BOOKS-US: Black Sci-Fi Collection Brings “Dark Matter” to Light

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Lisa Lynch

NEW YORK, Aug 1 2000 (IPS) - The current fascination with technology, from biotech to the Internet, has made science fiction films, novels and short fiction increasingly popular over the past few decades.

“Dark Matter,” a new collection of fiction and essays edited by Sheree Thomas, seeks to establish that black science fiction writers and readers are a vital part of the expanding world of science fiction.

A science fiction writer herself as well as the editor of a new black literary journal called “Anansi: Fiction of the African Diaspora,” Thomas hopes her volume will prove that black science fiction is compelling and politically engaged – in all, that it is a venue for some of the more exciting black writing today.

“Dark Matter” is divided into two sections. In the first half, Thomas includes short fiction by emerging writers as well as well- known authors such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany and Stephen Barnes.

Five essays in the volume’s second section explore the relationship between race and science fiction. Thomas herself takes up this relationship in her introduction, explaining that the book takes its title from a term in astronomy that could be a metaphor for black science fiction writing.

“Dark Matter” is “a non-luminous form of matter which has not been directly observed but whose existence has been deduced from the gravitational effects.” Black science fiction is the “dark matter” of the genre, she says, continually present, but rarely noticed.

The range of “dark matter” Thomas has chosen for her collection supports her claim of a thriving community of black science fiction writers. There are stories about yet-unrealised medical technology, alien invasion, computer networks, vampires and clones.

Many of the stories have political overtones, calling attention to the potential use of technology to oppress those who do not control it, or celebrating the transformative possibilities of future inventions.

Several of the stories in “Dark Matter” explicitly consider black-white relations through science fiction narratives. The most well-known of these stories, “Space Traders,” is taken from the collection “Faces At The Bottom of the Well” by former Harvard law professor Derrick Bell.

The space traders of the title are alien visitors who ask for – and receive – the African American population of the United States in exchange for a promise to fix the nation’s declining economy.

The country’s blacks, told they are being called into military service under special congressional order, are led to the alien ship in chains.

Another story, Daryl Smith’s “The Pretended,” features a near- future country that has eliminated its black population, then created black robots to act as its servants. When these robots occasionally wonder about their place in this future society, whites label them defective and programme them to self-destruct.

Though these stories, like most in the collection, draw on the traditional material of science fiction, “Dark Matter” is not exclusively a collection of science fiction writing. Thomas has chosen the broader category of “speculative fiction” to guide her selections, a category that includes fantasy fiction as well as spirit possession tales and ghost stories.

The first story in Thomas’s collection is an example of a tale which is speculative, but not really science fiction: Honoree Fanonne Jeffers’ “Lilith” re-imagines the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve, this time told from the perspective of Adam’s first wife Lilith, who (like Adam) was black.

Another story, “Greedy Choke Puppy” by Nalo Hopkinson, draws on West Indian myth in a story of a graduate student who is also a “soucouyant,” or vampire.

Some of Thomas’ examples of speculative fiction seem at first to be out of step with the rest of the collection.

For example, Charles Chesnutt’s 19th century plantation tale of a haunted vineyard, “The Goophered Grapevine,” is sandwiched between two futuristic narratives, Akua Lezli Hope’s tale of a woman whose body is surgically reconstructed as a wind instrument and Octavia Butler’s story of a horrible disease that is the side effect of a “miracle drug.”

But Thomas explains her choices were quite deliberate: historical works, including the Chesnutt story and a 1920s tale by W.E.B. Du Bois, were included to give her readers a sense of the history of the speculative genre.

Thomas said she also wanted to help her readers realise that a wide range of African American fiction – from Chesnutt’s “Grapevine” to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” – contains features of speculative fiction, even if the writing is classified and sold much differently.

“Science fiction is always getting a bad rap,” she explained, “so no one wants to be ghettoised as a science fiction writer; both authors and publishers don’t put work in that category.” The result, she explains, has been a sense that black science fiction and speculative fiction were exceptional, and not part of a larger tradition.

Thomas said she initially conceived of “Dark Matter” as a historical overview of speculative fiction, one that would give readers a solid understanding of the tradition that has influenced contemporary writers.

But after soliciting suggestions and contributions, she found herself “much more excited by the original work” sent to her by both established and emerging writers. Her notion of the project changed, and “Dark Matter” became a volume that surveyed the current state of black speculative fiction and only nodded towards an older speculative tradition.

Such a focus, Thomas hopes, will give both writers and readers of science fiction a sense of a shared community. It will also expose committed fans of the science fiction and fantasy genres to what emerges in the collection as a distinctive black speculative voice, a set of shared concerns and modes of expression.

“When I open Asimov’s (a leading science fiction magazine), I never see anything similar to my own work,” Thomas explains. “In fact, in a lot of mainstream fantasy and science fiction, Africa is turned into an exotic backdrop for the actions of white characters; this turns off a lot of people who might otherwise read science fiction.”

“Dark Matter,” she feels, will not only allow readers to see that science fiction is an ideal medium for exploring issues of race relations and black global culture; it also might inspire writers to realise that “the story they’ve written which is lying in the bottom of a drawer” might have a reading audience.