Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
An important collection of pioneering Black sci-fi and fantasy. I hadn't realized quite how important until I read the essays towards the end of the book about just how few Black published sci-fi authors there were at the time, particularly African American. In 2000 everyone cited Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney. And then.. a few others? But not very famous? The end. I knew diversity wasn't great in genre fiction but I didn't quite realize how bad it was. This book does a great job breaking through those limitations, both by highlighting old overlooked works and giving newer authors a platform.
The highlighting of older authors was particularly enlightening for me: W.E.B. Du Bois' 1920 speculative story, George Schuyler's 1931 novel excerpt, the astonishing 1887 story from Charles Chesnutt. Unusual stories, all three, and reminders that speculative fiction has been an excellent way to explore social alternatives.
This book is important enough as a collection I feel a little churlish not being more positive in my review. But, well, I didn't enjoy reading a lot of the stories. A bunch of them seemed pretty opaque or experimental in their writing style and I ended up skipping over several. Of course one expects from an anthology to not like everything equally and maybe I'm just a lazy reader. But I wish I could say I liked more of the newer stories more.
Derrick Bell's razor-sharp "The Space Traders" is my single most favorite of the modern stories and I was duly cut while reading it. Other favorites include "Separation Anxiety" by Evie Shockley, "Greedy Choke Puppy" and "Ganger (Ball Lightning)" by Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler's "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" (particularly strong; she works great in short form) and "The Woman in the Wall" by Steven Barnes. Delany's "Racism and Science Fiction" is also a welcome inclusion for its personal historical detail.
I appreciated how many of the stories were clearly informed by the Black experience without necessary being stories about Blackness or racial topics. There's a good sampling of explicit stories about race, too (particularly "The Space Traders") but there's a nice variety of topics and perspectives.