Why Black writers in science fiction are important

Science Fiction, for those who may not be familiar with it, is a modern genre that involves speculations on current or future science and  technologies. It’s a broad genre known, where writers have shaped new worlds with new rules (and sometimes old ones repackaged into those new worlds.) These writers, unfortunately, are typically white and so are most if not all the characters they introduce to these worlds.

Octavia Butler, acclaimed science fiction author and perhaps the most notable Black writer of the genre, said in her 1980 essay The Lost Races of Science Fiction that, “Science fiction, more than any other genre deals with change–change in science and technology, and social change.”

In that essay Butler goes on to challenge all the reasons she’s heard for the lack of Black characters in Sci-fi stories. Recognizing a character as Black, even in these brave new worlds, would be disruptive of the storytelling. And when she broaches the subject of the lack of Black writers, she simply states what we all know, that representation matters.  In what ways could a reader be inspired to write their own stories if the worlds they see are populated only by Whiteness. That on this strange planet where trees are purple and grow with their roots pointing up toward the green sky, Blackness can’t possibly exist.

Which is why Black writers in science fiction are important. Because even forty years after the publishing of Butler’s essay we still manage to ask how science fiction remains so white. Though decidedly not as white as it was when Butler originally asked the question.

And, if science fiction is about change, be it in science, technology or society, who better to write that story than a Black author, whose entire life has been contemplating what a new world could look like? The worlds Black sci-fi authors build will almost always be more expansive.