagonists in every story, lose empathy, and remain stuck in a never-ending cycle of receiving and delivering pain. We would never see what could be, how our world could different, how we could live in peace. It’s possible.

We need science fiction. We need the Octavia Butlers, the Samuel Delanys, the Ted Chiang’s, the Isaac Asimovs, the N.K. Jemisins, the Sofia Samatars, and so on. We need the Analogs, the Strange Horizons, the Lightspeeds, the FIYAHs, the Clarkesworlds, and so on to be outlets for our imaginations. I am thankful to the judges and Analog for selecting my work as this year’s winner. I’m so excited to be mentored by wonderful editors. I am thankful for all of you in this room, right here, where there’s hope and a belief in what science fiction is capable of. When it feels like the world is crumbling or, rather, stacking up dystopian nightmares (climate disaster, totalitarianism, the pandemic, income inequality, decreasing autonomy over our bodies, war, etc., etc.), it’s stories that allow us to imagine how we can shift and shape our futures, how we can interact with technology, how we can live differently, how we can change the world, by simply starting our questions with “What if…” Thank you all so much.

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[Thanks to Analog editor Trevor Quachri for obtaining permission for File 770 to publish this.]