*For many science fiction and fantasy readers, these last names command the spotlight and respect: [J.R.R.] Tolkien, [George R. R.] Martins, [Frank] Herbert, and [Arthur C.] Clarke
Within the new crop of writers, black female sci-fi and fantasy storytellers are carving their own niche into the genre while marking their brand.
Highlighting new writers like Octavia Butler, Tomi Adeyemi, and N.K. Jemisin, The Week noted how black women personified legendary fellow sci-fi author Isaac Asimov‘s view that science fiction gathers “knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
According to the site, “black women have always gathered knowledge faster than society writ large gathers wisdom. Thus, a Black woman science fiction — or fantasy — writer might be the most prescient writer of these genres.”
As white male fantasy and sci-fi writers look to run most of the genre, the popularity of their black female counterparts can’t be denied, with them proving “that the reading public is ready to imagine a better tomorrow, today.
With Butler, who died in 2006, her work has resonated with many readers and Hollywood, which transitioned her popular 1979 novel “Kindred” into a series on FX in 2022, The first-person page-turner centers around a Black woman who keeps being pulled from the 20th century to the antebellum era.
For Harvard University professor and historian Tiya Miles, Butler’s vision of the future has come into what The Week labeled as “uncanny fruition.
“The smoke-choked air from fire gone wild, the cresting rivers and rising seas, the sweltering heat and receding lakes, the melting away of civil society and political stability, the light-year leaps in artificial intelligence — Octavia Butler foresaw them all,” Miles wrote about the author in The Atlantic.
“As the writer Tananarive Due said about Butler and her work, “Sister, we got cities burning … they were telling her. And how dare she, you know, sort of retreat into this world. But actually, she was showing us an even bigger world, you know, something that we couldn’t even wrap our minds around.”
A fresh fixture at the top of the New York Times Children’s and Young Adult bestsellers list with her “Legacy of Orisha” trilogy, Adeyemi has cemented her legacy as someone to watch.
One who sees the value of reading to young minds who readily “bury themselves” in what she’s presenting in written form.
“There is something about reading when you’re young that is so different from reading when you’re an adult,” Adeyemi said when interviewed in SBJCT. “Books have the opportunity to bury themselves in your heart and shape the way you think about the world.”
The “Legacy of Orisha” series allows Adeyemi to mix West African mythology in text form with the effects of the transatlantic slave trade as it follows Zélie Adebola, a girl who comes from a line of magicians.
These are young adult books only in their marketing strategy. “It goes even deeper than entertainment,” because I wanted to help people see Black people, recognize them and empathize with them and identify their pain and feel the need to put a stop to it and fight against it,” Adeyemi shared with Assembly, a website from Malala Yousafzai’s Malala Fund.
Known for her “Broken Earth” trilogy of novels, Jemisin has put readers on notice with her writing style of blending climate catastrophe, magic, stalwart women, and unabashed sexuality via the characters she created.
With her brick-by-brick approach to building her literary universes, the Hugo Award winner promotes the notion of equality and justice as achievable goals that require an embrace of the collective and the individual.
“A good portion of the reason that we are dealing with this political bulls**t, pardon my language, in the United States right now is because we’ve got a bunch of white people who are freaked out because demographics seem to be overwhelming them and because there was a Black president and they’re suffering from the existential terror of extinction — even though there absolutely is no real logic to that terror,” said Jemisin to The Paris Review.
She added: “That is what we’ve been struggling with, people who are so fragile that they’re literally willing to destroy the planet rather than give up controlling it. They’re literally not willing to do things that are good for everyone because they’re terrified of one person who they don’t like maybe getting some benefit from that.”
For more about Butler, Adeyemi and Jemisinh, click here.
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