Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (review)

hUariously on the mark. With her fine sense of humor and insights into human behavior, Prose has created a memorable book. (AKB) Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fictionfrom the African Diaspora Edited by Sheree R. Thomas Warner Books, 2000, 427 pp., $24.95 American sdence fiction (SF) began as a short-story genre. Even now, although it's not uncommon for a new SF writer to debut with a novel, short stories are important, as Sheree Thomas's Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora abundantly Ulustrates. There's much to be celebrated here. A NaIo Hopkinson fan, I immensely enjoyed "Greedy Choke Puppy," a story that shares the Afro-Caribbean reUgious flavor of her novels, and "Ganger (BaU Lightning)," a charged, erotic tale weirdly reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer." Derrick BeU's frightening rhetorical masterpiece, "The Space Traders," and Steven Barnes' "The Woman in the WaU," the story of an African American woman and her stepdaughter caught up in "somebody else's war," are equaUy captivating. Though the anthology is mainly composed of contemporary short stories, Tony Medina's "Butta's Backyard Barbecue" and Amiri Baraka's "Rhythm Travel" experiment with forms that are not quite music, not quite poetry. Likewise, the novel excerpts from recent work by Ishmael Reed and AnthonyJoseph and George Shuyler's 1931 satire Black No More give the anthology a breadth and texture it wouldn't have had if only short stories had been included. The Shuyler reprint is one of several early speculative fiction pieces included in the anthology. Charles W. Chesnutt's 1887 tale, "The Goophered Grapevine ," and W. E. B. DuBois' "The Comet" are thrilling precursors to SF as genre. In the most provocative of the five essays included in Dark Matter, Samuel Delaney takes a hard look at "Racism and Science Fiction." His concerns about racial separatism seem to be centered on how that separatism is practiced, consciously and unconsciously, by white writers, yet he seems to be wary as weU of projects such as Dark Matter itseU, that take race as the primary selective mechanism for inclusion. He beUeves that such undertakings are part and parcel of the system of racism. Sheree Thomas states in her introduction to the anthology, "It is my sincere hope that Dark Matter wiU help shed Ught on the SF genre, that it wiU correct the misperception that black writers are recent to the field, and that it wiU encourage more talented writers to enter the field." As a white critic and teacher of SF, I think Thomas has admirably "shed Ught on the genre" by making visible an exdting group ofwriters who deserve a much larger readership than many of them have enjoyed so far. (MB)