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Book List: Black Authors of Speculative Fiction

This is not so much a book list as a list that will lead you to books.

I like to browse at the library (a pastime, unfortunately, that is on hold for the time being) and have discovered a lot of interesting authors that way. The new books section there is how I discovered Nnedi Okorafor, Rivers Solomon, and C.L. Polk. While I was encountering these authors for the first time, there was also a push for readers to deliberately work on including more diverse writers in their reading material. Both then and now there’s an argument made that readers should just read what they want, without considering the race of the author. It is valid to read just what you want to read, or to read the same kind of thing (or the same book) over and over– as Ranganathan says, every reader his book. But why not push your boundaries a little? If what you’re looking for is a good story, there are a lot of good stories you might miss out on if you aren’t deliberately seeking out Black authors. There is frequently a different aesthetic to their books, and the stories can catch you in ways you don’t expect. This difference leads to looking at speculative fiction genres through a new lens. In the case of Black people in the African diaspora, that aesthetic is generally referred to as Afrofuturism, a term first coined by Mark Dery. Nigerian writer Nnedi Okorafor recently differentiated that from the writing of Black Africans, which she identifies as Africanfuturism (you can read about that on her website, which I’ve linked to below, just scroll down to her name). Definitely, not everything Black writers come out with falls into this aesthetic. Considered althogether, Black speculative fiction covers a broad range of approaches to science fiction, fantasy, folkloric, and fluid fiction (a term coined by literary theorist Kinitra Brooks). If you haven’t tried it, look up some of these authors. I think you’ll find something you like.

I’m going to note that these are extremely brief and incomplete summaries, and it is a far from complete list. To learn more about these authors and their books click on the links. Enjoy!

Steven Barnes (Goodreads): Barnes writes alternative history, science fiction. horror, nonfiction, sometimes with Tannarive Due or other co-authors.

Tannarive Due (author website) : Due writes horror and nonfiction, sometimes with Steven Barnes. Due is an academic who teaches and writes about Black speculative fiction, particularly horror.

Jewelle Gomez (author website) : Jewelle Gomez is best known as the author of The Gilda Stories, about a black lesbian vampire. She has written poetry, plays, and essays.

N.K. Jemisin (author website): N.K. Jemisin writes Afrofuturistic science fiction and fantasy. Jemisin won three consecutive Hugo awards for Best Novel for the books in her Broken Earth Trilogy.

Walter Mosely (author website): mysteries, science fiction, nonfiction. Mosely is best known for his Easy Rawlins mystery series but has written in a variety of genres.

Samuel R. Delany (author website): science fiction, LGBTQ+ fiction, nonfiction. Delaney is the first Black person to be recognized as a modern science fiction writer.

Wrath James White (publisher website). interviews at Monster Librarian : extreme horror. Click on these links to see our reviews: Yaccub’s Curse, Succulent Prey, The Resurrectionist, Sacrifice, Sloppy Seconds,and Vicious Romantic

Sumiko Saulson (author website): horror, graphic novels, nonfiction on black women in horror. In addition to writing fiction, Saulson is the compiler of 100 Black Women in Horror (click here to see our review)and editor of the anthology Black Magic Women: Terrifying Tales by Scary Sisters.

Octavia Butler (official website of the Octavia Butler Estate): science fiction, alternative history, dystopian fiction Butler was the first recognized black woman author of modern science fiction and an inspiration for many Afrofuturist authors. See our review of her Earthseed Trilogy, which includes Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents here.

Tomi Adeyemi (author website) : YA Africanfuturist fantasy. Adeyemi is the bestselling author of the Legacy of Orisha series.

Evan Winter (Goodreads), interview at Tor.com: Africanfuturist epic fantasy.

Nnedi Okorafor (author website), Goodreads: Okorafor is an award-winning Nigerian-American science fiction and fantasy author who defines herself as an Africanfuturist and Africanjujuist (visit her author website for her explanation)

P. Djeli Clark (author website): Clark is an academic who writes nonfiction on Black speculative fiction, as well as a writer of Black speculative fiction, including alternative history, science fiction, and fantasy.

Victor LaValle (author website): Lavalle teaches at Columbia University. He writes horror, science fiction, and fantasy. Lavalle has won the Bram Stoker Award for his novella The Ballad of Black Tom (for our review click here) and the graphic novel Victor Lavalle’s Destroyer (for our review, click here).

Nalo Hopkinson (author website): Born in Jamaica, Nalo Hopkinson describes herself as a writer of fantastical fiction. She’s written nine books, including the award-winning Brown Girl in the Ring. She’s a professor of creative writing at the Univeristy of California Riverside.

Alaya Dawn Johnson (author website): is the author of YA and adult urban fantasy and speculative fiction, including the Andre Norton award-winning Love Is the Drug at the Nebula Awards.

C.L. Polk (author website): C.L. Polk is the author of the Kingston Cycle, a fantasy which takes p;ace in a steampunk-like setting similar to Edwardian England. The first book, Witchmark, won the World Fantasy Award and was nominated for the Lambda, Nebula, Locus, and Aurora awards.

Daniel Jose Older (author website) : Daniel Jose Older’s writing includes historical fantasy for middle-graders, the award winning YA Shadowshaper series, and adult urban fantasy .

C.T. Rwizi: C.T. Rwizi is originally from Zimbabwe and Swaziland, lived in Costa Rica and the United States, and now resides in South Africa. His debut fantasy novel, Scarlet Odyssey, was just released. Read our review here.

L.L. McKinney (author website): McKinney is the author of the YA Nightmare-verse dark fantasy books, beginning with A Blade So Black.

Rivers Solomon (author website): Solomon’s first book, An Unkindness of Ghosts, was a finalist for the Lambda, Tiptree, Locus, and Hurston/Wright awards and won a Firecracker Award. Their novella, The Deep, a collaboration with the musical group Clipping (which includes Daveed Diggs, formerly of Hamilton) is an outstanding work of Black speculative fiction. Read our review here.

Valjeanne Jeffers (Goodreads), (author website): Jeffers is the author of the Immortals series. She has published fantasy, science fiction, and erotica, particularly in Afrofuturist subgenres such as steamfunk and cyberfunk

Justina Ireland (author website): Ireland is the author of the YA alternate history horror novel Dread Nation and its sequel, Deathless Divide. She has also written other YA fantasy novels and writes for the Star Wars franchise.

Nicky Drayden (author website): Drayden writes Afrofuturist science fiction and fantasy.

Andrea Hairston (author website): Hairston is a playwright, novelist, and professor of theatre and Africana at Smith College. She is a feminist science fiction writer who has published novels, plays, and essays. Her book Redwood and Wildfire won the Tiptree and Carl Brandon Society awards.

Rebecca Roanhorse (author website): Roanhorse is an award-winning speculative fiction writer who has both Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo and African-American heritage. She has written post-apocalyptic urban fantasy and middle-grade fantasy, and writes for the Star Wars franchise.

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Kirsten, Reply

Musings: Choosing Your Adventure: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Doubleday, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-0385541213

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

The Starless Sea starts with a book-loving graduate student, Zachary Ezra Rawlins, who is writing his thesis on video games, finding a mysterious book of stories in his school’s library that includes a description of an incident from his childhood about a door he saw but didn’t open. Off he goes to find out more about the book and how he comes to be in it, that early on involves discussions of narrative and the differences between how it works in written works and in games. An inquisitive librarian tracks down information on the book for him, and between her help and a lot of searching the Internet, he is able to use clues from the book to connect it to a literary masquerade taking place in New York City in just a few days. Shortly, Zachary is on a quest, and the masquerade turns into a mystery, a chase, and an adventure that gives him the opportunity to walk through another door.

Once through the door, it is permanently closed behind him, and a different story begins for him. Zachary has entered a Harbor on the Starless Sea, an underground world where books and stories are safely kept. He is in a maze, or maybe it’s a hotel, or a library, with many doors, some locked and some open, where paths in time sometimes cross and sometimes do not, and people who meet in one room may not see each other again after leaving through the door. In addition to the Keeper and Zachary, there are just a few other people who appear in the underground world behind the door: Rhyme, the last guardian of the stories; Dorian, who may or may not be Zachary’s savior, killer, or true love, or a combination; Allegra, who wants to close all the doors so the story of the Starless Sea can never end; Simon and Eleanor, lovers who lost each other in time; and Mirabel, their daughter. All of them appear in different incarnations across different times and spaces as Zachary travels through the lands of the Starless Sea, and the sea itself. The world Zachary enters is dark, empty, often lonely and sometimes frightening or beautiful. His purpose once he arrives is unclear: even the Keeper of the Harbor doesn’t know, or want him there.

Erin Morgenstern writes gorgeous, lyrical, visually evocative prose. She started out as a visual artist and you can really tell from the way she has used words to create her worlds on paper. And if you are a person who loves books and stories and storytelling, who has always wanted to go through a portal or door to adventure, that might be enough for you to fall in love with this book. The weakenesses in plot and characterization are serious flaws, though. While Morgenstern starts out strong, once Zachary is through the portal, we lose the thread of his quest and it doesn’t get picked up again for a very long time (although there are a number of nods to the Narnia books throughout). There are multiple side stories that make you, as the reader, want to know where things went next, like the story of Simon and Eleanor, which has one foot in our reality for at least part of the time, and the story of the innkeeper falling in love, which feels like a fable but might not be.

The tales and fables in The Starless Sea are transformative, tragic, bleeding and dark. I was willing to try to track Zachary, as the anchor to the narrative, through his adventure because I wanted to know how some of these stories connected with his, but in many cases they were just vignettes, with the threads left hanging, or they returned in another incarnation. Then about three-quarters of the way through the book, Morgenstern, having constructed this elaborate, recursive story, suggested that Zachary, the Alice in this wonderland, might be an unreliable reporter. That is, that nothing I had experienced (as a reader) with him could be trusted, and that he might not actually even be in the world of the Starless Sea. Although she backtracked shortly after that, it derailed the story. Once it’s out there, it can’t be unsaid.

Morgenstern was able to create a fairytale atmosphere, but in attempting to make her characters archetypes, she weakened them to the point that it was hard to care what happened to them, and this betrayal of the reader made that even more difficult. In constructing and connecting multiple layers and versions of potentially linked stories that reflected the possible choices of the characters, she left them adrift. In interviews she has said plot is her weakness, and that she knew she had shortchanged her characters, and that’s really obvious here.

Because of Morgenstern’s amazing worldbuilding and gorgeous writing, and because I think she had some really interesting things to say about the way we structure stories in books (where the reader has a single path), versus games (where the player has many choices and can try different ones if the first ones don’t work), The Starless Sea was worth getting lost in. I feel like Morgenstern tried to present what it could look like to see what happens when a character makes different choices (like going through a door or not) by giving us a bird’s eye view of what it could look like to see the branchings and connections, outside the format of a game or a “choose your own adventure” book.

It’s an interesting experiment, but the observer’s position is unsatisfactory to me when I’m reading for enjoyment.

In adventure games, you get to be the active participant making decisions and dealing with their consequences. “Choose your own adventure” books are written in second person, making “you”, the reader, the decision maker, with the ability to go back through your chain of decisions and change them, hoping for a different ending (getting to make your own choices is so vital that Chooseco just developed a series of board books). I just wasn’t invested enough in Zachary’s story to want to watch him make decisions (often random) without having more direct interaction. Storytelling, if it doesn’t involve the reader or listener directly in participation, engages us when the storyteller invites us in. As gorgeously written as The Starless Sea is, it didn’t feel inviting to me as a reader. While the author created a memorable fictional world, she never opened a door.

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Kirsten, Reply

Book Review: The PS Book of Fantastic Fictioneers: A History of the Incredible (volumes 1 and 2) edited by Pete Von Sholly

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The PS Book of Fantastic Fictioneers: A History of the Incredible (volumes 1 and 2) edited by Pete Von Sholly

PS Publishing, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1786364258 (volume 1)

ISBN-13: 978-1786364265 (volume 2)

Available: Hardcover

Fantastic Fictioneers is a two-volume set from PS Publishing of short essays, arranged alphabetically, meant to celebrate 120 people who have contributed to what creator Pete von Sholly describes as the “imaginative arts”. This term covers individuals who have contributed to a wide swath of media, from children’s authors to comic book artists and writers, movie directors, animators, actors, publishers, and writers of science fiction, mystery, and horror. Some have passed away, like H.P. Lovecraft and Forrest Ackerman, and others are still with us, like Stuart Gordon and Ramsey Campbell. Each entry starts with a large illustration filling three-quarters of a page including the likeness of the entry’s subject accompanied by an illustration by von Sholly of what made them a prominent “fantastic fictioneer” (for example, the entry on Charles Addams pictures the Addams Family conjuring up Addams’ ghost in a seance; the background of Hiernomyous Bosch’s portrait contains creatures from his paintings; Ray Harryhausen’s face floats among his many models) followed by the first few paragraphs of a short essay. Some essays are detailed biographical entries, others are more personal accounts, and many are a combination. The entry on H.R. Giger includes musings and analysis on his work; the entry on Octavia Butler goes into detail on her life but includes a personal account; and Maria Alexander’s entry on Clive Barker is mainly a personal account of her experiences with him and his work. Each essay includes many photographs of artifacts and artwork related to the work of the essay’s subject, as well as photos of the individual. Von Sholly was able to get some prominent names to write many of the essays, including S.T. Joshi on Lovecraft, J.D. Lees on Ishiro Honda, and Harlan Ellison on Frank Herbert. If you have the time, you could spend quite a while turning the pages and learning a little about the varied “fantastic fictioneers” included.

The entries aren’t consistent enough in their format and content for the books to be used reliably as a reference source of biographical information, but the collection of individuals profiled crosses many areas of the “imaginative arts” and there is information on individuals that might not be typically covered (I had never heard of Seabury Quinn before). Although it could have benefited from a little more diversity (very few women and minority “fictioneers” are covered), Von Sholly explains that, outside of a few “obligatory” entries, the majority are subjective favorites. As long as the set already is, ultimately choices about what would be included had to be made, and there is no doubting that Fantastic Fictioneers is a labor of love. Unfortunately, while it is a gorgeous volume, it lacks an index, and many of the images are not credited, which could be a detriment to a library purchasing it. Fantastic Fictioneers will appeal most to collectors and fans, and large libraries interested in adding specialized biographical reference materials to their collections.

Due to the variety of individuals covered, and the expense of purchasing the set (about $130 for both volumes), I’m including images of the table of contents of both volumes below. It really is a wide-ranging collection of entries! For those fascinated by all aspects of speculative fiction, this is a unique collection!

Editor’s note: I received a PDF file from the publisher for this review.

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