The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF

Abstract

From the 1950s onwards, sf in the US magazine and paperback tradition postulated and presumed a color-blind future, generally depicting humankind one race, which has emerged from an unhappy past of racial misunderstandings and conflicts (James 47; see also Kilgore). This shared assumption accounts for the relative absence of people of color from such sf: if race was going to prove unimportant, why even bother thinking about it, when energies could instead be devoted to more pressing matters, such as how to colonize the solar system or build a better robot? And so questions of race remained as marginalized as black characters-at best, it seemed, Chewbacca's Jim to Han's Huck. A year after Star Wars, DC Comics put Superman in the ring with Muhammad Ali and then concocted a convoluted narrative that culminated in the speedy declaration of Ali's victory by a technical knockout as, stripped of his superpowers, the well-whupped Man of Steel refused to hit the canvas (until a split second after the referee announced the result). The exclusion of people of color from sf's future had already been noted by, among others, Gil Scott-Heron, whose 1970 track Whitey on the Moon (1970) contrasts the corporate profiteering of the US space program (so close, ideologically, to much of the Campbell-Heinlein tradition) with the impoverishment of black urban communities: I can't pay no doctor bill (but Whitey's on the moon)/Ten years from now I'll be payin' still (while Whitey's on the moon). The space race showed us which race space was for. This sense of exclusion even registered in white-authored sf. For example, in Survival, a 1971 episode of UFO (1970-73), Commander Straker (Ed Bishop)-the white, American head of SHADO, a secret military organization charged with defending Earth from alien invaders-believes white Colonel Paul Foster (Michael Billington) to be dead and so offers command of the vital moonbase to Lieutenant Mark Bradley (Harry Baird). Initially, this West-Indian officer turns down the promotion, saying that Straker has done his duty by offering the job to the next most senior man, even though he is black, and that he himself has done his duty by refusing it. When Straker demands an explanation, Bradley indicates his skin color. Straker-perhaps forgetting that the series is set in 1980, less than a decade in the future-responds, Don't give me that. Racial prejudice burned itself out five years ago.How would you know? Bradley demands. Whatever their intentions, sf's color-blind future was concocted by whites and excluded people of color as full subjects; and because of the particularities of US history, the most obvious omission was that significant proportion of the population descended from the survivors of the West-African genocide, the Middle Passage, and slavery. This is not to say that the dominant US sf

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