Advertisement
| african american science fiction: Wild Seed Octavia E. Butler, 2023-03-28 In an epic, game-changing, moving and brilliant story of love and hate, two immortals chase each other across continents and centuries, binding their fates together -- and changing the destiny of the human race (Viola Davis). Doro knows no higher authority than himself. An ancient spirit with boundless powers, he possesses humans, killing without remorse as he jumps from body to body to sustain his own life. With a lonely eternity ahead of him, Doro breeds supernaturally gifted humans into empires that obey his every desire. He fears no one -- until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu is an entity like Doro and yet different. She can heal with a bite and transform her own body, mending injuries and reversing aging. She uses her powers to cure her neighbors and birth entire tribes, surrounding herself with kindred who both fear and respect her. No one poses a true threat to Anyanwu -- until she meets Doro. The moment Doro meets Anyanwu, he covets her; and from the villages of 17th-century Nigeria to 19th-century United States, their courtship becomes a power struggle that echoes through generations, irrevocably changing what it means to be human. |
| african american science fiction: Black Space Adilifu Nama, 2010-01-01 Winner, Rollins Book Award, Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2008 Science fiction film offers its viewers many pleasures, not least of which is the possibility of imagining other worlds in which very different forms of society exist. Not surprisingly, however, these alternative worlds often become spaces in which filmmakers and film audiences can explore issues of concern in our own society. Through an analysis of over thirty canonic science fiction (SF) films, including Logan's Run, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Back to the Future, Gattaca, and Minority Report, Black Space offers a thorough-going investigation of how SF film since the 1950s has dealt with the issue of race and specifically with the representation of blackness. Setting his study against the backdrop of America's ongoing racial struggles and complex socioeconomic histories, Adilifu Nama pursues a number of themes in Black Space. They include the structured absence/token presence of blacks in SF film; racial contamination and racial paranoia; the traumatized black body as the ultimate signifier of difference, alienness, and otherness; the use of class and economic issues to subsume race as an issue; the racially subversive pleasures and allegories encoded in some mainstream SF films; and the ways in which independent and extra-filmic productions are subverting the SF genre of Hollywood filmmaking. The first book-length study of African American representation in science fiction film, Black Space demonstrates that SF cinema has become an important field of racial analysis, a site where definitions of race can be contested and post-civil rights race relations (re)imagined. |
| african american science fiction: Afrofuturism Ytasha L. Womack, 2013-10-01 2014 Locus Awards Finalist, Nonfiction Category In this hip, accessible primer to the music, literature, and art of Afrofuturism, author Ytasha Womack introduces readers to the burgeoning community of artists creating Afrofuturist works, the innovators from the past, and the wide range of subjects they explore. From the sci-fi literature of Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and N. K. Jemisin to the musical cosmos of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am, to the visual and multimedia artists inspired by African Dogon myths and Egyptian deities, the book's topics range from the alien experience of blacks in America to the wake up cry that peppers sci-fi literature, sermons, and activism. With a twofold aim to entertain and enlighten, Afrofuturists strive to break down racial, ethnic, and social limitations to empower and free individuals to be themselves. |
| african american science fiction: Dark Matter Sheree R. Thomas, 2004-01-02 Dark Matter is the first and only series to bring together the works of black SF and fantasy writers. The first volume was featured in the New York Times, which named it a Notable Book of the Year. |
| african american science fiction: Black Sci-Fi Short Stories Tia Ross, 2021-06-15 With topics ranging from slavery to space travel, the impressive breadth of this anthology makes for a well-rounded survey. Readers, writers, and scholars alike will find great value here. — Publishers Weekly Starred Review A deluxe edition of new writing and neglected perspectives. Dystopia, apocalypse, gene-splicing, cloning and colonization are explored here by new authors and combined with proto-sci-fi and speculative writing of an older tradition (by W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin R. Delany, Sutton E. Griggs, Pauline Hopkins and Edward Johnson) whose first-hand experience of slavery and denial created their living dystopia. With a foreword by Alex Award-winning novelist Temi Oh, an introduction by Dr. Sandra M. Grayson, author of Visions of the Third Millennium: Black Science Fiction Novelists Write the Future (2003), and invaluable promotion and editorial support from Tia Ross and the Black Writers Collective and more, this latest offering in the Flame Tree Gothic fantasy series focuses on an area of science fiction which has not received the attention it deserves. Many of the themes in Sci-fi reveal the world as it is to others, show us how to improve it, and give voice to the many different expressions of a future for humankind. The Flame Tree Gothic Fantasy, Classic Stories and Epic Tales collections bring together the entire range of myth, folklore and modern short fiction. Highlighting the roots of suspense, supernatural, science fiction and mystery stories, the books in Flame Tree Collections series are beautifully presented, perfect as a gift and offer a lifetime of reading pleasure. Table of Contents: An Empty, Hollow Interview by James Beamon The Comet by W.E.B. Du Bois Élan Vital by K. Tempest Bradford The Orb by Tara Campbell Blake, or The Huts of America by Martin R. Delany The Floating City of Pengimbang by Michelle F. Goddard The New Colossuses by Harambee K. Grey-Sun Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs Seven Thieves by Emmalia Harrington Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self by Pauline Hopkins Space Traitors by Walidah Imarisha The Line of Demarcation by Patty Nicole Johnson Light Ahead for the Negro by Edward Johnson e-race by Russell Nichols Giant Steps by Russell Nichols Almost Too Good to Be True by Temi Oh You May Run On by Megan Pindling Suffering Inside, But Still I Soar by Sylvie Soul The Pox Party by Lyle Stiles The Regression Test by Wole Talabi |
| african american science fiction: The Black Imagination, Science Fiction and the Speculative Sandra Jackson, Julie Moody Freeman, 2013-10-18 This book expands the discourse as well as the nature of critical commentary on science fiction, speculative fiction and futurism – literary and cinematic by Black writers. The range of topics include the following: black superheroes; issues and themes in selected works by Octavia Butler; selected work of Nalo Hopkinson; the utopian and dystopian impulse in the work of W.E. B. Du Bois and George Schuyler; Derrick Bell’s Space Traders; the Star Trek Franchise; female protagonists through the lens of race and gender in the Alien and Predator film franchises; science fiction in the Caribbean Diaspora; commentary on select African films regarding near-future narratives; as well as a science fiction/speculative literature writer’s discussion of why she writes and how. This book was published as a special issue of African Identities: An International Journal. |
| african american science fiction: The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction Sharon DeGraw, 2006-12-19 While the connections between science fiction and race have largely been neglected by scholars, racial identity is a key element of the subjectivity constructed in American SF. In his Mars series, Edgar Rice Burroughs primarily supported essentialist constructions of racial identity, but also included a few elements of racial egalitarianism. Writing in the 1930s, George S. Schuyler revised Burroughs' normative SF triangle of white author, white audience, and white protagonist and promoted an individualistic, highly variable concept of race instead. While both Burroughs and Schuyler wrote SF focusing on racial identity, the largely separate genres of science fiction and African American literature prevented the similarities between the two authors from being adequately acknowledged and explored. Beginning in the 1960s, Samuel R. Delany more fully joined SF and African American literature. Delany expands on Schuyler's racial constructionist approach to identity, including gender and sexuality in addition to race. Critically intertwining the genres of SF and African American literature allows a critique of the racism in the science fiction and a more accurate and positive portrayal of the scientific connections in the African American literature. Connecting the popular fiction of Burroughs, the controversial career of Schuyler, and the postmodern texts of Delany illuminates a gradual change from a stable, essentialist construction of racial identity at the turn of the century to the variable, social construction of poststructuralist subjectivity today. |
| african american science fiction: Afro-future Females Marleen S. Barr, 2008 Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New-Wave Trajectory, edited by Marleen S. Barr, is the first combined science fiction critical anthology and short story collection to focus upon black women via written and visual texts. The volume creates a dialogue with existing theories of Afro-Futurism in order to generate fresh ideas about how to apply race to science fiction studies in terms of gender. The contributors, including Hortense Spillers, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, and Steven Barnes, formulate a woman-centered Afro-Futurism by repositioning previously excluded fiction to redefine science fiction as a broader fantastic endeavor. They articulate a platform for scholars to mount a vigorous argument in favor of redefining science fiction to encompass varieties of fantastic writing and, therefore, to include a range of black women's writing that would otherwise be excluded. Afro-Future Females builds upon Barr's previous work in black science fiction and fills a gap in the literature. It is the first critical anthology to address the blackness of outer space fiction in terms of feminism, emphasizing that it is necessary to revise the very nature of a genre that has been constructed in such a way as to exclude its new black participants. Black science fiction writers alter genre conventions to change how we read and define science fiction itself. The work's main point: black science fiction is the most exciting literature of the nascent twenty-first century. |
| african american science fiction: Black and Brown Planets Isiah Lavender III, 2014-09-25 Black and Brown Planets embarks on a timely exploration of the American obsession with color in its look at the sometimes-contrary intersections of politics and race in science fiction. The contributors, including De Witt D. Kilgore, Edward James, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen S. Barr, among others, explore science fiction worlds of possibility (literature, television, and film), lifting blacks, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples out from the background of this historically white genre. This collection considers the role of race and ethnicity in our visions of the future. The first section emphasizes the political elements of black identity portrayed in science fiction from black America to the vast reaches of interstellar space framed by racial history. In the next section, analysis of indigenous science fiction addresses the effects of colonization, helps discard the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovers ancestral traditions in order to adapt in a post-Native-apocalyptic world. Likewise, this section explores the affinity between science fiction and subjectivity in Latin American cultures from the role of science and industrialization to the effects of being in and moving between two cultures. By infusing more color in this otherwise monochrome genre, Black and Brown Planets imagines alternate racial galaxies with viable political futures in which people of color determine human destiny. |
| african american science fiction: Negus Bien-Aime Wenda, 2016-07-16 NEGUS, a collection of African-American science fiction based short stories and flash fiction, will satisfy sci-fi lovers as well as urban fiction readers. Whether you're obsessed with aliens or into life after death, NEGUS hits a homerun with out of this world content that'll leave you in deep thought about this planet we call Earth. |
| african american science fiction: Race, Aliens, and the U.S. Government in African American Science Fiction Elisa Edwards, 2011 This thesis deals with contemporary African American science fiction. It focuses on three texts by Derrick Bell, Octavia Butler, and Walter Mosley and examines the ways in which they convert the dominantly white SF genre. By addressing non-traditional issues such as racism, racial boundaries, and the politics of species, these alien encounter stories demonstrate that it is not the intruders from outer space who are the real threat to U.S. society but their own (white) U.S. Government. Thesis. (Series: MasteRResearch - Vol. 2) |
| african american science fiction: Speculative Blackness André M. Carrington, 2016-02-29 In Speculative Blackness, André M. Carrington analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction—including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultures—to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Carrington’s argument about authorship, fandom, and race in a genre that has been both marginalized and celebrated offers a black perspective on iconic works of science fiction. He examines the career of actor Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed the character Uhura in the original Star Trek television series and later became a recruiter for NASA, and the spin-off series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, set on a space station commanded by a black captain. He recovers a pivotal but overlooked moment in 1950s science fiction fandom in which readers and writers of fanzines confronted issues of race by dealing with a fictitious black fan writer and questioning the relevance of race to his ostensible contributions to the 'zines. Carrington mines the productions of Marvel comics and the black-owned comics publisher Milestone Media, particularly the representations of black sexuality in its flagship title, Icon. He also interrogates online fan fiction about black British women in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Harry Potter series. Throughout this nuanced analysis, Carrington theorizes the relationship between race and genre in cultural production, revealing new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture. |
| african american science fiction: The Comet W. E. B. Du Bois, 2021-06-08 The Comet (1920) is a science fiction story by W. E. B. Du Bois. Written while the author was using his role at The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, to publish emerging black artists of the Harlem Renaissance, The Comet is a pioneering work of speculative fiction which imagines a catastrophic event not only decimating New York City, but bringing an abrupt end to white supremacy. “How silent the street was! Not a soul was stirring, and yet it was high-noon—Wall Street? Broadway? He glanced almost wildly up and down, then across the street, and as he looked, a sickening horror froze in his limbs.” Sent to the vault to retrieve some old records, bank messenger Jim Davis emerges to find a city descended into chaos. A comet has passed overhead, spewing toxic fumes into the atmosphere. All of lower Manhattan seems frozen in time. It takes him a few moments to see the bodies, piled into doorways and strewn about the eerily quiet streets. When he comes to his senses, he finds a wealthy woman asking for help. Soon, it becomes clear that they could very well be the last living people in the planet, that the fate of civilization depends on their ability to come together, not as black and white, but as two human beings. But how far will this acknowledgment take them? With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Comet is a classic work of African American literature reimagined for modern readers. |
| african american science fiction: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms N. K. Jemisin, 2010-02-25 After her mother's mysterious death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky in order to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in the first book in this award-winning fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season. Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate -- and gods and mortals -- are bound inseparably together. |
| african american science fiction: Dark Matter Sheree R. Thomas, 2014-12-02 This volume introduces black science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction writers to the generations of readers who have not had the chance to explore the scope and diversity among African-American writers. |
| african american science fiction: Fugitive Science Britt Rusert, 2017-04-18 Honorable Mention, 2019 MLA Prize for a First Book Sole Finalist Mention for the 2018 Lora Romero First Book Prize, presented by the American Studies Association Exposes the influential work of a group of black artists to confront and refute scientific racism. Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Britt Rusert uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. Fugitive Science chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims. Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields—from astronomy to physiology—to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture. This distinct and pioneering book will spark interest from anyone wishing to learn more on race and society. |
| african american science fiction: The Goophered Grapevine Charles Waddell Chesnutt, 2017-01-06 This Squid Ink Classic includes the full text of the work plus MLA style citations for scholarly secondary sources, peer-reviewed journal articles and critical essays for when your teacher requires extra resources in MLA format for your research paper. |
| african american science fiction: The City We Became N. K. Jemisin, 2020-03-24 Three-time Hugo Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N.K. Jemisin crafts her most incredible novel yet, a glorious story of culture, identity, magic, and myths in contemporary New York City. In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power. In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it's as if the paint is literally calling to her. In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels. And they're not the only ones. Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six. For more from N. K. Jemisin, check out: The Inheritance Trilogy The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms The Broken Kingdoms The Kingdom of Gods The Inheritance Trilogy (omnibus edition) Shades in Shadow: An Inheritance Triptych (e-only short fiction) The Awakened Kingdom (e-only novella) Dreamblood Duology The Killing Moon The Shadowed Sun The Dreamblood Duology (omnibus) The Broken Earth The Fifth Season The Obelisk Gate The Stone Sky How Long 'til Black Future Month? (short story collection) A glorious fantasy. —Neil Gaiman |
| african american science fiction: Kindred Octavia E. Butler, 2004-02-01 From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times). “Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” —N. K. Jemisin Developed for television by writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), executive producers also include Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans, The Patient), and Darren Aronofsky (The Whale). Janicza Bravo (Zola) is director and an executive producer of the pilot. Kindred stars Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, and Gayle Rankin. |
| african american science fiction: Black No More George Samuel Schuyler, 2012-02-14 What would happen to the race problem in America if black people could suddenly become white? |
| african american science fiction: Strange Matings Rebecca J. Holden, Nisi Shawl, 2013 This anthology celebrates the work and exploring the influence and legacy of the brilliant Octavia E. Butler. Author Nisi Shawl and scholar Rebecca J. Holden have joined forces to bring together a mix of scholars and writers, each of whom values Butlers work in their own particular ways. As the editors write in their introduction: Strange Matings seeks to continue Butlers uncomfortable insights about humanity, and also to instigate new conversations about Butler and her work conversations that encourage academic voices to talk to the private voices, the poetic voices to answer the analytic How did her work affect conceptions of what science fiction is and could be? How did her portrayals of African Americans challenge accepted assumptions and affect others writing in the field? In what ways did her commitment to issues of race and gender express itself? How did this dual commitment affect the emerging field of overtly feminist science fiction? How did it affect the perception of her work? In what ways did Butler inspire other writers and change the face of science fiction? How did she queer science fiction? In what ways did she inspire us and motivate us take up |
| african american science fiction: Black From the Future Stephanie Andrea Allen, Lauren Cherelle, 2019-08-20 Black From the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Writing encompasses the broad spectrum of Black speculative writing, including science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and Afrofuturism, all by Black women writers. Editors Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle have gathered the voices of twenty emerging and established voices in speculative fiction and poetry; writers who've imagined the weird and the wondrous, the futuristic and the fantastical, the shadowy and the sublime. |
| african american science fiction: Ready Player One Ernest Cline, 2011-08-16 #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg. “Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today • “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready? In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days. When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself. Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Village Voice • Chicago Sun-Times • iO9 • The AV Club “Delightful . . . the grown-up’s Harry Potter.”—HuffPost “An addictive read . . . part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart.”—CNN “A most excellent ride . . . Cline stuffs his novel with a cornucopia of pop culture, as if to wink to the reader.”—Boston Globe “Ridiculously fun and large-hearted . . . Cline is that rare writer who can translate his own dorky enthusiasms into prose that’s both hilarious and compassionate.”—NPR “[A] fantastic page-turner . . . starts out like a simple bit of fun and winds up feeling like a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.”—iO9 |
| african american science fiction: Fledgling Octavia E. Butler, 2011-01-04 Fledgling, Octavia Butler’s last novel, is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly un-human needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: she is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted—and still wants—to destroy her and those she cares for, and how she can save herself. Fledgling is a captivating novel that tests the limits of otherness and questions what it means to be truly human. |
| african american science fiction: The Forgotten Girl India Hill Brown, 2019-11-05 This ghost story gave me chill after chill. It will haunt you. -- R.L. Stine, author of Goosebumps Do you know what it feels like to be forgotten?On a cold winter night, Iris and her best friend, Daniel, sneak into a clearing in the woods to play in the freshly fallen snow. There, Iris carefully makes a perfect snow angel -- only to find the crumbling gravestone of a young girl, Avery Moore, right beneath her.Immediately, strange things start to happen to Iris: She begins having vivid nightmares. She wakes up to find her bedroom window wide open, letting in the snow. She thinks she sees the shadow of a girl lurking in the woods. And she feels the pull of the abandoned grave, calling her back to the clearing...Obsessed with figuring out what's going on, Iris and Daniel start to research the area for a school project. They discover that Avery's grave is actually part of a neglected and forgotten Black cemetery, dating back to a time when White and Black people were kept separate in life -- and in death. As Iris and Daniel learn more about their town's past, they become determined to restore Avery's grave and finally have proper respect paid to Avery and the others buried there.But they have awakened a jealous and demanding ghost, one that's not satisfied with their plans for getting recognition. One that is searching for a best friend forever -- no matter what the cost.The Forgotten Girl is both a spooky original ghost story and a timely and important storyline about reclaiming an abandoned segregated cemetery.A harrowing yet empowering tale reminding us that the past is connected to the present, that every place and every person has a story, and that those stories deserve to be told. -- Renee Watson, New York Times bestselling author of Piecing Me Together |
| african american science fiction: Afrofuturism Rising Isiah Lavender III, 2019-10-09 Reexamines canonical African American literary texts as science fiction, applying the narrative practice of afrofuturism in order to better understand the black experience in America. |
| african american science fiction: The Haunting of Tram Car 015 P. Djèlí Clark, 2019-02-19 P. Djèlí Clark returns to the historical fantasy universe of A Dead Djinn in Cairo, with the otherworldly adventure novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015. Finalist for the 2020 Hugo Award Finalist for the 2020 Nebula Award Finalist for the 2020 Locus Award Cairo, 1912: The case started as a simple one for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities — handling a possessed tram car. Soon, however, Agent Hamed Nasr and his new partner Agent Onsi Youssef are exposed to a new side of Cairo stirring with suffragettes, secret societies, and sentient automatons in a race against time to protect the city from an encroaching danger that crosses the line between the magical and the mundane. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. |
| african american science fiction: Sister Mine Nalo Hopkinson, 2013-03-12 Nalo Hopkinson--winner of the John W. Campbell Award, the Sunburst Award, and the World Fantasy award (among others), and lauded as one of our most inventive and brilliant writers (New York Post)--returns with a new work exploring the relationship between two sisters in this richly textured and deeply moving novel. We'd had to be cut free of our mother's womb. She'd never have been able to push the two-headed sport that was me and Abby out the usual way. Abby and I were fused, you see. Conjoined twins. Abby's head, torso, and left arm protruded from my chest. But here's the real kicker; Abby had the magic, I didn't. Far as the Family was concerned, Abby was one of them, though cursed, as I was, with the tragic flaw of mortality. Now adults, Makeda and Abby still share their childhood home. The surgery to separate the two girls gave Abby a permanent limp, but left Makeda with what feels like an even worse deformity: no mojo. The daughters of a celestial demigod and a human woman, Makeda and Abby were raised by their magical father, the god of growing things--a highly unusual childhood that made them extremely close. Ever since Abby's magical talent began to develop, though, in the form of an unearthly singing voice, the sisters have become increasingly distant. Today, Makeda has decided it's high time to move out and make her own life among the other nonmagical, claypicken humans--after all, she's one of them. In Cheerful Rest, a run-down warehouse space, Makeda finds exactly what she's been looking for: an opportunity to live apart from Abby and begin building her own independent life. There's even a resident band, led by the charismatic (and attractive) building superintendent. But when her father goes missing, Makeda will have to discover her own talent--and reconcile with Abby--if she's to have a hope of saving him . . . |
| african american science fiction: The Dark Fantastic Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, 2020-09-22 Winner, 2022 Children's Literature Association Book Award, given by the Children's Literature Association Winner, 2020 World Fantasy Awards Winner, 2020 British Fantasy Awards, Nonfiction Finalist, Creative Nonfiction IGNYTE Award, given by FIYACON for BIPOC+ in Speculative Fiction Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imagination Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter. The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world. In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.” |
| african american science fiction: Octavia E. Butler Gerry Canavan, 2016-10-31 I began writing about power because I had so little, Octavia E. Butler once said. Butler's life as an African American woman--an alien in American society and among science fiction writers--informed the powerful works that earned her an ardent readership and acclaim both inside and outside science fiction. Gerry Canavan offers a critical and holistic consideration of Butler's career. Drawing on Butler's personal papers, Canavan tracks the false starts, abandoned drafts, tireless rewrites, and real-life obstacles that fed Butler's frustrations and launched her triumphs. Canavan departs from other studies to approach Butler first and foremost as a science fiction writer working within, responding to, and reacting against the genre's particular canon. The result is an illuminating study of how an essential SF figure shaped themes, unconventional ideas, and an unflagging creative urge into brilliant works of fiction. |
| african american science fiction: A Phoenix First Must Burn Patrice Caldwell, 2020-03-10 Sixteen tales by bestselling and award-winning authors that explore the Black experience through fantasy, science fiction, and magic. Evoking Beyoncé's Lemonade for a teen audience, these authors who are truly Octavia Butler's heirs, have woven worlds to create a stunning narrative that centers Black women and gender nonconforming individuals. A Phoenix First Must Burn will take you on a journey from folktales retold to futuristic societies and everything in between. Filled with stories of love and betrayal, strength and resistance, this collection contains an array of complex and true-to-life characters in which you cannot help but see yourself reflected. Witches and scientists, sisters and lovers, priestesses and rebels: the heroines of A Phoenix First Must Burn shine brightly. You will never forget them. |
| african american science fiction: The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction Eric Carl Link, Gerry Canavan, 2015-01-26 This Companion explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fiction and their roots in the American cultural experience. |
| african american science fiction: Parable of the Sower Octavia E. Butler, 2023-03-28 This acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror from an award-winning author pairs well with 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale and includes a foreword by N. K. Jemisin (John Green, New York Times). When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' emotions. Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny. |
| african american science fiction: The Dreamer and the Dream Roger A Sneed, 2021-09-28 Analyzes the interplay of Black religious thought with science fiction to illuminate Afrofuturism as an important channel for Black religion and spirituality. |
| african american science fiction: Who Fears Death Nnedi Okorafor, 2018-03-22 An award-winning literary author enters the world of magical realism with her World Fantasy Award-winning novel of a remarkable woman in post-apocalyptic Africa. Now optioned as a TV series for HBO, with executive producer George R.R. Martin! |
| african american science fiction: The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, 2019 This book examines the link between blackness and immortality in the fledgling genre of African American vampire fiction-- |
| african american science fiction: Imperium in Imperio Sutton E. Griggs, 2022-11-13 Imperium In Imperio is a turn of a century novel which envisages what kind of leadership the Black Civil Rights Movement ought to have–one that is radical and seizes control of the government or the other which stresses on assimilation? Published in 1899 the novel proposed the radical idea of a secret underground group of radicals that is debating these issues. The faces of these two widely disparate ways are two friends–Bernard Belgrave, the proponent of militancy and Belton Piedmont, the pacifist. But what will happen when these two ideologies collide? Can their utopian ideals sustain in the face of reality? Or will their worlds descend into the chaos of a political dystopia? The novel still raises pertinent questions about the issues of Black leadership in present day America and contrary to popular belief, does not provide an easy answer! Sutton Elbert Griggs (1872-1933) was an African-American author, Baptist minister, social activist and founder of the first black newspaper and high school in Texas. |
| african american science fiction: Acacia David Anthony Durham, 2008-08-26 “David Anthony Durham has serious chops. I can’t wait to read whatever he writes next. —George R. R. Martin Welcome to Acacia . . . Born into generations of prosperity, the four royal children of the Akaran dynasty know little of the world outside their opulent island paradise. But when an assassin strikes at the heart of their power, their lives are changed forever. Forced to flee to distant corners and separated against their will, the children must navigate a web of hidden allegiances, ancient magic, foreign invaders, and illicit trade that will challenge their very notion of who they are. As they come to understand their true purpose in life, the fate of the world lies in their hands. |
| african american science fiction: The Dream of Perpetual Motion Dexter Palmer, 2010-03-02 Imprisoned for life aboard a zeppelin that floats high above a fantastic metropolis, greeting-card writer Harold Winslow pens his memoirs. His only companions are the disembodied voice of Miranda Taligent, the only woman he has ever loved, and the cryogenically frozen body of her father, Prospero, the genius and industrial magnate who drove her insane. As Harold heads toward a last desperate confrontation with Prospero to save Miranda's life, he finds himself an unwitting participant in the creation of the greatest invention of them all: the perpetual motion machine. Beautifully written, stunningly imagined, and wickedly funny, Dexter Palmer's The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a heartfelt meditation on the place of love in a world dominated by technology. |
| african american science fiction: Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk, 2018-03-15 In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds—the intertwinement of the mental and the physical—in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations. She reads (dis)ability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler (Kindred) and Phyllis Alesia Perry (Stigmata) not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. The fantasy worlds in works by N. K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson—where werewolves have obsessive-compulsive-disorder and blind demons can see magic—destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. In these texts, as well as in Butler’s Parable series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. Outlining (dis)ability's centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts. |
GENDER AND RACE IN SCIENCE FICTION AND THE EMERGENCE OF AFROFUTURISM
Afrofuturism is the created science fictional future for African Americans, mainly written by African American authors. Since the early Twentieth Century Science Fiction has been primarily …
Race in Science Fiction: The Case of Afrofuturism
Afrofuturism is speculative fiction or science fiction written by both Afrodiasporic and African authors. It's a global aesthetic movement that encompasses art, film, literature, music, and …
25 Years of Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Thought: …
Cultural critic Mark Dery first used the term in his oft-cited essay “Black to the Future” to describe “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American …
Florida State University Libraries - repository.lib.fsu.edu
establishing a Black Speculative canon and dispelling notions of African American Literature and Speculative Fiction as mutually exclusive categories, insufficient critical attention has been …
Introduction: African Science Fiction - Cambridge University Press ...
African science fiction, namely Taiwo Osinubi’s “Cognition’s Warp: African Films on Near-future Risk” (255–274). Other articles in the special edition of African Identities looked to African …
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fi ction and their roots in the American cultural …
The Rise of the Afrofuturistic Novel: a Study of the - CORE
Lagoon (2014) written by Nnedi Okorafor (a Nigerian-American author born in 1974 who currently lives in New York) is an Afrofuturistic novel; this narrative is a rich and complex text where …
Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism - catherinesramirez.com
the relationship of black people to science, technology, and humanism have been grouped beneath the rubric of Afrofuturism.1 These texts use science fiction themes, such as …
American Science Fiction" (1990) and Samuel R. Delany's …
Patrick B. Sharp's contribution on Leslie Marmon Silko use "science fiction" as a hermeneutic to recenter indigenous epistemologies and Native American realities that confront normative …
Utopia and the Gendered Past in Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood …
This paper explores the gendered dimensions of what I call Afrotopia—a particular form of black sci-ence fiction that imagines an isolated, advanced African civilization untouched by the …
Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction
Margaret Atwood considers that there is a meaningful “distinction” between “science fiction proper,” which deals with impossible beings, places, and things, and speculative fic-tion, …
Octavia Estelle Butler - University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Octavia Estelle Butler is “the first African-American woman to gain popularity and critical acclaim as a major science fiction writer” (Hine 208). She was born on June 22, 1947 in Pasadena, …
The Rise of Young Adult Black Science Fiction: An Analysis of ...
The subject of my thesis is YA science fiction literature by African American women dealing with issues of race, gender, and sexuality affecting teenagers of color in US society. In particular, I …
Feminism, Afrofuturism, and the Redefinition of Science Fiction.
science fiction by African- American writers, Barr intends Afro- Future Females to be the first volume to include both fiction by and critical works on black women writers and their …
e-Publications@Marquette - Marquette University
Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler. Seattle: Aqueduct, 2013. iii + 314 pp. $20 pbk. “The last Christmas card Octavia sent me had a photo of Mt. …
Trends in Black Speculative Fiction - Finfar
African Speculative Fiction (2021), featuring speculative fiction stories from Africa and the diaspora, published in 2020. It includes fiction by, among others, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Sheree …
African Futurism: Speculative Fictions and “rewriting the ... - JSTOR
The paper examines how speculative narrative strategies in a range of texts are brought to bear on specific historical situations on the African continent (those character-ized, for example, by …
A Companion to African American Literature - Wiley Online Library
This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new …
Afrofuturism and Generational Trauma in N. K. Jemisin‘s Broken …
N. K. Jemisin‘s Broken Earth Trilogy demonstrates that liberation from cyclical collective trauma can be imagined for oppressed groups through the Afrofuturist aesthetic mode. Jemisin …
Maureen Moynagh - JSTOR
fiction, explicitly presents the turn to science fiction and fantasy on the part of African American writers as a form of resistance against the racist confines both of the social world and the …
GENDER AND RACE IN SCIENCE FICTION AND THE EMERGENCE OF AFROFUTURISM
Afrofuturism is the created science fictional future for African Americans, mainly written by African American authors. Since the early Twentieth Century Science Fiction has been primarily written by those who sought to keep African Americans in the background, oppressed, residing in a Dystopia, or simply nonexistent.
Race in Science Fiction: The Case of Afrofuturism
Afrofuturism is speculative fiction or science fiction written by both Afrodiasporic and African authors. It's a global aesthetic movement that encompasses art, film, literature, music, and scholarship.
25 Years of Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Thought: …
Cultural critic Mark Dery first used the term in his oft-cited essay “Black to the Future” to describe “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the con-text of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a...
Florida State University Libraries - repository.lib.fsu.edu
establishing a Black Speculative canon and dispelling notions of African American Literature and Speculative Fiction as mutually exclusive categories, insufficient critical attention has been paid to mapping out the tropes and cultural constructions that distinguish Black Speculative
Introduction: African Science Fiction - Cambridge University …
African science fiction, namely Taiwo Osinubi’s “Cognition’s Warp: African Films on Near-future Risk” (255–274). Other articles in the special edition of African Identities looked to African American and
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fi ction and their roots in the American cultural experience.
The Rise of the Afrofuturistic Novel: a Study of the - CORE
Lagoon (2014) written by Nnedi Okorafor (a Nigerian-American author born in 1974 who currently lives in New York) is an Afrofuturistic novel; this narrative is a rich and complex text where science fiction meets African folklore and horror intertwines with environmental concerns. The three protagonists—Adaora, Agu and Anthony—embark on
Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism - catherinesramirez.com
the relationship of black people to science, technology, and humanism have been grouped beneath the rubric of Afrofuturism.1 These texts use science fiction themes, such as abduction, slavery, displacement, and alienation, to renarrate the past, present, and future of the African diaspora.
American Science Fiction" (1990) and Samuel R. Delany's …
Patrick B. Sharp's contribution on Leslie Marmon Silko use "science fiction" as a hermeneutic to recenter indigenous epistemologies and Native American realities that confront normative development's apocalyptic trajectory.
Utopia and the Gendered Past in Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood
This paper explores the gendered dimensions of what I call Afrotopia—a particular form of black sci-ence fiction that imagines an isolated, advanced African civilization untouched by the ravages of European colonialism and the traumas and humili-ations of enslavement.
Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction
Margaret Atwood considers that there is a meaningful “distinction” between “science fiction proper,” which deals with impossible beings, places, and things, and speculative fic-tion, “which employs the means already more or less to hand, and takes place on …
Octavia Estelle Butler - University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Octavia Estelle Butler is “the first African-American woman to gain popularity and critical acclaim as a major science fiction writer” (Hine 208). She was born on June 22, 1947 in Pasadena, California, to Laurice and Octavia M. (Guy) Butler. Of five pregnancies, Butler was the only child that her mother was able to carry to term.
The Rise of Young Adult Black Science Fiction: An Analysis of ...
The subject of my thesis is YA science fiction literature by African American women dealing with issues of race, gender, and sexuality affecting teenagers of color in US society. In particular, I focus on two YA contemporary fantasy novels by African American women and transgender authors
Feminism, Afrofuturism, and the Redefinition of Science Fiction.
science fiction by African- American writers, Barr intends Afro- Future Females to be the first volume to include both fiction by and critical works on black women writers and their contributions to speculative fiction.
e-Publications@Marquette - Marquette University
Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler. Seattle: Aqueduct, 2013. iii + 314 pp. $20 pbk. “The last Christmas card Octavia sent me had a photo of Mt. Rainier on the front. Not only did she love that mountain, she resembled it. She towered over everything ordinary; she made her own weather” (2), Nisi Shawl exults
Trends in Black Speculative Fiction - Finfar
African Speculative Fiction (2021), featuring speculative fiction stories from Africa and the diaspora, published in 2020. It includes fiction by, among others, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Sheree Renée Thomas, Tobias S. Buckell, Chinelo Onwualu, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, ZZ Claybourne, and Suyi Davies Okungbowa. Stories are in the themes of the many faces ...
African Futurism: Speculative Fictions and “rewriting the ... - JSTOR
The paper examines how speculative narrative strategies in a range of texts are brought to bear on specific historical situations on the African continent (those character-ized, for example, by genocide, civil war, cross-continental migration, urban dereliction, xenophobia, violence, and the occult) and the potential futures.
A Companion to African American Literature - Wiley Online Library
This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post - canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fi elds of study and providing the ...
Afrofuturism and Generational Trauma in N. K. Jemisin‘s Broken …
N. K. Jemisin‘s Broken Earth Trilogy demonstrates that liberation from cyclical collective trauma can be imagined for oppressed groups through the Afrofuturist aesthetic mode. Jemisin disrupts senses of scale and time, allowing the geological and the personal to play out in the same space.
Maureen Moynagh - JSTOR
fiction, explicitly presents the turn to science fiction and fantasy on the part of African American writers as a form of resistance against the racist confines both of the social world and the world of literary publishing: “The power to imagine is
