Edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. Arsenal Pulp Press, 270 pp, $24.95, softcover.

So Long Been Dreaming is "an anthology of postcolonial science fiction short stories written exclusively by people of colour", a good idea for a genre dominated by white guys. That said, any theme-oriented collection of writing must stand on its own feet, and this one does, but just barely.

It starts off poorly, opening with three seemingly unfinished stories. The fourth, onetime Vancouverite Larissa Lai's "Rachel", a tidy riff on Blade Runner from the Replicant's perspective, offers some relief.

The next story, Eden Robinson's "Terminal Avenue", forecasts a dark future of apartheid right here in Vancouver. It is the strongest piece in the collection, not surprising to readers who have already had the pleasure of discovering Robinson.

The next highlight comes from another Vancouverite, Wayde Compton. His "The Blue Road: A Fairy Tale" is an excellent allegory on the compromises people of colour have to make in our supposedly inclusive society. Similarly, American Greg van Eekhout's "Native Aliens" is a well-written story about the predicament of colonizers who try to join their own colonists, only to end up having no home at all.

Although this anthology is not specifically Canadian, its best stories all come from Canadians. (One might theorize that this shows multiculturalism is succeeding.) Ontario SF novelist Karin Lowachee's "The Forgotten Ones" is an engaging tale of Natives fighting their colonizers, only to find out they themselves are not as Native as they thought. And in "Refugees", Victoria's Celu Amberstone depicts a world where humans live in a simple manner under the protection of their so-called benefactors. It effectively explores the irony of the word refuge as the root of the story's title.

Readers looking for a consistent through-line in So Long Been Dreaming may be disappointed. It does not fully satisfy as either pure science fiction or postcolonial analysis. However, there are stories worth reading, and the editors and publisher should be commended for creating a place where, as Nalo Hopkinson writes in her introduction, "marginalized groups of people can discuss their own marginalization". That attempt, at least, is successful.