Looking for some. Particularly sci-fi or futuristic stories. The only sci-fi one I know if is Otherland.
Examples such as story titles and the names of the people. Earth presumably. Obviously there are fictional ones
I read a fairly interesting one and for the fricken life of me cannot remember the title. Ugh sorry. All I remember of the indigenous is one of them was the keeper of the fire and carried it around in his hands. le sigh.
One of my favorite books is "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" but Michael Chabon (literary author but writing in an alternate-history setting in that novel). The main theme is an alternate reality where millions of Jews had to be re-settled in Alaska after WWII, but an important subplot in the book (which takes place in I think in the 1990s) is the interplay between the huge Yiddish-speaking city and the Native Alaskan Tlingit tribes that live on the outskirts.
Otherland as an example. It is set into the future a century or so and in some books in the series the environment is almost entirely virtual reality. One of the main characters is named !Xabbu, who is part of a bush tribe in Africa. !Xabbu's original language is that click language, the one with all the knocks and weird sounds you make with your tongue (the exclamation point denotes a loud click). What we're typically interested in while reading sci-fi is this exciting idea of what is new and inevitable because of "technological progression." This is all premised on a Western, industrial view of social progression. It is usually pretty Eurocentric. It typically excludes cultures of people such as the Kalahari in the deserts of Sub-Saharan Africa, or the Kogi in the mountains of Columbia, or the Inuit in the cold places of the north, or indigenous Polynesians. It is said that each day an ancient language dies and the culture of a people die with it. While I get just as excited as others about the idea of humanity racing toward the singularity, my heart sinks too thinking of how the stories, dreams, beliefs, rituals, sustainable ways of living with the environment, are dying out while a particular cultural lifeway "wins." For my story in particular I want to feature the Kogi of Columbia because they view themselves as guardians of mother earth, and a few years ago they came out and sent a message to the rest of the world "the younger brothers" to let them know that they had to stop destroying the world. The Kogi are one of the only remaining indigenous people of South America who live exactly as they did before European invasion. Indigenous people and cultures can function in a sci-fi story as a prophetic voice to the future that the way we're headed is too far from its human/organic roots. I'm not interested in preaching any kind of message; maybe we'll trash earth and everybody will speak English in 500 years, or Mandarin, and all indigenous languages and cultures will be literally extinct. Okay. But I find these cultures to be extremely interesting and for us to systemically exclude them from speculative fiction seems like we're losing out on a lot of potential for good storytelling.
I always worry about passing on recommendations of books that I haven't read, but here are a few suggested by the Writing Excuses podcast in their various episodes on writing non-western cultures in speculative fiction. "House of Discarded Dreams" by Ekaterina Sedia (set in Zimbabwe) http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/The-House-of-Discarded-Dreams-Audiobook/B003X3UKLK?amp%3Bqid=1349051914&amp%3Bsr=1-1&ref_=sr_1_1 "Zoo City" and "Moxyland" Lauren Bekes (set in South Africa) http://laurenbeukes.com/books/moxyland/ http://laurenbeukes.com/books/zoo-city/
Sounds interesting. Too bad in my story all the more 3rd countries were forgot about/left to die as the Earth became inhabitable to humans. The only kind of culture like that I have are a bunch of walking trees who don't like technology.
Just regular talking and walking Trees. When they grow old (when they know they are going to die [it's not fully dying]) they find a place and stand there until they become regular tall trees. I guess in a way everything is "genetically modified" though since the whole premise is that every race was created by a super advanced alien race.
