African Influence on Science Fiction

African Influence on Science Fiction

By Uzor Chinukwue

Authors

• Steven Barnes• Tobias S. Buckell• Octavia Estelle

Butler• Tananarive Due• Dr. Buchi

Emecheta• Nalo Hopkinson

• Walter Mosley• John Ridley• Josephine Saxton• Sheree R. Thomas• Samuel R. Delany

More Authors

• Ihsan Bracy• Cherene Sherrard• Charles R.

Saunders• David Findlay• Douglas Kearney• W.E.B. Du Bois

• Henry Dumas• Pam Noles• John Cooley• Ibi Aanu Zoboi• Kevin

Brockenbrough• Nnedi Okorafor-

Mbachu

Steven Barnes

Steven Barnes

• Author of Lion’s Blood: A novel of slavery and freedom in an alternate America.

• Its sequel is Zulu Heart. • The 2 novels talk about an alternate universe where

Africans have colonised and rule the new world. • He has also written a number of pulp fiction SF

novels like Star Wars: The Cestus Deception. • Barnes is a martial artist and married to another SF

writer, Tananarive Due, who he met at a science fiction conference.

Steven Barnes Titles

Tobias S. Buckell

Tobias S. Buckell

• Caribbean born, author of Crystal Rain.• As in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun,

Buckell deals with a society that has retrogressed and no longer knows how to use the technology that built it.

• The protagonist is an Immortal who has lost his memory. As a book written by a Caribbean born author it brings another point of view to SF – the world is set in Caribbean and Aztec societies, a different milieu from other SF stories of the same kind. Buckell even has his characters speak in patois, giving them a uniqueness and vibrancy.

Tobias S. Buckell

Octavia Estelle Butler


• One of very few Black Female SF authors• Octavia is one of the most popular ones and has

stories published Sheree Thomas’ anthology as well as a number of novels. In 1995 she became the first SF writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant

• Kindred is the story of Dana, a modern African American writer who is married to a Caucasian writer and drawn back into time to live with her ancestor, Rufus, who is a slave around the period 1815-1830.


• Butler does not concentrate on the science of time travel, instead, she uses the story as a vehicle to shed light on the grim realities of slavery and of male dominance.

• Though not as popular as the mainstream author Toni Morrison, Butler can hold her own in historical settings and the SF elements are a nice touch.

• Butler said when she first started she mailed her manuscripts and so people didn’t know she was black. But then she wrote Kindred and started to find it difficult to sell this kind of SF with Black sensibilities


• Octavia Butler also wrote Wild Seed (2000) and is about Doro who has been alive for 4000 years. He dreams of breeding a new race of superior humans with whom he can feel at home. Doro selects for this purpose Anyanwu – the wild seed – and sees a being he can accomplish this with.


• Orson Scott Card wrote about Wild Seed, It is a measure of Butler's considerable prowess as a storyteller that she succeeds in making Doro, not exactly likeable, but at least intelligible, even sympathetic, though of course we are as eager as Anyanwu for her to get away from him and his fascinating and unspeakable breeding program. Butler is telling us a mythic story of semi-divine heroes; yet she is also telling us a romantic tale of tragic love and a realistic extrapolation of a twisted society of people with bizarre, un-containable powers.

Octavia E. Butler Titles

Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due

• Due is author of The Between, The Living Blood, The Good House, and My Soul to Keep.

• Her mother is civil rights activist, Patricia Stephens Due.

• As mentioned earlier, she is married to fellow SF writer Stephen Barnes.

• The Between (1995) was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for horror writers. The book is part horror, part detective, and part speculative fiction.

Tananarive Due

• In her blog she says about My Soul to Keep, In 1997, I published a novel entitled My Soul to Keep that marked the beginning of what I now call my African Immortals series. The story centres around a 500-year-old Ethiopian immortal named Dawit and the Miami newspaper reporter, Jessica, who is unwittingly married to him. At the time, I had no series in mind.The novel was a watershed for me: It has endured as a reader favourite, and was blurbed by Octavia E. Butler and Stephen King, who wrote that it "bears favourable comparison to Interview with the Vampire."

Tananarive Due Titles

Dr. Buchi Emecheta

Buchi Emecheta

• Born in Nigeria in 1944 to Igbo parents.• Has published over 20 books including, The Second-

class Citizen, The Bride Price, and The Slave Girl.• After convincing her parents to give her an education

like her brother she was sent to an all-girls Methodist school.

• Got married at 16 and moved to London to be with her husband who had gained admission into a British university. She then had 5 children in 6 years.

Buchi Emecheta

• It was an unhappy marriage full of abuse and she had to write in her spare time to keep her sanity.

• Her husband was suspicious of her writing and burnt her first manuscript when she showed it to him for approval.

• At 22, while working as a librarian at the British Museum, she left her husband and took her 5 children with her, while also earning a BSc degree in sociology at University of London.

Buchi Emecheta

• Dr. Emecheta once described her stories as “stories of the world… [where] … women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical.”

• Her book Second-class Citizen is part biographical and she dedicates it to her children.

Buchi Emecheta

• I identify with this statement on the BBC’s website where she says, “The first book I wrote was the Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it … I think by that time this urge to write had become more important to me than he realised, and that was the day I said, “I’m going to leave this marriage,” and he said, “what for, that stupid book?” and I said, “I just feel like you just

burnt my child.”

Buchi Emecheta Titles

Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson

• Author of Brown Girl in the Ring. • She is a Jamaican born writer and editor and

currently lives in Canada. • Her SF and fantasy draw on Caribbean history and

language and its traditions of oral and written storytelling. She has garnered praise from all quarters and has short stories also published in Sheree Thomas’ anthology series.

Nalo Hopkinson Titles

Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley

• Author of Blue Light, Mosley is a prominent novelist and known mostly for his crime fiction.

• Blue light is set in San Francisco in the 1960s. The story tells of an unearthly beam of energy – the blue light of the book’s title – that rains down on people and speeds up the evolutionary process, making them more than men, as they assimilate alien knowledge.

• The lights then enter a dead man and reanimate him.

Walter Mosley

• He becomes the Gray Man, a being bent on destroying the others affected by the Blue Light and becomes the story’s living embodiment of death. In the end of the first part of the book the Gray Man attacks the congregation of Blues and their human initiates.

• The second part of the book deals with an investigation into the attack and the Blues’ final evolution and confrontation with the Gray Man.

• A review on space.com explains this story is not one of alien abduction but one of alien induction.

Walter Mosley

• The main viewpoint in the book is that of Chance, aide and biographer to Orde, a Blue prophet. With the character the author compares humanity with the perfection of the Blues.

• Chance acts as a witness to the change the alien blue light has given some humans.

• Through this character Mosley explores questions of race and individual identity.

Walter Mosley Titles

John Ridley

John Ridley

• Author of What Fire Cannot Burn. • Ridley is an American film actor, director, and writer. • He started as a stand-up comedian before writing for

such sitcoms as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. His first novel Stray Dog was turned into the 1997 film U-turn, Starring Jennifer Lopez and Sean Penn and directed by Oliver Stone.

• He has also received an original story credit on the film 3 Kings, starring Ice Cube, George Cooloney, and Mark Walberg.

John Ridley Titles

• His novel, Those Who Walk in the Darkness is about a member of an elite police task force that hunts down a group of super humans known as metanormals.

Josephine Saxton

Josephine Saxton

• Author of Queen of the States. • The novel was shortlisted in 1987 for the Arthur C.

Clarke Award. • One of her stories, The Power of Time, is included in

a series of SF anthologies called The Road to Science Fiction, collected and written for use in classrooms by James Gunn.

• JS was born in 1935 and began publishing in 1965 with Science Fantasy magazine.

Josephine Saxton

• The encyclopaedia of science fiction writes that, “[her] first 3 novels – The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969), Vector for Seven: The Weltanschaung [sic] of Mrs Amelia Mortimer and Friends (1970) and Group Feast (1971) – established her very rapidly as an inventive creator of SF Fabulations.”

• In this sense fabulation is from the root fables.• Magic realism is a type.

Josephine Saxton Titles

Sheree R. Thomas

Sheree R. Thomas

• Author of Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora.

• The book was named New York Times’ Notable Book of the Year and winner of the World Fantasy Award for Year’s Best Anthology and the GOLD PEN Award.

• The book is a collection of Black SF, Horror, and Fantasy writers such as, Samuel Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Charles R. Saunders, Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Jewelle Gomez, Ishmael Reed, Kalamu ya Salaam, Robert Fleming and Nalo Hopkinson.

Sheree R. Thomas

• The sequel is, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, and contains even more stories of the speculative genre.

• The works of both books range from the 1890s to 1930s to modern works by some of SF’s most prominent pioneers.

Sheree R. Thomas Titles

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany

• Author of Nova, Babel 17, and Dhalgren. • Described by Algis Budrys as, “the best science

fiction writer in the world,” and by the New York Times Book Review as, “the most interesting writer of science fiction writing in English today.”

• Delany has won 4 Nebula awards and 2 Hugo awards over the course of his career.

• Born in Harlem in April 1 1942, Delany started writing very young and was noticed by the time he was just 20 when he published his first novel.

Samuel R. Delany

• Delany based characters of his novella, Atlantis: Model 1924, on his 2 aunts, Sadie and Bessie Delany.

• Sadie Delany was a civil rights activist and educator and was the first black person to be allowed to teach domestic science as high school level in New York public schools.

Samuel R. Delany

• She became famous along with her sister Bessie, after the publication of New York Times bestselling oral history, "Having our Say," written by journalist Amy Hill Hearth which was about them. By this time Bessie was 103.

Samuel R. Delany

• Babel 17 is about a poet Rydra Wong who is employed by the government in a future world where a war is being fought by the known universe and a group of antagonists called, the Invaders.

• The government employs Rydra because she has always been a wiz kid at breaking codes, and want her to crack a code they believe is being used by the enemy to plan attacks against them. But she soon quickly realises that Babel 17 is not a code but a language, a language used to furtively turn its listeners into traitors.

Samuel R. Delany

• Delany uses this plot to discribe the power of language – its role in communication and creation of identity. For instance, in exploring the language of an alien character it is discovered that this character’s brutality is as a result of his inability to grasp what the word “I” means, because there is no such word for describing one’s self in this language.

• As a result of this missing word, this character misses the meaning behind the word and so cannot understand individual responsibility for actions.

Samuel R. Delany

• This character can also, without the word “I”, not understand how he may hurt someone else, since in not knowing “I” he also invariably does not understand the word “you”.

Samuel R. Delany

African Influence on Science Fiction

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