Last week Tade Thompson, a British-born Yoruba writer, became only the second writer of black African heritage to win the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction. Three out of this year’s six shortlisted titles were by writers of colour, a reflection of the fact that some of today’s most exciting SF and fantasy writing comes from non-white authors. Recent high-profile examples include Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer prize in 2017, as well as that year’s Arthur C Clarke award and is being made into a TV series by Barry Jenkins; and NK Jemisin, who last year won a third consecutive Hugo award for best science fiction novel with the final part of her Broken Earth trilogy. Yet as Tom Hunter, award administrator for the Arthur C Clarke prize, points out, of the 124 submissions from 46 different publishers and imprints, only 7% were by writers of colour. He is unambiguous about what this means: “Diversity in science fiction needs action now.”
Thompson’s Rosewater was a worthy winner: a complex and fast-moving novel that expertly balances weird alien incursion against thriller action, zombie scares and a vividly rendered future Nigeria. He joins Whitehead and Jemisin as leading proponents of contemporary Afrofuturism, at a time when that movement is going mainstream – the film Black Panther took more than $1bn at the box office last year, and some of the world’s biggest recording artists have adopted Afrofuturist stylings, from Rihanna and Beyoncé to Janelle Monáe.
In fact the movement, and black engagement with sci-fi, go back a long way. Samuel Delany has been writing sci-fi from the black experience since the 1960s (he’s still going), Funkadelic were hymning their outer-space mothership in the 1970s, and the much missed Octavia Butler wrote some of the most powerful sci-fi of the 1980s and 90s. What’s happening today is a shift in focus: a black African rather than African American sci-fi phenomenon. Writer Geoff Ryman, a former Clarke winner himself, points out that Thompson’s success marks “the first time an African not living in the US has won a major sci-fi/fantasy award”.
Rosewater is a distinctively African example of Afrofuturism: a portrait of Nigeria in 2066, extrapolated from the bustling and expanding society of today, but with its own distinctive flavour – intricate, sometimes hectic, spacious. Where white western cyberpunk tends to isolate its characters, gloomily alienated individuals moving through hi-tech future cities, Thompson’s characters exist in vivid networks of kinship and friendship groups. The novel is as interested in protagonist Kaaro’s love life (he is believably gauche in relation to his various objects of desire) as in his superhero skills. The far-fetched and the mundane rub shoulders in a distinctive and agreeable manner. Kaaro has employment as a kind of telepathic James Bond, but he also has a dull job in a bank. The alien incursion, around which the novel’s titular city has been constructed, combines magic and science: healing the sick and bringing the dead back to zombie-life, but also provoking a hi-tech evolution in science.
Thompson is the UK spokesperson for the Nommo awards, set up to recognise excellence in African speculative fiction. He sees the current diversification of genre as driven by two main factors. “SF is looking for new stories because of progressive thought, but also the need to avoid stagnation. Finding new ideas to feed audience appetites means looking everywhere, which in turn improves career prospects for marginalised creators. So [the Nigerian-American writer, Nnedi] Okorafor happens, Jemisin happens, and Black Panther breaks the box office, because when you go looking, you find gold.” Okorafor, award-winning author of the Binti trilogy, has recently had her work picked up for TV adaptation by HBO. “We persist not to entertain,” says Thompson, “but because of an enduring love of genre, hence the Nommo awards, hence magazines like Omenana and Fiyah.”
Leila Abu el Hawa, director of the Kitschies, a prominent British prize for progressive sci-fi and fantasy, identifies other emerging voices. “Every year I’m really excited by what we’ll find coming from established authors and the new folk on the scene: Temi Oh, Agnes Gomillion, Thompson and Justina Ireland to name a few.” But she also recognises real inertia in the system. “These voices are not always easy to find, and the lack of diversity within publishing is endemic and not just limited to genre. Things are changing, but slowly.”
Chair of the Clarke judges Andrew M Butler agrees: “The way we define SF, whether starting with Shelley or Verne or Wells or the pulps, is with white and predominantly male writers. We need new perspectives. That’s part of the process of estrangement and familiarisation that great SF engages in.”
In 2015, Thompson took part in the discussions that established the African Speculative Fiction Society. It is now a body of 170 published African writers, editors and publishers who nominate and vote for the Nommos. Ryman, who administers the awards, says the African Science Fiction and Fantasy reading group on Facebook has 3,500 members and is growing. “In the wake of the success of Black Panther, and the success of Africans like Thompson and Okorafor, almost every publisher now wants to be able to say they are open to speculative fiction by Africans. That can only be a good thing.”
But he qualifies his optimism: “If African writers are to end their dependency on being published in the west – and develop a big audience on the [African] continent – publishers here should consider hiring in African editors with experience in African Englishes and lives. Then their efforts really will build on the success of people like Tade to provide a platform for African stories told by Africans.”
Ryman points to “terrific novels by Africans” such as Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, the story of a young Nigerian woman whose consciousness is fractured between different realities; The Raft by Fred Strydom, a high-concept meditation on memory and the nature of reality; Azotus, a sub-Saharan dystopia by Shadreck Chikoti; and Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh, a vibrant space adventure in which a young crew set out on a 23-year flight to a new world. But he acknowledges that the publishing world’s centre of gravity remains western. “All the prizes and attention and impact come from being published in the west.”
Science fiction may be ahead of the curve, compared with some other genres. But it still has further to go. For now, however, the future looks bright.
