Black writers bring a different perspective to sci-fi

Black Issues Book Review, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Kristina Nwazota

The history of slavery rewritten with Africans as masters and Europeans as slaves, African warlocks, and other fantastic themes have I become the stuff of new science fiction, often referred to as "speculative fiction." For decades, science fiction writers have stuck to traditional themes like aliens on earth, immortality, time travel and alternate worlds. Today, black writers from diverse backgrounds have begun adding layers to speculative fiction, drawing from a history of pain, loss, joy and even religion. The introduction has stirred white science fiction readers and begun to draw a whole new audience of black readers to the genre.

"Until fantasy came into it, it was really a white, teenage-boy type of audience," says New York City's Coliseum Books buyer Jay Grace. Now, with increased visibility, publishers and booksellers alike are discovering that black writers can offer an exotic twist to a genre hungry for new ideas.

"For me, it's a whole new audience," says editor Betsy Mitchell, whose Warner Books imprint, Aspect, publishes five of the genre's six award-winning black authors. She says the introduction of a new perspective into the field has appealed to a black audience, an audience that once thought science fiction didn't relate to them. "What I've heard a number of times is that blacks weren't reading science fiction because they couldn't find any characters that reminded them of them," Mitchell says. "Their stories weren't being told."

That the black story has not been told is not to say that blacks have not been writing science fiction. In 1976, Octavia Buffer (see BIBR, January-February 1999), perhaps the most well-known black science fiction writer, published her first novel, Patternmaster. The book told the story of a group of telepathic humanoids and their 4,000-year-old African leader Doro. Buffer won acclaim in the genre, publishing rifles like Mind of My Mind, Kindred, Parable of the Sower and, most recently, Parable of the Talents, but she failed to capture a totally diverse audience. Her books, With themes about the power and resilience of women, drew white feminist readers.

Her contemporaries Steven Barnes and Samuel Delaney also published successfully to a white audience, developing universal characters. Barnes says a feeling of isolation was often present during his early career as a writer. Unable to express his African-American culture in his writing, Barnes felt a division between a need to tell the science fiction stories he loved from his perspective and a need to draw what was then the genre's white audience.

"I had to find a way to express that part of myself," Barnes says. "I started asking myself how do I directly address this? There isn't enough of a black audience to keep a roof over my head." Barnes decided to write a book With a black hero, the first from a black science fiction writer. Published by St. Martin's Press in 1983, Street Lethal (Tor Books, November 1994, $4.99, ISBN 0-812-51034-8) became an instant success.

But the glory was soon lost for Barnes when he discovered upon publication why white readers were scooping the book off the shelves. "When the book came out, they put a white man on the cover," Barnes says.

Today, publishers need not go to such lengths to attract audiences to the work of black science fiction writers. Drawing their own audiences by injecting rhythms taken from histories in Africa, the Caribbean and the U.S., black writers are able to tell their stories without worrying that their books won't leave bookstore shelves.

Among the newer writers are Barnes's wife, former journalist Tananarive Due, whose stories of suspense weave love with the supernatural, and Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson, who injects memories of her childhood in Jamaica, Guyana and Trinidad into history and fantasy.

Other writers include New York-based Linda Addison, who has published poetry and short stories in Science Fiction magazine, and Nisi Shawl, whose stories have appeared frequently in Asimov's Science Fiction, the oldest sci-fi magazine in the U.S. Both writers were featured in last year's Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (see BIBR September-October 2000, page 19), the first ever anthology of black science fiction writers. Published by Warner, the work featured black writers, who for a long time could find no outlet for their work. Readers have connected with these writers whose stories reflect their own experiences, imaginations or the completely unknown. "It's a sense of the familiar for black readers and a sense of the exotic for white readers," Barnes says.

Hopkinson, who published her first science fiction novel, Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner Books, July 1998, $13.95, ISBN 0446-67433-8), after winning first place in Warner's best new novel contest, attributes her success to the addition of new dimensions that have drawn a large audience of black women and a smaller readership of Caribbeans.

"It's partly because I'm writing about communities and cultures that haven't really been featured in science fiction before," says Hopkinson.