The advantage of Science Fiction as a point of cultural departure is that it allows for a series of worst-case futures - of hells-on-Earth and being in them - which are woven into every kind of everyday present reality (on a purely technical level, value in SF is measured against the fictional creation of other worlds, or people, believable no matter how different). The central fact in Black Science Fiction - self-consciously so named or not - is an acknowledgement that Apocalypse already happened: that (in PE’s phrase) Armageddon been in effect. Black SF writers - Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler - write about worlds after catastrophic disaster; about the modalities of identity without hope of resolution, where race and nation and neighbourhood and family are none of them enough to obviate betrayal…
