Album Cover: Ornette Coleman—Science Fiction (1972)
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» Samuel R. Delany - "Racism and Science Fiction" (1998)

For better or for worse, I am often spoken of as the first African-American science fiction writer. But I wear that originary label as uneasily as any writer has worn the label of science fiction itself. Among the ranks of what is often referred to as proto-science fiction, there are a number of black writers. M. P. Shiel, whose Purple Cloud and Lord of the Sea are still read, was a Creole with some African ancestry. Black leader Martin Delany (1812–1885—alas, no relation) wrote his single and highly imaginative novel, still to be found on the shelves of Barnes & Noble today, Blake, or The Huts of America (1857), about an imagined successful slave revolt in Cuba and the American South—which is about as close to an sf-style alternate history novel as you can get. Other black writers whose work certainly borders on science fiction include Sutton E. Griggs and his novel Imperio Imperium (1899) in which an African-American secret society conspires to found a separate black state by taking over Texas, and Edward Johnson, who, following Bellamy’s example in Looking Backward (1888), wrote Light Ahead for the Negro (1904), telling of a black man transported into a socialist United States in the far future.

via afrofuturistaffair

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Book Cover: Samuel Delany - Jewels of Aptor
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“What does it… feel like, to have lost an entire world?”

“Lonely,” Rat raised his many-ringed hand to rub at his neck under his broad jaw. “But the loneliness comes from the question.”

“The question, hey, Skoilla Rat?” JoBonnet, , beside her cushion, rested only a white damasked glove on the webbed and re-webbed cover rug. “Tell a visitor to these alien climes what you mean.”

“What is it like to lose a world?” is the first question everyone who meets me asks; so I am alone with my own feelings, sights, sounds, and experiences, which can only provide an answer to the question: What is it like to be presented with a new one?”
…

Ollivet’t retired to her onw cushion and sat, leaving Rat standing-­ like someone very used to standing though. “But I am curious, too.” “You…” Rat paused-­ “create me with your eyes.”

Samuel Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
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Alondra Nelson on Afrofuturism’s History and Meaning

(Source: kunstxoias, via afrofuturistaffair)

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    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…
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In my humble opinion Joanna Russ is simply one of the most important writers who has written in the United States in the last fifty years.

Samuel R. Delany
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What If Your Favorite Album Was a Book? Prince’s Purple Rain as Science Fiction Novel
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endoftheuniverse: from “further considerations on afrofuturism” by kodwo eshun: “Toni Morrison argued that the African subjects that experienced capture, theft, mutilation, and slavery were the first moderns. They underwent real conditions of existential homelessness, alienation, dislocation, and dehumanization that philosophers like Nietzsche would later define as quintessentially modern.” “In the colonial era of the early to middle twentieth century, avant-gardists from Walter Benjamin to Frantz Fanon revolted in the name of the future against a power structure that relied on control and representation of the historical archive. Today, the situation is reversed. The powerful employ futurists and draw power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past.” “…science fiction was never concerned with the future, but rather with engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present.” “The human-machine interface became both the condition and the subject of Afrofuturism… to feel at home in alienation…” “Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction writers envision. Black existence and science fiction are one and the same.”
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