A crash course in the history of black science fiction.

March 10, 2016 4:08 AM

42 black science fiction works that are important to your understanding of its history. Nisi Shawl has assembled a rich syllabus of novels and story collections, from 1859 to 2015. Some fantasy and horror along with the strictly science fictional.
posted by doctornemo (36 comments total)

i'm not sure i'd call the intuitionist sf, but it's an interesting book (which i should read again). edit: whitehead has written several other books - anyone read any?
posted by andrewcooke at 4:15 AM on March 10, 2016

This is so cool. Thanks for sharing!
posted by Kitteh at 4:33 AM on March 10, 2016

I recommend Kai Ashante Wilson's book, The Sorceror of the Wildeeps. Excellent talent.
posted by nofundy at 5:19 AM on March 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

I read Dhalgren recently when it was mentioned here on the Blue, and loved it. On the other hand, I don't recall that I finished The Space Traders.
posted by oheso at 5:27 AM on March 10, 2016

I couldn't stand Dhalgren myself.

Who Fears Death is on my list though, and I've enjoyed the Tobias Buckell books I've read so far.
posted by Foosnark at 5:44 AM on March 10, 2016

Seconding nofundy's Sorcerer of the Wildeeps recommendation. I just read it last week and was simultaneously elated and shattered by it. It reminded me a lot of M. John Harrison's loopy, genre-boggling Virconium sequence, but with an unapologetic delight in African-American language.

If you search, though, you'll find a number of reviews that complain specifically about the language, claiming that contemporary vernacular has no place in fantasy, and oh my goodness the cussing. After reading them, I was suddenly desperately in need of an audio version of Richard K. Morgan's A Land Fit For Heroes read by Idris Elba. Or a movie version of one of Samuel R. Delaney's queer-er outings...
posted by prismatic7 at 6:25 AM on March 10, 2016

I couldn't stand Dhalgren myself.

I say good day to you, sir.

fwiw I love Dhalgren but I'm not sure it's really an "SF" novel in a way that many will recognize. It's more like slipstream or magical realism. If you want more of an SF-ass SF novel, I'd recommend Babel-17 or try some of his wonderful short fiction, like the "Driftglass" anthology.
posted by selfnoise at 6:26 AM on March 10, 2016 [3 favorites]

whitehead has written several other books - anyone read any?

In his speculative-fiction vein, if you liked The Intuitionist, you should definitely read John Henry Days and Zone One.

Of his more realist works, Sag Harbor and Colossus of New York are very New York-centric (well, duh, given the titles alone), and The Noble Hustle is a top-tier poker memoir. Apex Hides the Hurt is good but... slight? I guess? Anyway, it's good, but it's the weakest of his fiction, I'd say.
posted by Etrigan at 6:27 AM on March 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

Who Fears Death is awesome; i'd recommend Lagoon as well.
posted by allthinky at 6:33 AM on March 10, 2016

This is a really, really cool list. I like that there's lots of sort of SFish stuff on here. I think it's been easier for me to keep up with regular-old-SF-by-Black-writers but harder to find books like these that incorporate SF elements or SFnal ideas but aren't square in the middle of "obviously science fiction".

I am so looking forward to her new novel, too.

Dhalgren is....difficult. There's some kind of SF fan joke that I can never really remember that goes something like "what do the end of the universe and page fifty of Dhalgren have in common" and the punchline is, like, "hardly anyone ever gets past them", except that it's actually funny. If you like experimental novels and Ulysses and John Rechy's City of Night (which I feel like has GOT to be an influence but no one ever points it out), you'll lerrrrve Dhalgren. If not, then maybe not.

I like it a lot, but it sure wasn't the first Delany I read.

If you want to start with Samuel Delany but don't know where, here are some starting points:

1. If you like memoirs, start with Heavenly Breakfast or Motion of Light In Water - you'll get his voice and his concerns and some stuff about science fiction, and they're very engaging just as memoirs. He had the most interesting nerdy-kid childhood, there's some early Marilyn Hacker in MoLiW, they're just fun books.

2. If you like to think about writing, you could read some of his literary criticism or his advice to young writers in On Writing. I like all his critical work but Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts On the Politics of the Paraliterary might be most accessible.

3. His very New Wave SF short stories in Aye, and Gomorrah. I really like The Star Pit. It's fun to read these along with his memoirs, especially his short reminiscence of being in Greece as a hippie-ish dude; really makes some of that sixties poptimism make sense in a weird way because there's just this feeling of being able to see the world, possibilities, strangenesses, learning your powers.

4. My very, very favorite Delany short story is Time Considered As A Helix of Semi-Precious Stones. Read it for the sort of classic-SF camp-tough-guy voice, read it for the sads, read it for the S&M, read it for the romance, read it for the intersteller ice cream parlor. It's a story that really, really confused me when I was a teenager, but now I get a lot more out of it.

5. If you want to start with an SF novel, I suggest either Triton or Babel-17, the latter if you're more into straightforward SF, the former if you like socio-cultural stuff. Triton is kind of depressing, but the world is wonderful, and the restaurant scene has to be read to be believed.
posted by Frowner at 6:34 AM on March 10, 2016 [11 favorites]

I started Whitehead's Zone One but am tired of zombies and have been focusing on Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, and Nisi Shawl.

It's certainly well-written, and more immediately gripping than The Intuitionist was, for me.
posted by allthinky at 6:46 AM on March 10, 2016

Frowner, I loved those memoirs, and I'm not usually into memoirs. What a fascinating life Delany has led!
posted by elizilla at 6:54 AM on March 10, 2016

I am aware of most of these contemporary works, and would recommend Jemisin and Okorafor in a minute. I am a big fan of the trend to bring to light authors of diverse cultures and backgrounds, and have really broadened my reading because of it.
Now lets have some sci-fi from southern asia!
posted by OHenryPacey at 7:06 AM on March 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

Great link, fantastic list, thank you.

Re: Whitehead, I've read The Intuitionist (which for me was interesting in a "huh!" kind of way, but not in an "awesome!" kind of way, but YMMV) and John Henry Days (which was a much better story IMO, but unlike The Intuitionist, really has no scifi/fantasy elements).

Additional works I'd recommend (not on this list, but by authors that are on the list):

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler, easily the strongest of her Patternist novels, and an excellent fantasy-set-in-the-real-world novel. Like other great scifi/fantasy writers, Butler does a fantastic job of riffing on human (and contemporary) notions of morality through the moral lens of creatures that are different from us (the Patternist novels do this with godlike telepaths and mutants; Fledgling does this with vampires; the Lilith's Brood novels do this with DNA-swapping aliens).

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin is a brilliant fantasy novel (the first in a series, with a second due for publication later this year). What I really loved about this book was the way it felt completely familiar as a fantasy novel, but every idea in its pages felt completely new. Great exploration of systems of oppression and control--she really picks apart what makes those systems tick, and manages to do it without it feeling didactic.

Ah, what the hell--let's also include Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. It's not science fiction, but it's great. I'm including it here because it deftly skirts the line between magical realism and political satire. It's funny as hell, its commentary has real bite, and it has enough fantasy-ish elements that I think it's worth mentioning.
posted by duffell at 7:15 AM on March 10, 2016 [5 favorites]

Well, my reading list just got longer.
posted by sparklemotion at 7:48 AM on March 10, 2016

Motion of Light in Water is one of the great memoirs -- it's so well written and contains a lot of rumination on what makes an autobiography and how maybe a true autobiography is impossible. And, if you've read his early work, it's almost heart-breaking the way he was working through his own issues through his novels.

I once went to a party where one of the activities was reading pages at random from Dhalgren
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:43 AM on March 10, 2016 [5 favorites]

Metafilter: reading pages at random from Dhalgren.
posted by Death and Gravity at 9:07 AM on March 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

I can't get to the link from work, so this may have been covered...

'Jay Score' (1941) by Eric Frank Russell introduces a black surgeon. As an adolescent, this was totally unremarkable to me - until I read the lit crit that explicitly pointed it out. I think that was when America's racist history really landed for me.

It's probably one reason why I picked up The Autobiography of Malcolm-X soon after. And that's probably one reason I'm a progressive today. So, "Thanks, Eric!" Sci-Fi changes the world FTW.
posted by j_curiouser at 9:37 AM on March 10, 2016

Great list Frowner! I would add Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand which is the first Delany book I read as a young man, and is what led to eventually reading Dhalgren.

I've been lucky enough to be at a couple parties with Nisi and she's as delightful and deep in person as she comes across on the page. I highly recommend her work.
posted by lumpenprole at 9:56 AM on March 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

I must say that I am impressed by anyone who starts with SiMPlGoS. I'd say that started my Delany obsession because of the experience of getting through it (the first hundred pages being totally different in tone and emphasis from the rest, on purpose) and because I am always entranced by the spaces that Delany creates almost more than anything else - I love Dyethshome, the restaurant in Triton, Lord Whosis's castle that really isn't and the castle where Gorgik stays when he's just been brought out of the mines, etc.
posted by Frowner at 10:09 AM on March 10, 2016

It's interesting to note the watershed moment in the late 1990s. Before that, aside from Delany and Butler, most of the titles on the list were produced and published in the "literary" world rather than in SF circles; afterwards, almost everything on the list was published by a genre publisher (mostly SF, some YA), shortlisted for SF awards, and so on.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 11:02 AM on March 10, 2016

My first Delany was Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand. I read it when I was 13 and it blew my mind. Since on the title page it says that it's meant to be part one of a diptych, I spent years waiting for the second one. I only found out much later that, as a result of the AIDS epidemic, he couldn't in good faith continue to write about the kind of sexual behavior depicted in the SimPLGoS. That broke my heart.

Come for the revolutionary pronoun use, stay for the lizard sex.

Thanks for this list! I am eager to dive into it.
posted by deadbilly at 11:14 AM on March 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

Until a few years ago, I figured Delany claimed that it was part of a diptych just to fuck with us - that it was some kind of "ha ha you stupid reader, you have all these bourgeois expectations about closure and plot and garbage like that - see how you like this!!!!!"
posted by Frowner at 11:17 AM on March 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

Any list with Dhalgren on it is going to become a discussion of Dhalgren. It’s that kind of book.
I got about ¾ of the way through it. The magical disjointedness didn’t phase me, the long rambling descriptive passages did. I actually enjoyed what I read, but I need the Reader’s Digest condensed version. Any book that spends more than a page describing anything is probably a book I’m not going to make it through.

I loved Butler’s Parable books when I read them a decade ago, interesting that they’re not the ones chosen.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff on this list, but my problem with lists that are too inclusive is that I have no idea which of these I’d enjoy and which ones not. Any list that features Dhalgren is suspicious to me. Not that it’s a bad book, just not my taste.
posted by bongo_x at 12:26 PM on March 10, 2016

It contains Mumbo Jumbo so I approve! That book does not get enough love.

And to continue the Delany discussion, I have a lot of favorites, but The Einstein Intersection is the one I keep going back to. It is in many ways the opposite of Dhalgren , it's short and spare and easy to read, but it is just a difficult. Its about how thinking works coupled with the development and use of mythology ; a sort of psychedelic Riddley Walker.
posted by rtimmel at 12:30 PM on March 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'd add Nalo Hopkinson's The Salt Roads.
posted by bile and syntax at 5:16 PM on March 10, 2016

Just want to second there recommendation for the Wizard of the Crow. Absolutely fascinating book, at times hilarious and heartbreaking, superbly written. It's fairly criminal that it's not better known.
posted by kaibutsu at 6:06 PM on March 10, 2016

I once made dinner for Delany. As you may imagine, I was pretty nervous. Then I remembered the section of The Motion of Light in Water whereDelany described how nervous he was making dinner for Auden. I thought "I can't even be nervous without Delany getting there before me!" It was unbearably meta, although the dinner was nice.

I hadoncedescribed Butlrr's worktop a friend saying that it was about what happened when you only free choice was to keep living; then I read Clay's Ark, where the characters didn't even get that choice.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:35 PM on March 10, 2016 [4 favorites]

Jeeze. I swear I typed "I had once described Butler's" but that is baroque even for a phone keyboard...
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:30 AM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's not a typo; it's new theory language. "Worktop" should mean something specific and obscure with which you can rhetorically bludgeon the unwary. I think it might be short (or possibly German) for "work-topos" or the shape or landscape of a work. This is different from the actual landscape as used or described within a work and refers instead to some kind of "shape" taken by the plot and the things that are emphasized. Outsiders will think that it's pronounced worktopus like octopus, and we can all have a good laugh. Also, the "work-topos" will be sort of ineffable, so that will help with paper-writing.
posted by Frowner at 6:47 AM on March 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

It's actually pronounced "VERK-top.
posted by Frowner at 6:48 AM on March 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

I recently read Nnedi Okorafor's Akata Witch and enjoyed it immensely. It read to me like an alternate universe sort of Alice in Wonderland-type tale crossed with a quest story. And it's all about a girl discovering who she is and what her powers are. It's YA, but don't let that stop you. Highly recommended.

Okorafor's novella, Binti, is getting lots of mention as SF award time rolls around this year.

I've read a good bit of Octavia Butler. The Xenogenesis trilogy, now more usually called Lilith's Brood, comprising Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago have given me things to think about for YEARS. They're more explicitly science fiction than some of her other books. All her work is powerful, though.
posted by Archer25 at 6:51 AM on March 11, 2016

Want to strongly second The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin if you are looking for newer stuff. It starts off as a traditional fantasy, but with a slightly more modern tone. Then by the end I realized that she has masterfully woven together a lot more threads than I had even noticed to create something really phenomenal. I was so into this book that when I got off the bus I couldn't stop reading it and would read it while walking down the street.
posted by tofu_crouton at 8:25 AM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'll also put in a good word for Delany's Nova-- it's space opera and it's also protocyberpunk without the noir.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:56 PM on March 11, 2016

Any list with Dhalgren on it is going to become a discussion of Dhalgren. It’s that kind of book.

I barely made it through Babel-17.

I can't say I have heard of a lot of these people, and some I have read and loved (Steven Barnes' co-wrote the Dream Park books, which I think are great), but I did recognise The Space Traders (probably from MeFi) because it came up around the time Obama was elected, because they made it into a short film.
posted by Mezentian at 8:47 PM on March 11, 2016

Delany's essay "Racism and Science Fiction", mentioned in the original article, is available online. It's well worth your time and attention. Here's an excerpt:

On February 10 [1967], a month and a half before the March awards, in its partially completed state Nova had been purchased by Doubleday & Co. Three months after the awards banquet, in June, when it was done, with that first Nebula under my belt, I submitted Nova for serialization to the famous sf editor of Analog Magazine, John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell rejected it, with a note and phone call to my agent explaining that he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character. That was one of my first direct encounters, as a professional writer, with the slippery and always commercialized form of liberal American prejudice: Campbell had nothing against my being black, you understand. (There reputedly exists a letter from him to horror writer Dean Koontz, from only a year or two later, in which Campbell argues in all seriousness that a technologically advanced black civilization is a social and a biological impossibility. . . .). No, perish the thought! Surely there was not a prejudiced bone in his body! It’s just that I had, by pure happenstance, chosen to write about someone whose mother was from Senegal (and whose father was from Norway), and it was the poor benighted readers, out there in America’s heartland, who, in 1967, would be too upset. . . .

It was all handled as though I’d just happened to have dressed my main character in a purple brocade dinner jacket. (In the phone call Campbell made it fairly clear that this was his only reason for rejecting the book. Otherwise, he rather liked it. . . .) Purple brocade just wasn’t big with the buyers that season. Sorry. . . .

Today if something like that happened, I would probably give the information to those people who feel it their job to make such things as widely known as possible. At the time, however, I swallowed it—a mark of both how the times, and I, have changed. I told myself I was too busy writing. The most profitable trajectory for a successful science fiction novel in those days was for an sf book to start life as a magazine serial, move on to hardcover publication, and finally be reprinted as a mass market paperback. If you were writing a novel a year (or, say, three novels every two years, which was then almost what I was averaging), that was the only way to push your annual income up, at the time, from four to five figures—and the low five figures at that. That was the point I began to realize I probably was not going to be able to make the kind of living (modest enough!) that, only a few months before, at the Awards Banquet, I’d let myself envision. The things I saw myself writing in the future, I already knew, were going to be more rather than less controversial. The percentage of purple brocade was only going to go up.

posted by Kattullus at 5:03 AM on March 24, 2016 [4 favorites]