Black science fiction

In 1859, Martin Delany (1812–1885), one of the foremost U.S. black political leaders and known as the "father of Black Nationalism,"[8] began publishing Blake, or the Huts of America as a serial in the Anglo-American Magazine. Delany, also internationally known as a scientist and explorer,[9] positioned Blake as an engagement with the racial sciences of the time.[10] The Anglo-American Magazine often also published articles on science, particularly the science of race.[10] The subject of Delany's serial novel is a successful slave revolt in the Southern states and the founding of a new black country in Cuba. Samuel R. Delany described it as "about as close to an SF-style alternate history novel as you can get."[11] The serialization ended prematurely, but the entire novel was eventually published in serial form in the Weekly Anglo-African in weekly installments from November 1861 to May 1862.

The Anglo-African was considered the premier publication featuring the work of black scientists and theorists; Blake's inclusion in its serials highlights its connection to a larger political context focused on black citizenship in the antebellum South.[10] Further, while it incorporates elements of the fugitive slave narrative, Blake's narrator is also a scientist, whose focus on data collection and research stand in repudiation of the racial science of the day.[10] In fact, this reflects one of Delany's major themes: that Africa and its contributions to science and math were foundational to the Western world.[12]

In terms of genre, Blake represents an early example of black utopian speculative fiction.[7] In Passing and the African American Novel, Maria Giulia Fabi writes, "Less convinced of the libratory potential of technological progress than their white counterparts, African American utopian writers focused on the process of individual and collective ideological change rather than on the accomplished perfection of utopia itself."[13] It is also a proto-Afrofuturist novel. Lisa Yaszek writes, "[I]n a move that would set the tone for nearly a century of Afrofuturist SF to come," Delany explores the ambivalence and precarity of black cultural survival while simultaneously arguing for black technological prowess.[14] Further, because of Delany's interest in black separatism and the establishment of a black state, Blake is an extension and exploration of the themes and ideas he explored in his 1852 publication of The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States.[15] Blake was never published as a complete, stand-alone novel in the nineteenth century.[10]

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) was a noted writer of folkloric hoodoo stories. His collection The Conjure Woman (1899) is the first known speculative fiction collection written by a person of color. The 1892 novel Iola Leroy by Frances Harper (1825–1911), the leading black woman poet of the 19th century, has been described as the first piece of African-American utopian fiction on account of its vision of a peaceful and equal polity of men and women, whites and former slaves. In contrast, the 1899 novel Imperium in Imperio by Sutton Griggs (1872–1933) ends with preparations for a violent takeover of Texas for African Americans by a secret black government.[6] Imperium in Imperio is credited with being the first political novel written by an African American.[16] Griggs self-published his novel and sold it door-to-door.[1]

Of One Blood (1902) by the prolific writer and editor Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930), describing the discovery of a hidden civilization with advanced technology in Ethiopia, is the first "lost race" novel by an African-American author. However, unlike other entrants into this genre, Hopkins' "lost race" offers a homecoming to her black protagonists.[7] Light Ahead for the Negro, a 1904 novel by Edward A. Johnson (1860–1944), is an early attempt at imagining a realistic post-racist American society, describing how by 2006 Negroes are encouraged to read books and given land by the government. W. E. B. Du Bois's 1920 story The Comet, in which only a black man and a white woman survive an apocalyptic event, is the first work of post-apocalyptic fiction in which African Americans appear as subjects. George Schuyler (1895–1977), the noted conservative U.S. critic and writer, published several works of speculative fiction in the 1930s, using the framework of pulp fiction to explore racial conflict.[6] Published in The Pittsburgh Courier, Schuyler's serials lampoon the Talented Tenth, criticize colorism, and explore double-consciousness.[7]

By the 1920s, speculative fiction was also published by African writers. In South Africa, the popular 1920 novel Chaka, written in Sotho by Thomas Mofolo (1876–1948) presented a magical realist account of the life of the Zulu king Shaka. Nnanga Kôn, a 1932 novel by Jean-Louis Njemba Medou, covers the disastrous first contact of white colonialists with the Bulu people. It became so popular in Medou's native Cameroon that it has become the basis of local folklore. 1934 saw the publication of two Nigerian novels describing the deeds of rulers in a mythic version of the country's past, Gandoki by Muhammadu Bello Kagara (1890–1971) and Ruwan Bagaja by Abubakar Imam. In 1941, the Togolese novelist Félix Couchoro (1900–1968) wrote the magical realist romance novel Amour de Féticheuse. The story Yayne Abäba in the 1945 collection Arremuňň by Mäkonnen Endalkaččäw, an Ethiopian writer writing in Amharic, is notable as an early work of Muslim science fiction, describing the adventures of a teenage Amhara girl sold into slavery.[6]

Writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Minister Faust, Nnedi Okorafor, N. K. Jemisin, Tananarive Due, Andrea Hairston, Geoffrey Thorne, Nisi Shawl, and Carl Hancock Rux are among the writers who continue to work in black science fiction and speculative fiction.

Samuel R. Delany is a noted science fiction writer, literary critic, and memoirist whose science fiction explores and experiments with mythology, race, memory, sexuality, perception and gender. In 2013, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named Delany its 30th SFWA Grand Master.

Delany addressed the challenges facing African Americans in the science fiction community in an essay titled "Racism and Science Fiction."

Since I began to publish in 1962, I have often been asked, by people of all colors, what my experience of racial prejudice in the science fiction field has been. Has it been nonexistent? By no means: It was definitely there. A child of the political protests of the ’50s and ’60s, I’ve frequently said to people who asked that question: As long as there are only one, two, or a handful of us, however, I presume in a field such as science fiction, where many of its writers come out of the liberal-Jewish tradition, prejudice will most likely remain a slight force—until, say, black writers start to number thirteen, fifteen, twenty percent of the total. At that point, where the competition might be perceived as having some economic heft, chances are we will have as much racism and prejudice here as in any other field.

We are still a long way away from such statistics.

But we are certainly moving closer.[11]