Dhalgren: Samuel Delany, afrofuturism, & black SF

Winner of the 2020 Locus, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Ignyte, and Brave New Words Awards.

“There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns,” proclaimed Octavia E. Butler.

New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color showcases emerging and seasoned writers of many races telling stories filled with shocking delights, powerful visions of the familiar made strange. Between this book’s covers burn tales of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and their indefinable overlappings. These are authors aware of our many possible pasts and futures, authors freed of stereotypes and clichés, ready to dazzle you with their daring genius.

Unexpected brilliance shines forth from every page.

In Queer Indigenous Cinemas, scholar Gabriel S. Estrada offers an analysis of queer Indigenous media from the Americas, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. This groundbreaking work uses Indigenous directional space and sovereign mapping methods to uncover the emotional, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of queer Indigenous lives. The book’s seven chapters—each one of the directions—look closely at media such as cinema and streaming videos that draw on Indigenous concepts from diverse nations such as Diné, Caxcan, Kanaka Maoli, and Nehiyawak.

Estrada discusses how the cinema brings into focus the ways that many Indigenous genders do not conform with the male/female binary, genders and sexualities that may or may not overlap with contemporary constructions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and two-spirit (LGBTQI2+) identities.

In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds—the intertwinement of the mental and the physical—in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. She reads (dis)ability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler (Kindred) and Phyllis Alesia Perry (Stigmata) not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. The fantasy worlds in works by N. K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. In these texts, as well as in Butler’s Parable series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. Outlining (dis)ability's centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts.

"Bodyminds Reimagined reveals how nonrealist representations can defamiliarize categories assumed to be self-evident, opening up new ways of thinking about methodology, trauma, metaphor, and politics. Schalk's work pushes all of us in feminist studies, black studies, and disability studies to reimagine how we understand minds and bodies moving though the world.” - Alison Kafer, author of Feminist, Queer, Crip

The Ignyte Awards consider only works, entities, and persons within the realm of speculative literature, to include fantasy, science-fiction, horror, magical realism, and their associated subgenres. Works are considered eligible if published and made available originating or translated into the English language (at least 70%) within a given calendar year. Works which are produced in whole or in part by LLMs (large language models) or generative “AI” services or products are ineligible in all categories.

Above: the 2026 nominees for Outstanding Anthology/Collected Works. You can vote and choose the award winner!

Afrofuturism & Radical Imagination

Thursday, August 27 | 7:00pm

Join the Museum of Science in Boston to explore how Black cultural traditions and visionary speculation offer a powerful toolkit for building more inclusive technologies and reimagining the world we inhabit.

What if imagination itself is a technology?  

Join the Museum of Science for a dynamic discussion at the intersection of art, science, and community — exploring how Afrofuturism offers not just a vision of the future, but a revolutionary framework for building it. Rooted in Black cultural traditions and fueled by visionary speculation, Afrofuturism has long challenged the boundaries of what science, technology, and society can look like.  

This event has passed.

I’m participating in "Afrofuturism and the Law: A Symposium for Justice" on April 24th. I’ll discuss how speculative narratives can help us interrogate our legal systems. Specifically through the lens of stories like "Motherlode" and "Don’t Stop, Can’t Stop" from my collection MOJORHYTHM. These works extrapolate on reproductive justice, the history of legal precedent and how Black women and girls are often the first impacted - adversely - and the systemic challenges within the music industry.

The question I’m asking is what is justice and who gets it and who doesn’t.

“They put up barriers, the same way with our bodies. Our bodies are meant for us to be very expressive. Hawaiians were like that. . . . To me it was an expression of the mahele of our bodies, the restriction of our bodies, the control of our expression of our bodies.” —Kuʻumeaaloha Gomes

Generated from the life histories of ten Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) elders (kūpuna) who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or māhū (LGBTQM), this book reveals the way they experienced overlapping Native/Indigenous and LGBTQM identities. The Mahele of Our Bodies: Nā Moʻolelo Kūpuna Māhū/LGBTQ is filled with rich descriptions of Hawaiʻi’s unwritten queer history, from growing up in the late Territory era and Hawai‘i’s transition to a state, to vivid descriptions of Honolulu nightlife in the 1960s and 1970s, the impact of HIV/AIDS in the hula community, and first-person accounts of the activism and political debates surrounding same-sex marriage rights in the 1990s.

Each life history explores themes of the significance of Hawaiian culture in identity formation, the ongoing prevalence of colonialism and Christianity, the importance of community activism, the role of culture and performance, and the complexities of leaving home to fully come out. The kūpuna in this book have much to teach us about how they survived. Stephanie Nohelani Teves edited the interviews she conducted into first person moʻolelo or stories. Their vivid descriptions of what life was like for them during the Hawaiian renaissance or at the height of the fight for same-sex marriage serve as a reminder of how much emotional and physical labor was expended so that present-day Kānaka LGBTQM can imagine different possibilities and hopeful futures.

Womb City, by Tlotlo Tsamaase: this genre-bending Africanfuturist horror novel blends The Handmaid’s Tale with Get Out in an adrenaline-packed, cyberpunk body-hopping ghost story exploring motherhood, memory, and a woman’s right to her own body.

Nelah seems to have it all: fame, wealth, and a long-awaited daughter growing in a government lab. But, trapped in a loveless marriage to a policeman who uses a microchip to monitor her every move, Nelah’s perfect life is precarious. After a drug-fueled evening culminates in an eerie car accident, Nelah commits a desperate crime and buries the body, daring to hope that she can keep one last secret.

The truth claws its way into Nelah’s life from the grave. 

As the ghost of her victim viciously hunts down the people Nelah holds dear, she is thrust into a race against the clock: in order to save any of her remaining loved ones, Nelah must unravel the political conspiracy her victim was on the verge of exposing—or risk losing everyone. 

"This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous) writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism’s histories. Here, readers will discover bio-engineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, motherships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492. Contributors include Darcie Little Badger, Mari Kurisato, Kai Minosh Pyle, David Alexander Robertson, and jaye simpson."

"Sylvia Rivera made transgender history when this portrait—of her (center), partner Julia Murray (right), and friend Christina Hayworth—taken on the day before New York City’s 2000 Pride March, was added to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2015. It’s the first portrait of a transgender person to be included in this important institution’s holdings."