Sheree R. Thomas, Editor: Dark Matter: A Century Of Speculative Fiction From The African Diaspora

The overt pun of this anthology's title is obvious enough: Dark Matter is a tongue-in-cheek description of its contents, all stories and essays written by African Americans. But in her introduction, editor Sheree R. Thomas turns the joke into a barbed social critique, likening black science-fiction writers to the "invisible matter" posited to explain otherwise-inexplicable gravitational forces. Like dark matter, she theorizes, black authors have been present throughout history, producing a measurable effect without being observed. One of the collection's essays, Samuel R. Delaney's "Racism And Science Fiction," supports the metaphor by noting that mainstream scholarship considers him "the first African-American science-fiction writer," overlooking at least a dozen predecessors. A few are represented in Dark Matter, including an 1887 folk tale by Charles W. Chestnutt, a 1920 post-apocalyptic Adam-and-Eve fable by W.E.B. DuBois, and a riveting excerpt of George Schuyler's scathing satire Black No More, a 1931 novel in which a doctor begins transforming blacks into pale blond Nordics, with society-shaking results. But most of the book's contents are recent—two-thirds of it was written this year alone—which makes Thomas' proposed hidden historical effect of black writers hard to track. Their future effect on the field seems clearer, and while the content and execution vary widely, most of these stories creatively explore forms of isolation, alienation, and separation. Several address racism both literally and overtly: Evie Shockley's "Separation Anxiety" posits a future of state-sponsored "cultural preservation" ghettos, while Derrick Bell's strident "The Space Traders" has the U.S. openly debating whether to sell every black American to an alien race in exchange for new technologies. Other stories are more abstract, with a generational starship, an African death camp, and a robot junkyard just a few of the divergent and generally entertaining settings for subtly metaphorical examinations of the Self, the Other, and the sometimes unbridgeable gap between them. As a package, Dark Matter is notably grim, which gives the title a third symbolic twist, but it's mostly solid, substantial, and skillfully wrought. With luck, it'll push at least a few of Thomas' invisible writers into the spotlight they deserve.