Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora is exactly the sort of book for which the concept of anthologies and multi-author collections of stories based on a theme was made. Edited by Sheree Thomas, this 2000 publication brings together a varied assortment of fiction and non-fiction by Black authors writing about Black characters in a multitude of sub-genres ranging from fantasy to speculative satire to works covering the wide spectrum of science fiction. The purpose of volumes such as this is to bring to a wider mainstream readership literary works which have mostly operated well under the radar.
While a handful of these stories have managed to work their way into the academic curriculum since the book was published, the inescapable fact is that this is a collection of writing constructed by an astonishing gallery of talent. To get from the brilliantly nuanced “double consciousness” which makes Charles Chesnutt worthy of entry into the debate over who is America’s greatest short story writer to the weirdly eclectic Afro-Futurism of Henry Dumas to an unexpected foray into apocalyptic science fiction by the great master of non-fiction W.E.B. Du Bois to the rhythmic rap-as-prose mastery of tone that is Ama Patterson would otherwise necessitate giving up the space of at least half a shelf on a home bookcase.
Interestingly, a number of otherwise positive reviews have called into question the order of the stories in the first section of the book. (The second section—much shorter and limited in scope—is comprised of non-fiction essays by Black authors on the subject of actually writing speculative fiction.) The very first story is titled “Sister Lilith” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and carries a publication date of 2000. Patterson’s “Hussy Strut” concludes the fiction section, and it was published in the same year. The oldest story in the collection is Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine” and it was originally published in 1887, yet it is situated toward the middle of the volume in between another story from 2000 and a 1987 piece by Octavia Butler. Obviously, then, the collection is structured neither chronologically by publication date nor alphabetically by author.
Almost as if predicting the criticism, the editor seems to be creating a natural structure to the order of the stories by arranging the first four selections in chronological order according to the time in which they are set, only to suddenly smash that order to smithereens with Evie Shockley’s “Separation Anxiety” which leaps ahead from the story preceding it by almost two centuries. From that point on, any attempt to identify a recognizable pattern behind the selection of the order in which the stories appear seems to be a vain quest. Ironically, perhaps, that seems to be the exact point Thomas is making with her editorial decisions.
While it is the “speculative fiction” part of the title of this anthology that is the primary theme uniting the various examples, it is equally important not to overlook the word “diaspora” in the title. The definition of diaspora usually includes connotative terminology like “dispersal” and “scattering” and “movement away” from a common home. When something is dispersed, it breaks down into pieces and scatters across an area representing a movement away from its common origin. Diaspora thus describes not only the content of this collection, but its very structure.
Speculative fiction ranges across a wide spectrum of sub-genres, many of which are displayed and demonstrated in the stories. Certainly, connections within that spectrum between the cloning tale “Like Daughter” and the societal satire “Future Christmas” exist, but these two stories are so different from each other than the only way to describe them as belonging to same genre is to engage the metaphor of dispersal. Like the other stories contained within, they each originate from a common generic idea of speculation fiction, but that original concept has evolved as it has moved so far away from the point of origination that the process of dispersal is perfectly represented within the stark differences between the tales.
Far from criticizing the lack of an obviously identifiable thematic progression in the arrangement of the order in which the stories appear, this lack of order should be held up as one of the book’s greatest strengths. Not every Black author in this book is writing from the same origination point of their culture or heritage or history and neither are the works they produced a solidified portrait that defines a genre. The strength of this collection is that it meets the expectations of its title. It is a representative of the diaspora of multi-dimensional writers capable of tracing all the way back to a shared African heritage and of literature with a common starting point of speculation about what might have been or might one day be.
