The original essay was prompted by a prominent science fiction writer’s curiosity over the lack of black fans at sf conventions. From that, he inferred a small, if not negligible, black sf readership. In the absence of hard data, even today, it’s difficult to say whether black attendance at cons has increased, or whether our proportion of the readership as a whole has grown. However, there has been a definite increase in black content in the field. And the number of black writers has grown, even though the total whose books have been released by mass-market publishing houses can still be counted on the fingers of two hands. But that’s better than the fingers of one hand, which was where the situation stood in the late 1970s.
At that time, science fiction was still in the process of freeing itself from the grasp of its so-called Golden Age in the 1930s–1950s, when hard science was a king whose court was closed to blacks. And fantasy was still frozen in an amber of Celtic and Arthurian themes. Now, at the turn of the century, a year that has been fraught with significance of sf fans since it first became popular back in the 1920s, it’s time to reassess the relevance of the genre to black readers. Today, both fields in the genre have opened considerably. Hard science fiction shares shelf space with “soft” sf, New Wave, and cyberpunk. Fantasy writers are exploring non-European cultures, mostly Asian but also, occasionally, African. Much of what would have turned off potential black readers in the seventies is gone now. Yet some of those shortcomings remain, even as remnants of racism continue to plague the real world of the twenty-first century.
Check out the changes…
Until the 1970s, there was really only one working black writer in the sf field: Samuel R. Delany. Although he wasn’t the first black to write science fiction, he was, and remains, a giant in the genre, and his name is mentioned in the same breath as those of Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke. However, Delany’s fiction production has diminished over the past twenty years, as he produces an astonishing amount of literary criticism and other nonfiction. Even so, his work is still more classic than contemporary. However, the seventies ushered in a second giant to stand beside Delaney: Octavia Butler. At the time I wrote my essay, Butler was just beginning to make her mark. Her heyday came during the 1980s, beginning, in my opinion, with Wild Seed, an epic that chronicles intergenerational abuse of psionic powers. Kindred, her time-travel/slavery novel, is an sf/fantasy equivalent of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. With its dual setting in the late seventies, Kindred would probably have made a better movie project for Oprah Winfrey. In the future Oprah should consider featuring Butler’s later novels, The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents, in her book club, a move that would help give Butler the wider audience she deserves. But Butler’s popularity among mainstream readers has grown with the Parable series, possibly attracting some of the same readers who enjoy Toni Morrison.
By the way, even though it was marketed as mainstream literature, the strong supernatural element in Beloved could easily qualify it as fantasy, or, at the very least, horror in the mode of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, if not Stephen King’s Bag of Bones. Like Morrison, Butler writes from a black perspective, creating stories that envision a multicultural world. Also like Morrison, her themes are universal. One could also say that her work is more accessible than that of Delany, who sometimes writes on an esoteric literary and intellectual plane. If there were only one reason why blacks should read science fiction, it would be the writings of Octavia Butler.
But, of course, there are more.
Another writer I would recommend to readers is Steven Barnes, who broke through in the 1980s. Barnes began by collaborating with hard-sf writer Larry Niven. Later, he ventured out on his own, with books that feature futuristic black characters who are well versed in martial arts. His novel Blood Brothers delves into themes that could be lifted directly from today’s headlines: racism, survivalism, computer-gone-amuck-ism. The intergenerational aspect of Blood Brothers shows a bit of Butler’s pioneering influence.
However, Butler’s true literary child is Nalo Hopkinson, a Caribbean-Canadian writer who made a big splash in 1998 with her award-winning first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring. Hopkinson doesn’t imitate Butler, but she does echo the older writer’s strengths in plotting and characterization. Brown Girl is a deft mix of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and Caribbean culture and folklore. Another recent debut came from actor LeVar Burton, who played the character Geordie LaForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. His Aftermath was a dystopian-future story told from a black perspective more reminiscent of Steven Barnes than Octavia Butler.
Yet, blacks weren’t the only writers to mine the rich veins of African and African-American experiences for their work. Even as new black writers emerged during the 1980s and 1990s, white writers were including more black characters in their stories and writing novels with black-oriented themes. Thankfully, few of them echoed the shortcomings of their predecessors. So far, there haven’t been any new Farnham’s Freeholds, but then there haven’t been any new Ray Bradbury blacks-on-Mars scenarios, either, unless one takes note of Nalo Hopkinson’s recent work Midnight Robber, a novel that offers readers two planets populated by the descendants of Afro-Caribbeans. The following examples are only the most immediate, as my reading in the genre has tailed off over the past decade or so.
F. M. Busby’s Zelda M’tana evoked the feisty black heroines Pam Grier used to play in the so-called “blaxploitation” films of the seventies. However, M’tana, a ghetto girl who works her way up the ladder of a space fleet, is neither stereotype nor caricature. She is, perhaps, Busby’s answer to the glamorous Lieutenant Uhura of Star Trek fame, played by Nichele Nichols, who also cowrote a science fiction novel, Saturn’s Child. Alan Dean Foster explored Masai and the shaitan-sculpture of Mozambique in Into the Out Of, which was published in 1986. More recently, he has written an African-oriented space fantasy called Carnivores of Light and Darkness, which is the first of a trilogy. His setting is the Africa of another world, an alternative Africa in which evolution and magic have worked hand in hand to produce an environment that is both familiar and strikingly alien. Neither of these books contains negative stereotypes, in my opinion, and they fulfill the thought-provoking, mind-expanding promise upon which the genre failed to deliver in the past.
Alternate history has always been a staple of sf, and two of the subgenre’s most proficient practitioners, Harry Turtledove and Orson Scott Card, have included blacks in their musings about Americas that might have been. Turtledove works from the premise that the South won the Civil War, leading to two nations occupying the land we call the United States. Slavery persists in Turtledove’s South, and the North is hostile to blacks, blaming them for the lost war. In So Few Remain, Turtledove paints a poignant picture of what the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s life might have been like if the cause to which he had dedicated his life had ended in failure.
In the alternate America Card postulates in his Alvin Maker series, the fledgling U.S. scored only a partial victory in the Revolutionary War, leaving the South in the hands of the British. Also, in Card’s world, magic works through psionic powers called “knacks.” In the fifth volume of the series, Heartfire, Card evokes the psychological and spiritual cost of slavery. In both Card’s and Turtledove’s work, the “n-word” is used liberally. Its use is a reflection of the settings of their stories, and the characters out of whose mouths the word spews are, like Huck Finn’s father, a long way from admirable.
Of course, this discussion would not be complete without a mention of the work of Mike Resnick. There is no middle ground of opinion on Resnick’s African-based sf. It is either admired or despised. Depending on one’s point of view, he is either a bold visionary or the reincarnation of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose racially incorrect Tarzan novels defined Africa’s place in the world of the imagination for most of this century. He is either exploring new imaginative territory or turning Africa into his own private “game reserve” of story material. Resnick’
s principal contributions are stories and novels set on an Afro-topian space colony called Kirinyaga, and Future Earths: Under African Skies, a 1993 anthology he coedited with Gardner Dozois. Some excerpts from the anthology provide some clues about Resnick’s attitudes:
But while Africa has lost some of the mystery and romance of [H. Rider] Haggard’s and Burroughs’ day, it now provides thoroughly documented examples of some of the most fascinating people and societies any writer, searching for the new and the different and the alien, could hope to find. (here)
Please note Resnick’s use of the word “alien” to describe African people and culture. He supports his argument with examples of African practices that are indeed at odds with the standards of contemporary Western societies: the survival of slavery in Sudan, the practice of female circumcision, the excesses of dictatorial rulers like Idi Amin and Jean-Bedel Bokassa. After extolling such calamities as great “story material,” Resnick asks: “Is there anyone out there who still thinks Africa isn’t alien enough?”
Obviously, Resnick doesn’t think so. His attitude echoes that of a bygone age, when plantation owners in the U.S. South believed Africa was indeed “alien enough” to justify transporting Africans to labor in bondage in a country that was founded on principles of freedom. By the way, one has to wonder why Resnick cited only reprehensible leaders like Amin and Bokassa, and ignored Nelson Mandela, who not only made an incredible transition from political prisoner to president of South Africa, but also forgave those who had imprisoned him. Perhaps Mandela’s life story was too “alien” for Resnick. There are no Mandelas in the Future Earths anthology. Most of its stories were unremittingly negative; they took today’s headlines about the woes of Africa and projected them onto the future. Resnick’s contribution is a Kirinyaga story, and even though Kirinyaga is a utopian world, its stability comes at a price Resnick seems to think is much too high: cultural stagnation.
Having said that, though, it is only fair to note that in Koriba, the leader of the Kirinyaga world, Resnick has created an African character who has personal strength and integrity that would never—could never—be even imaginable in a Burroughs novel. Resnick and Burroughs are products of their times. Each of them has taken the worst his times have offered about Africa, and either ignored or discounted the positive aspects of the continent’s history and culture. The difference is, Burroughs probably didn’t know any better. Resnick, who also pens a regular column under the name of “Ask Bwana” in the sf publication Speculations, does, but he goes ahead and trashes Africa anyway.
Resnick is right, though, in his argument that Africa is fertile ground for sf story ideas. And it ought to be even more fertile for fantasy. Yet for the most part, the fantasy genre has lagged behind sf in opening its doors to stories based on the legends of non-European cultures. My own attempt at opening such a door, the Imaro heroic fantasy series, did not find the readership it needed to remain in print. More black characters are appearing in the genre, though, and one excellent novel, Lee Killough’s Leopard’s Daughter, incorporated a great deal of genuine African folklore and history. Unfortunately, Killough’s book didn’t receive the attention it deserved. Leopard’s Daughter came out more than a decade ago, and there haven’t been many other African-oriented fantasy novels, although blacks have appeared more often in supporting roles.
So some good material has emerged over the past two decades, even if one has to look long and hard for it. But there’s a reason for blacks to read and write science fiction that goes beyond the number of black writers in the field, or the number of black characters who can break-dance on the head of a micrometeorite in someone’s hard-science plot line. Science fiction serves as the mythology of our technological culture. Imagination is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, and probably also marked the main difference between us and our close evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, enabling our ancestors to leave them behind tens of thousands of years ago. The human imagination manifests itself in stories. Those stories become legends, myths, the defining elements of a culture. And for all the condescending disdain the literary establishment has heaped on sf and fantasy, writers in those genres serve a function similar of that of the bard or the griot in ways “literary” writers cannot approach.
We blacks have more than made our mark in the Western world’s popular culture. Imagine how diminished the arts would be without the contributions of people from Duke Ellington to Alice Walker. We need to contribute to our culture’s overall mythology as well, and provide alternatives to the stereotypes that continue to plague us within that mythology.
After all, if we don’t unleash our imaginations to tell our own sf and fantasy stories, people like Mike Resnick will tell them for us. And if we don’t like the way he’s telling them, it’s up to us to tell them our own way. Butler, Barnes, and Hopkinson have met that challenge admirably. But they represent only a tiny fraction of the total number of writers in the field. That fraction has to grow.
The onus is on us. We have to bring some to get some in outer space and otherspace, as we have done here on Earth. Just as our ancestors sang their songs in a strange land when they were kidnapped and sold from Africa, we must, now and in the future, continue to sing our songs under strange stars.
BLACK TO THE FUTURE
Walter Mosley
(2000)
I’ve been reading fantasy and science fiction since I was a child. From Winnie-the-Pooh to Tom Swift and his Jetmarine; from Marvel Comics to Ray Bradbury to Gabriel García Márquez. Any book that offers an alternative account for the way things are, catches my attention—at least for a few chapters. This is because I believe that the world we live in is so much larger, has so many more possibilities, than our simple sciences describe.
Anything conceivable I believe is possible. From the creation of life itself (those strings of molecules that twisted and turned until they were self-determinate) to freedom. The ability to formulate ideas into words, itself humanity’s greatest creation, opens the door for all that comes after. Science fiction and its relatives (fantasy, horror, speculative fiction, etc.) have been a main artery for recasting our imagination. There are few concepts or inventions of the 20th century—from submarine to newspeak—that were not first fictional flights to fancy. We make up, then make real. The genre speaks most clearly to those who are dissatisfied with the way things are: adolescents, post-adolescents, escapists, dreamers, and those who have been made to feel powerless. And this may explain the appeal that science fiction holds for a great many African-Americans. Black people have been cut off from their African ancestry by the scythe of slavery and from an American heritage by being excluded from history. For us, science fiction offers an alternative where that which deviates from the norm is the norm.
Science fiction allows history to be rewritten or ignored. Science fiction promises a future full of possibility, alternative lives, and even regret. A black child picks up a copy of Spider-Man and imagines himself swinging into a world beyond the limitations imposed by Harlem or Congress. In the series of “Amber” novels, Roger Zelazny offers us the key to an endless multitude of new dimensions. Through science fiction you can have a black president, a black world, or simply a say in the way things are. This power to imagine is the first step in changing the world. It is a step taken every day by young, and not so young, black readers who crave a vision that will shout down the realism imprisoning us behind a wall of alienating culture.
In science fiction we have a literary genre made to rail against the status quo. All we need now are the black science fiction writers to realize these ends.
But where are they?
There are only a handful of mainstream black science fiction writers working today. There are two major voices: Octavia E. Butler, winner of a coveted MacArthur “genius” grant, and Samuel R. Delaney, a monumental voice in the field since the ’60s. Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due are starting to make their marks. There are also flashes of the genre in such resp
ected writers as Toni Morrison and Derrick Bell. But after these notables, the silence washes in pretty quickly.
One reason for this absence is that black writers have only recently entered the popular genres in force. Our writers have historically been regarded as a footnote best suited to address the nature of our own chains. So, if black writers wanted to branch out past the realism of racism and race, they were curtailed by their own desire to document the crimes of America. A further deterrent was the white literary establishment’s desire for blacks to write about being black in a white world, a limitation imposed upon a limitation.
Other factors that I believe have limited black participation in science fiction are the uses of play in our American paradise. Through make-believe a child can imagine anything. Being big like his father. Flying to the moon on an eagle’s back. Children use the images they see and the ones that they are shown. Imagine whiteness. White presidents, white soldiers, the whitest teeth on a blond, blue-eyed model. Media images of policemen, artists, and scientists before the mid-’60s were almost all white. Now imagine blackness. There you will find powerlessness ignorance, servitude, children who have forgotten how to play. Or you will simply not find anything at all—absence. These are the images that have made war on the imagination of Black America.
It is only within the last 30 years that blackness has begun appearing in even the slightest way in the media, in history books and in America’s sense of the globe. And with just this small acknowledgment there has been an outpouring of dreams. Writers, actors, scientists, lawyers, and even an angel or two have appeared in our media. Lovers and cowboys, detectives and kings have come out of the fertile imagination of Black America.
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