That Just Kills Me: Black Militant Near-Future Fiction

[I] had begun to see the world as a cesspool of buffoonery. Even the violence was funny. A man gets his throat cut. He shakes his head to say you missed me and it falls off. Damn reality, I thought. All of reality was absurd, contradictory, violent and hurting. It was funny, really. If I could just get the handle to the joke. And I had got the handle, by some miracle.

—Chester Himes, My Life of Absurdity

In 1977, when I was a sixteen-year-old high-school dropout, I had the good fortune to be admitted to a graduate course in science fiction writing taught by Theodore Sturgeon at Antioch College West, in Hollywood, California. For our third or fourth assignment, Ted gave us instructions to write a science fiction story that explained "why black people don't write science fiction." That seemed like a good question to me, and I gave it as much thought as a precocious white sixteen-year-old could. (I am not sure how long Ted had been asking his classes this question, but I do know that ours was not the first to hear it.) In my own story, I gave my readers a sociological explanation: black people were too busy surviving in the here and now to write science fiction. All my classmates adopted sociological or social psychological explanations in their stories as well. These variations on a theme apparently made good sense to Ted, and I do not recall any other explanations being offered.

Over the last quarter of a century I've grown to understand that Ted asked the wrong question, and we students (all of us white) came up with the wrong answers. A liberal humanist, a strong supporter of black civil rights and of human rights, a visionary and a philosopher, Ted, like virtually everyone else in the science fiction world in the 1970s, was unable to see what was right before his eyes. I know for a fact that he read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, for we discussed it during a late-night jaunt to Ship's coffeehouse. It never occurred to either of us to think of Ellison's novel as an example of black science fiction. I am sure, because he was a voracious and eclectic reader, that Ted was familiar with, if he had not himself read, the works of John A. Williams and Sam Greenlee. And yet he never mentioned them as writers within the genre of science fiction or even "speculative fiction," as some were beginning to call it. The failure to see what is, literally, right before our eyes has everything to do with how we see what we see. In order to recognize and evaluate African American works of science fiction, readers and critics need first to be familiar with the traditions of African American literature and culture. As Gregory Rutledge (2000) cautions us, we cannot effectively "evaluate the creative efforts of black futurist fiction authors without a cultural predicate grounded in the black experience" (128).

Science fiction has always been the literature to which I turn for insight, intelligent entertainment, and thought-provoking argument. It's an inherited passion, as my mother was (and still is) addicted to the genre. While I was growing up she stored the "overflow" books from her collection in my bedroom. When, in community college, I began to study African American literature, I kept those course texts on other shelves. Before I reached graduate school, however, the lines had begun to blur, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door, and John Williams's The Man Who Cried I Am all migrated from the African American literature shelf to the science fiction shelf, while Samuel R. Delany's books and Octavia Butler's books migrated to the African American literature shelf when I discovered, in the early...