Racism
As might be expected, a major theme of this collection is the issue of racism. These are stories written by black authors populated by black characters. These stories are also speculative fiction, meaning they take place within a world that one hopes would be post-racism. Whether or not the future is one without racism is unknown, but expectations seem low. Speculative fiction need not take place in the future, however, and some of these stories are set in the past or what is the past now but was the present at the time of composition. Introducing racism into the individual stories is not universal to the entire collection. In some cases, racism is unchanged. In other cases, it exists, but at a different level than as practiced in the world, we know.
Diversity in Science Fiction
While most of the content is fairly recent, a few reach well back into American literary history. The author of America’s finest short story ever, Charles W. Chesnutt is represented here instead by his most well-known story which is, tellingly, completely unknown by most Americans. “The Goophered Grapevine” was published in 1887. While the name W.E.B. Du Bois may be famous, the fact that in 1920 he wrote an apocalyptic short story title “The Comet” in which a black man and white women think they are the only survivors of an astronomical collision is less so. A point running throughout the selection process of the book is that speculative fiction was being written by African Americans throughout the entire 20th century. The theme is that even if overlooked for much of that time, this writing matters and needs to become more well-known.
Race and Writing
The contents of the collection are divided into two unequal parts. The bulk of the collection is devoted to short fiction. The rest is comprised of non-fictions essays on the subject of writing speculative fiction by black authors. The most direct of these essays is Samuel Delaney’s “Racism and Science Fiction” which hits the point directly in the title and is a thoughtful examination of how an author’s race impacts the ability to publish. That essay stands in contrast to Octavia Butler’s “The Monophobic Response” which takes a more metaphorical approach to the issue of race by aligning being black in majority white society with the Otherness of being an alien creature. The thematic center of this section of the book is idea that that due to significantly different cultural experiences, speculative fiction written by black authors is necessarily different from that of white authors with a particularly strong tendency to treat non-humans with greater sympathy and understanding.
