Black writers bring a different perspective to sci-fi.

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.

This new exposure for black writers has opened the door to black readers. Robin Green-Cary, owner of Sibanye bookstore in Baltimore says, "I've been selling books for almost ten years. I can tell you in my first four or five years, I sold virtually no science fiction. But in the last few years, it's been steadily increasing, and it's a loyal audience." Green-Cary says the audience is women, men, young and old. "I can move it across the board," she reports.

At Barnes & Noble in New York, science fiction buyer James Killen said book buyers' response to authors like Hopkinson and Due has been great. He says black science fiction writers are selling well for the store, and the audience--from all backgrounds--continues to expand.

"As more blacks enter the genre," says Killen, "I think that portion of the audience is also going to grow."

Black versus white science fiction

Still, Steven Barnes says black authors have to be mindful when considering the subject matter for their work, especially if they want to sell to a broad audience.

"If they make [the story] specifically about white versus black, white readers won't read it. If it's just about black people," Barnes says, "you very definitely run the risk of a lot of white readers saying, `Well, that's interesting, but I'm not reading that.'"

Despite Barnes's reservations, black writers are doing well. Octavia Butler won the 1999 Nebula Award, science fiction's highest honor, given by the Academy of Science Fiction for her novel Parable of the Talents (Warner Books, January 2000, $13.95, ISBN 0-446-67578-4). In 2001, black writers were among the nominees for several awards. Hopkinson was a finalist for the 2000 Nebula Award and the 2001 Hugo Award for Best Novel for her work on Midnight Robber (see BIBR, July-August 2000, page 25).

Tracey Minor runs ScifiNoir.com, a two-year-old, online chat group for lovers of science fiction written by black authors. The group has over 300 members and includes fans from the U.S., Australia, England, the Caribbean and even Holland. Minor says, "The age range is from 19 to 61. They come from all walks of life."

Minor says she has been reading science fiction for years, but only recently discovered non-white sci-fi writers. Her online group discusses public perceptions of people of color writing in the genre, black characters, and how stories with white heroes could be influenced by the injection of black heroes. Some of the members, she says, include white writers looking for ways to make their black characters more believable.

Dark Matter editor Sheree Thomas attributes part of the attention black writers in the genre have received to the success of her book. Thomas says, "Publishers are now willing to support this type of literature."

Traveling around the country and meeting black science fiction writers with nowhere to publish, along with her love for the genre, led her to compile the anthology, says Thomas. Many of the writers featured in the anthology, she reports, had been writing for years without recognition. Thomas looks forward to all categories of science fiction being re-imagined by black authors.

"We're putting black lives into the future," she says, "and adding some of our interpretation of the past."

Soon to be published speculative fiction

Dark Matter II:
Speculative Fiction
from the African
Diaspora
edited by Sheree Thomas
Aspect, Winter 2002

Lion's Blood
by Steven Barnes
Aspect Books, February 2002
$24.95, ISBN 0-446-52668-1
The story of slavery rewritten
from an African perspective.

Good House
by Tananarive Due
Harper/Prism
The story of
living in a haunted house in a
mostly white, small town.

A Sampling of Speculative Fiction For readers who say they don't read science fiction, Nalo Hopkinson counters that you may not know that what you're reading is science fiction.

"There's just so much out there that is not genre science fiction, but is magic realism, and it is quite at home on the shelves of the science fiction bookstore," Hopkinson says.

Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Knopf, October 1998
(reprint edition)
$16.95, ISBN 0-375-40273-X

Mama Day
by Gloria Naylor
Vintage Books, April 1989
(reprint edition)
$13.00, ISBN 0-679-72181-9

Mumbo Jumbo
by Ismael Reed
Scribner,
June 1996
$12.00, ISBN 0-684-82477-9

Madame Fate
by Marcia Douglas
Soho Press,
January 1999
$24.00, ISBN 1-569-47134-7

Kristina Nwazota is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in New York magazine and The Fader. She is a former managing editor of Black Issues Book Review and Harlem Overheard, a youth-oriented newspaper. A graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Kristina lives and works in New York City, where she teaches a weekend newswriting course. Nwazota takes a look at the new face of black speculative fiction, beginning on page 28.