Futurist Fiction & Fantasy: The Racial Establishment

"I don't like movies when they don't have no niggers in 'em. I went to see, I went to see "Logan's Run," right. They had a movie of the future called "Logan's Run." Ain't no niggers in it. I said, well white folks ain't planning for us to be here. That's why we gotta make movies. Then we['ll] be in the pictures."

--Richard Pryor in "Black Hollywood"
from Richard Pryor: Bicentennial Nigger (1976)

Futurist fiction and fantasy (hereinafter referred to as "FFF") encompasses a variety of subgenres: hard science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, sword-and-sorcerer fantasy, and cyberpunk. ¹ Unfortunately, even though nearly a century has expired since the advent of FFF, Richard Pryor's observation and a call for action is still viable. Despite the growing number of Black FFF writers, the proportion of Black FFF authors to White FFF authors is dismal. This disproportion means that Black FFF authors have a limited presence in the industry. Thus, although Black FFF authors have produced novels falling into the last four FFF categories enumerated above, they have not produced a single hard-science fiction (hereinafter referred to as "hard SF") novel, although Samuel R. Delany, Jr., and Octavia E. Butler have incorporated hard science into their speculative fiction. ²

One can easily understand why there are so few Black FFF authors. Given the tendency of many literary scholars and authors, Black and otherwise, to think of FFF as hedonistic, and the systemic racism of the FFF industry that persisted for many years, among other things, the resulting cosmology of constraint limited and limits the exploratory aspirations of many (diasporic) Africans. ³ For example, the thoughts of Ralph Ellison, perhaps the most significant African-American (male) creative writer of the 20th century, may be illustrative. In his 1980 introduction to Invisible Man (1952), he articulates his dilemma in conceptualizing his idea of the invisible man, admittedly a quite fanciful notion, and pairing it with racial issues:

It was, I thought, an intriguing idea for an American novel but a difficult task for a fledgling novelist. Therefore I was most annoyed to have my efforts interrupted by an ironic, down-home voice that struck me as being as irreverent as a honky-tonk trumpet blasting through a performance, say, of Britten's War Requiem. And all the more so because the voice seemed well aware that a piece of science fiction was the last thing I aspired to write. (xv)

Thus, Ellison seems to belittle, even if unintentionally, the potential and need for Black FFF. Ironically, the freedom leitmotif present in much Black canonical fiction, including Invisible Man, is not incompatible with the didacticism of the FFF genre. For FFF author and critic Joanna Russ, the uniqueness of "science fiction" is that it is quite "worshipful [] and religious in tone," and thus connected to "human concerns" (556-57, 562). Fantasy is structured in similar manner. According to John Clute and John Grant, fantasy follows a pattern of

an earned passage from BONDAGE--via a central RECOGNITION of what has been revealed and of what is about to happen, and which may involve a profound METAMORPHOSIS of protagonist or world (or both)--into the EUCATASTROPHE, where marriages may occur, just governance fertilize the barren LAND, and there is a HEALING. (338-39, capitalization in original)

Morality (bondage and freedom), religion and the supernatural, and the human condition (healing and metamorphosis) have long been themes of African-American literature. The burgeoning presence of Blacks in FFF has strengthened these elements. Notwithstanding the didacticism underlying much of the FFF genre, several decades elapsed after the incipience of the genre in the 1920s before the first Black FFF writer, Samuel R. Delany, Jr., would appear. A chronological study of Black FFF would begin with the origins of fantasy, which predated FFF by many centuries.

While the futurist fiction genre arguably begins with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) (Aldiss, Detached 52), ⁴ the general...