Bill Campbell & Edward Austin Hall (eds.“We can also assume that it’s dead because a melanin-devouring plague (Schuylerosis?) either killed all people of color or that same plague killed all the melanin on the planet, leaving only a handful of affable sidekicks in its wake.” – Bill Campbell, editor of Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond However if the former is the only response to what the latter opposes, it’s merely replacing one hegemony with another. Neither are these two mutually exclusive. On the other side is fiction that doesn’t begin from the disingenuous and cynical “all things being equal” position that allows for a universe of white science-fiction and fantasy to exist uncontested.

One one side there is the Afrofuturism of genre tropes, no different in its own way from mainstream fantasy mired in a deeply uncritical view of medieval Europe, all dragons and monarchies. Perhaps it’s a question here about what constitutes Afrofuturism. By the third or fourth story in, it was going so much in the ‘piling up unexamined and hackneyed tropes’ direction I decided to stop. The promises the Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto makes are broadly what I look for in skiffy/fantasy as the bare minimum (well, interstellar travel and alternate universes aside) for me to even pick a book up, and what I’d hoped to find in Mothership. Certainly judging an anthology on the basis of a couple of short stories is decidedly biased, but it was while I was reading this I also read The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto which is by (I think this) Martine Syms (though ‘Conceptual Entrepreneur’ sounds like one of those Silicon Valley ‘job’ descriptions).

Or as much of it as I’ve currently read – and I stopped not very far in at all. Banks, the skiffy/fantasy reading of late has been very dissatisfying. Reliables in the form of Charles Stross and Iain M. The opposite though I can say for most of the fiction. I was looking on my bookshelves recently, and of the non-fiction stuff there is sod-all that doesn’t fall out of the at least a solid read category, if not indeed brilliant read territory. Bill Campbell’s & Edward Austin Hall’s Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond arrived shortly after and it’s been a disorganised couple of months when it comes to reading (side-tracked by watching all three seasons of Person of Interest, twice), as well, my direction or enthusiasm has moved firmly back towards non-fiction. Womack’s Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture a couple of months ago, I think this is the book I was intending to read.

Mothership by Bill Campbell