Science fiction has always been a way of imagining the future. Sometimes in its optimal form, sometimes as what the future might look like if people did not tend toward the good and the just. As legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once wrote, “The saddest aspect of life at present is that science fiction is accumulating knowledge faster than society is accumulating wisdom.”
Black women have always accumulated knowledge faster than society as a whole has accumulated wisdom. As a result, black women science fiction or fantasy writers are perhaps the most forward-thinking authors in these genres. For a long time, the field was dominated primarily by white men: the JRR Tolkiens, Philip K. Dicks, and George RR Martins of the field. But the popularity and foresight of a handful of black women authors proves that the reading public is ready to imagine a better tomorrow, today.
Tomi Adeyemi: the fresh storyteller
The final installment in Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orïsha trilogy, “Children of Anguish and Anarchy,” was released on June 25, 2024, and jumped to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for children’s and young adult books. The previous two titles in the series did the same when they were released. “There’s something about reading when you’re young that’s so different from reading when you’re an adult,” Adeyemi said in an interview in SBJCT“Books have the power to etch themselves into your heart and shape the way you view the world.”
Subscribe The week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news and analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for the free weekly newsletter
From our morning news roundup to our weekly Good News newsletter, get the best of the week delivered straight to your inbox.
From our morning news roundup to our weekly Good News newsletter, get the best of the week delivered straight to your inbox.
Adeyemi, a Nigerian-American writer, combines West African mythology with a textual undercurrent about the impact of the very real transatlantic slave trade. The series follows Zélie Adebola, a girl who comes from a family of wizards. In the final book, a group of colonizers called the Skulls enslave Zelie and her compatriots. In their marketing strategy, these are strictly young adult books. “It goes even deeper than entertainment, because I wanted to help people see black people, recognize them and empathize with them and recognize their pain and feel the need to put an end to it and fight against it,” Adeyemi told Assemblya website of Malala Yousafzai’s Malala Fund.
Predictably, Adeyemi has had a rollercoaster ride in Hollywood since the first book debuted. Studios snapped up the rights to adapt the first title into a movie, only to let the rights expire. Then, in 2022, Paramount snapped up the rights to Children of Blood and Bone, the first installment in the series, and agreed to hire Adeyemi as screenwriter, with acclaimed director Gina Prince-Bythewood at the helm.
Octavia Butler: the revered clairvoyant
Octavia Butler, who died in 2006, once said of “The Parable of the Sower,” her acclaimed 1993 novel about a woman who feels the pain of others: “I began writing the book thinking that maybe we need biological conscience. It seems to me that there are too many people in this world who would just as soon wipe out half their country if they could rule the other half.” It has long been said that the United States is a country lacking empathy. Butler named this American disease in this novel and throughout her work.
Over the years, Butler’s speculative visions of the future have taken shape in eerie ways. “The smoke-filled air from out-of-control fires, the rising rivers and rising seas, the sweltering heat and receding lakes, the disappearance of civil society and political stability, the light-year leaps in artificial intelligence – Octavia Butler foresaw them all,” wrote Tiya Miles, a professor and historian at Harvard University, in The Atlantic.
“Kindred,” Butler’s 1979 first-person novel about a black woman who keeps getting pulled from the 20th century to the antebellum era, was adapted into a series on FX in 2022. And “The Parable of the Sower” has been getting near-adaptations for years. With or without Hollywood, Butler’s clairvoyance remains unyielding. As writer Tananarive Due said of Butler and her work, “Sister, we have cities on fire… they told her. And how dare she retreat into that world. But in reality, she showed us an even bigger world, you know, something we couldn’t even comprehend.”
NK Jemisin: the blockbuster world designer
Awards are by no means the only measure of an author’s worth. Nevertheless, it is significant that a black woman has won three Hugo Awards in a row for best novel – the first time an author has ever achieved this.
Jemisin’s acclaimed Broken Earth trilogy stunned science fiction and fantasy critics, but readers of all stripes were drawn to the series’ mix of climate catastrophe, magic, brave women and blatant sexuality.
There is a departure in Jemisin’s work. When she thinks about alternative worlds, she builds them brick by brick. In worldbuilding, she imagines universes where equality and justice are goals that are sometimes attainable. And achieving that requires an empathetic embrace of both the individual and the collective.
“A good part of the reason we’re dealing with this political bullshit in the United States right now, excuse my language, is because we have a lot of white people who are freaking out because the demographics seem to be overwhelming them and because there was a black president, and they’re suffering from an existential fear of extinction — even though there’s absolutely no real logic to that fear,” Jemisin told The Paris Review. “That’s what we’re struggling with: people who are so fragile that they would literally rather destroy the planet than give up control of it. They’re literally unwilling to do things that are good for everyone because they’re afraid that a person they don’t like might take advantage of it.”
Their message resonates: Sony will produce all three Broken Earth novels as films. “The world is pretty unfair right now,” Jemisin told the outlet. “Those of us who grew up losing out on justice instinctively understand that and want to see that reality acknowledged because a large part of American society is intent on weaving the illusion that what you see is not what’s really happening. … But changing that is part of the work that science fiction and fantasy can do.”
