In honor of Black Speculative Fiction Month, eight SFF authors share stories that honor forebearers and memories of the past, fight the legacies that underpin the brutalities of the present, and demand a future that’s freer than today.
The stories publish on Tor.com all throughout the morning of October 19. They are collected here.
In September of 1988, the New York Times published an article by James Brooke, an American journalist and then bureau chief at Abidjan, Ivory Coast. “Goodbye to Tarzan,” the headline read. “Meet Captain Africa.” For many Americans—and in essence, many readers the world over—Captain Africa was the first contact with a comic and superhero written, illustrated and published by Africans domiciled on the continent. The first African #ownvoices superhero comic to go global, if you will. At the time of the New York Times article, Captain Africa had already been in publication for close to a year, but no matter. It was new, fresh, pan-African, and worthy of attention.
A few years into the 1990s, Captain Africa slowly waned, before vanishing completely. Along with its creator, Ghanaian Andy Akman, and its Nigerian publisher, African Comics Limited, almost every facet of its existence is now lost. Yet its influence on more recent superheroes from the continent lingers, and continues to shape work written and produced by its own people today.
The current wave of speculative fiction from underrepresented groups continues to provide the SFF world with peeks into oft-forgotten slices of the globe. Interesting settings are huge draws in science fiction and fantasy, so little wonder we’ve been enamored by these sojourns into non-EuroAmerican spaces. The African continent stands in the front lines of this charge, offering stories that overturn long held views about its history and future, or at least provide some long desired nuance. However, our fascination with Black Panther, Children of Blood and Bone, and Who Fears Death? is mostly steeped in the fantastic or futuristic representations of these African locales, and not as much the contemporary.
Pray, where are the SFF books about the African locales of now?
Why are there no boys like me on these covers?
My seventeen-year-old brother who lives in Lagos, Nigeria, raised this question to me recently. Not in these exact words, but sufficiently close. I’d been feeding him a steady drip of young adult (YA) science fiction and fantasy (SFF) novels from as diverse a list as I could, featuring titles like Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, Roshani Chokshi’s The Star-Touched Queen and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. The question, at first seemed like a throwaway one, but as my head-scratching went on, I realised I did not have a clear-cut answer for it.
His question wasn’t why there were no black boys like him in the stories, because there definitely were. I guess he wanted to know, like I now do, why those boys were good enough to grace the pages inside but were somehow not good enough for the covers. And because I felt bad about the half-assed response I offered, I decided to see if I could find a better one.
The current wave of speculative fiction from underrepresented groups continues to provide the SFF world with peeks into oft-forgotten slices of the globe. Interesting settings are huge draws in science fiction and fantasy, so little wonder we’ve been enamored by these sojourns into non-EuroAmerican spaces. The African continent stands in the front lines of this charge, offering stories that overturn long held views about its history and future, or at least provide some long desired nuance. However, our fascination with Black Panther, Children of Blood and Bone and Who Fears Death? is mostly steeped in the fantastic or futuristic representations of these African locales, and not as much the contemporary. Pray, where are the SFF books about the African locales of now?
This question came to me while writing David Mogo, Godhunter. I discovered there was little work out there representing contemporary African spaces in all their multilayered complexity. So I set out to find books where the otherworldly is juxtaposed with the contemporary—used here to mean since the 2000s—socioeconomics, politics and culture of post-colonial Africa. These five locales offered fresh glances at the African continent, so that both inhabitants and non-inhabitants of these cities, towns and villages end up discovering their magic and potential anew.
