How Black female science fiction and fantasy writers are upending the narrative

Science fiction has always been a way to envision the future. Sometimes for the optimal; sometimes as the future might be if humans do not zig toward the good and just. As the legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov once wrote, "the saddest aspect of life right now is that science fiction gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

Black women have always gathered knowledge faster than society writ large gathers wisdom. Thus, a Black woman science fiction — or fantasy — writer might be the most prescient writers of these genres. The field has long been run by mostly white men: the J.R.R. Tolkiens, Philip K. Dicks and George R. R. Martins of the field. But the popularity and foresight of a handful of Black female writers proves that the reading public is ready to imagine a better tomorrow, today. 

Tomi Adeyemi: the fresh storyteller

The final installment of Adeyemi's "Legacy of Orisha" trilogy, "Children of Anguish and Anarchy," was released on June 25, 2024 and leapt to the top of the New York Times Children's and Young Adult bestsellers list. The previous two titles in the series did the same when released. "There is something about reading when you're young that is so different from reading when you're an adult," Adeyemi said when interviewed in SBJCT. "Books have the opportunity to bury themselves in your heart and shape the way you think about the world." 

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Adeyemi, a Nigerian American writer, merges West African mythology with a textual undercurrent about the effects of the very real transatlantic slave trade. The series follows Zélie Adebola, a girl who comes from a line of magicians. In the final book, a group of colonizers called Skulls enslave Zelie and her compatriots. These are young adult books only in their marketing strategy. "It goes even deeper than entertainment, because I wanted to help people see Black people, recognize them and empathize with them and identify their pain and feel the need to put a stop to it and fight against it," Adeyemi said to Assembly, a website from Malala Yousafzai's Malala Fund.

Perhaps predictably, Adeyemi has experienced a Hollywood roller coaster since the first book's debut. Studios have picked up the rights to turn the first title into a movie, only to let the rights run out. Then, in 2022, Paramount snagged the rights to "Children of Blood and Bone," the first in the series, and agreed to sign Adeyemi on as screenwriter, with renowned director Gina Prince-Bythewood at the helm. 

Octavia Butler: the revered clairvoyant 

Octavia Butler, who died in 2006, once said of "The Parable of the Sower," her celebrated 1993 novel about a woman who feels others' pain, "I began writing the book with the thought that maybe what we needed was the biological conscience. It does seem to me that there are too many people in this world who would just as soon wipe out half their country if they could rule the other half." Long has it been argued that the United States is a country low on empathy. Butler named that American disease in this novel and across her oeuvre. 

As the years have ticked on, Butler's speculative visions of the future have come to uncanny fruition. "The smoke-choked air from fire gone wild, the cresting rivers and rising seas, the sweltering heat and receding lakes, the melting away of civil society and political stability, the light-year leaps in artificial intelligence — Octavia Butler foresaw them all," wrote Tiya Miles, a professor and historian at Harvard University, in The Atlantic.

"Kindred," Butler's 1979 first-person novel about a Black woman who keeps being pulled from the 20th century to the antebellum era, was made into a series on FX in 2022. And there have been near-adaptations of "The Parable of the Sower" for years. With or without Hollywood, Butler's clairvoyance remains unbending. As the writer Tananarive Due said about Butler and her work, "sister, we got cities burning … they were telling her. And how dare she, you know, sort of retreat into this world. But actually, she was showing us an even bigger world, you know, something that we couldn't even wrap our minds around." 

N.K. Jemisin: the blockbuster world shaper

Awards are far from the end-all of an author's value. Still, when a Black woman wins three consecutive Hugo Awards for best novel, the first time any author has ever done so, it is telling. 

Jemisin's acclaimed Broken Earth trilogy had science fiction and fantasy critics agog. But readers of all stripes were drawn to the series' intermingling of climate catastrophe, magic, stalwart women and unabashed sexuality. 

In Jemisin's work there is a cracking open. When she contemplates alternate worlds, she builds them brick by brick. In her world-building, she envisions universes in which equality and justice are goals that are sometimes achievable. And to do so requires an empathetic embrace of both the individual and the collective. 

"A good portion of the reason that we are dealing with this political bullshit, pardon my language, in the United States right now is because we've got a bunch of white people who are freaked out because demographics seem to be overwhelming them and because there was a Black president and they're suffering from the existential terror of extinction — even though there absolutely is no real logic to that terror," said Jemisin to The Paris Review. "That is what we've been struggling with, people who are so fragile that they're literally willing to destroy the planet rather than give up controlling it. They're literally not willing to do things that are good for everyone because they're terrified of one person who they don't like maybe getting some benefit from that."

Her message is resonating: Sony is set to produce all three of the Broken Earth's novels as movies. "The world is pretty unjust right now," said Jemisin to the outlet. "Those of us that have grown up on the short end of the justice stick understand this innately and want acknowledgement of that reality, because so much of American society is dedicated to weaving the illusion that what you see is not actually what is happening.… But fixing that is part of the job that science fiction and fantasy can do."