Speculative Fiction Guide: Black SF

N.K. Jemisin

4 Time Hugo Award Winner;

Nebula Award

Nnedi Okorofor

2 Time Hugo Award Winner;

Nebula Award; World Fantasy Award

Martin Delany

It has become commonplace for histories of African American science fiction to cite Martin R. Delany’s antebellum novel Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba as this tradition’s point of origin.1 For Britt Rusert, Delany’s interest in the microscope and the novel’s attention to astronomy create “rich imaginative terrain for speculations on freedom and world making.” (Brittan)

W.E.B. DuBois

W.E.B. Du Bois is probably best known as an essayist and the co-founder of the NAACP. But he also wrote a number of works of fiction, including the well-known apocalyptic story “The Comet.” But his newly discovered short story from around 1908 (The Princess Steel) could be a foundational text of Afro-Futurism. (Anders)

Pauline Hopkins

Though she was to undergo much hardship in her career as a writer, she still gave us one of the earliest works of Afrofuturist literature with her book Of One Blood and is remembered today as the first Black woman to pen a sci-fi novel. (Century)

Samuel Delany

A novelist and critic who taught literature and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts and Temple University, Samuel R. Delany had won four Nebula Awards and a Hugo Award by the time he was 27. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002, by which time he'd also been chosen by the Lambda Literary Report as one of the 50 people who had done the most to change our view of gayness in the last half-century. In 2013, he was named the 31st Damon Knight Memorial Foundation Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Charles Saunders

Saunders is best known for his fantasy Imaro (1981) and as the founder of the “sword and soul” subgenre, combining African history, culture, and mythology with sword-and-sorcery tropes.

Jewelle Gomez

Gomez’ fiction has won her the admiration of the Indigenous Futurism movement, which focuses on the speculative fiction of Native peoples, and she is revered as a leader in the black science fiction movement known as Afrofuturism. In 1997, Gomez participated in one of the first conferences on black speculative fiction, “The African-American Fantastic Imagination: Explorations in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror.” She co-edited, with Eric Garber, a gay and lesbian science fiction/fantasy anthology titled Swords of the Rainbow (2000). (Gomez)

Octavia Butler

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER was a renowned African American author who received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work...Though the MacArthur Grant made life easier in later years, she struggled for decades when her dystopian novels exploring themes of Black injustice, global warming, women’s rights and political disparity were, to say the least, not in commercial demand. (Octaviabutler.com)

Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due is an award-winning author who teaches black horror and afrofuturism at UCLA. A leading voice in black speculative fiction for more than 20 years Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award. (Tananarivedue.com)

Nichelle Nichols (Actor)

Best known for playing Lieutenant Uhura, the communications officer on the original 60's 'Star Trek' television series, Nichelle Nichols is one of the first African-American women to be cast in a role other than stereotyped black maid or nanny. (Nishi)

Nalo Hopkinson

Vibrant and edgy, rich and dazzling, deeply human and humane, Nalo Hopkinson’s fiction has received the Campbell and Locus Awards, the World Fantasy Award, and the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.