Come Alive by Saying No: An Introduction to Black Power SF

Abstract

This essay considers a group of novels from the 1960s and 1970s about African-American revolution, by Barry Beckham, Nivi-kofi A. Easley, Sam Greenlee, Chester Himes, Blyden Jackson, William Melvin Kelley, John O. Killens, Warren Miller, Julian Moreau, Chuck Stone, John Edgar Wideman, and John A. Williams as examples of black power sf. It focuses in particular on their inability to imagine a post-revolutionary future, and the strategies they adopt in place of more conventional sf techniques of extrapolation—such as refusal, immanentization, veil-rending, and pornotopianism—in order to narrativize the problem of what Walter Mosley has characterized as breaking the chains of (white) reality.

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