In this chapter, I have argued that Allen and Okorafor represent a new generation of writers whose stories may be rife with stereotypes and metafiction, but who use both of those elements differently from their forebears. Allen’s “The Venus Effect” and Okorafor’s “The Magical Negro”
presented blatantly stereotypical characters in order to force readers to notice and to explore that aspect, and the effect is heightened through the use of metafiction and metalepsis. Such literary devices highlight the narratives’
synthetic and thematic dimensions, while downplaying and disrupting the mimetic. In these two stories, audiences are not invited to feel much empathy for the characters because they are presented so stereotypically, being caricatures instead of relatable human beings. Instead, these authors encourage their readers to concentrate on the thematic features of the narratives: the cultural and political elements of the readers’ reality. Due to the direct address and metaleptic moments in both stories, the self-reflectivity of the narrative turns toward the readers in a spell of joint attention, much like the Venus effect in a painting.
In the latter part of this chapter, I discussed how Okorafor has sought to take control of genre denominations and how her writing can be read through the term Africanfuturism. Thus, whereas her “The Magical Negro” can still be read as an Afrofuturist narrative, her Binti trilogy demonstrates Africanfuturist tendencies. Drawing on Westfahl’s notion that different groups or even individuals can attempt to gain more control of defining genre, I studied how the definitions of Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism strive to do just that. Authors and editors seek to gain control of how their work is defined and categorized—and, in Okorafor’s case, even how it is read. Africanfuturist narratives like Binti take a further step: when writing their own stories, they cut ties with the West and establish a new normalcy that is not dependent on comparisons with Eurocentric, racist, and colonialist traditions of Anglo-American science fiction. By replacing the (Anglo) Anglo-American context in their fiction with an African one, Africanfuturist writers like Okorafor expand and radically transform the worlds of speculative fiction.
7 CONCLUSION
CHANGING SCIENCE FICTION
In this thesis, I have outlined how science fiction has changed from a “white man’s genre” into one that can accommodate Okorafor’s Africanfuturist fiction and includes so many influential writers of color. Through case studies of fiction by Delany, Butler, Hopkinson, Okorafor, and Allen, I have shown how these authors have shaped the genre from within. Each generation of writers has—within their own contexts and to an extent influenced by those contexts—
consciously aimed at transforming or subverting science fiction to allow for more diversity, more writers and characters from different backgrounds, and more variety in its themes. In order to provide a wider view of the change, this thesis has also discussed other forces that are at play when a genre is changing.
When discussing different forces or authorities shaping the genre of science fiction, I have used Westfahl’s model of “unknowingly shared authority,” albeit I have modified its five authorities in order to allow for more complexity within each group, in order to make it better suited for the context of science fiction by authors of color. In the pages that remain, I will first sum up the main arguments regarding generic change presented in this dissertation and, because this study strives to be a part of the academic discussion defining science fiction, I will also take up the challenge I avoided in the Introduction, and briefly discuss the implications of the practices of forming definitions of sf within academia. Finally, I will sum up my findings about the compatibility of science fiction and rhetorical poetics.
When Delany started writing science fiction in the 1960s, he entered a genre where writing traditional science fiction meant having no (obviously) black characters in central roles, and where technology and the hard sciences were the desirable motifs. As I argue in Section 1.1, for Delany’s early fiction, the most relevant authority shaping the genre was John W. Campbell’s editorial policies and the genre’s roots in adventure fiction. Delany’s earliest novels, including The Ballad of Beta-2, did not so much change the genre as work within the genre on its terms. However, even as the protocols of science fiction shaped Delany’s early fiction, he also reshaped motifs like the alien encounter, thus paving way for others after him. By 1970, science fiction was also refashioned by the science fiction community, when the emergence of the New Wave favored more literary works and allowed for more explicit depictions of sexuality and race; for instance, Delany’s aliens in The Einstein Intersection assume brown skin as part of their human forms. Delany’s subsequent work then highlights how changes exterior to the genre can be reflected in the context of science fiction. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand reflects academic discussions of deconstruction and the backlash on gay rights during the 1980s. Delany uses both the trope of the alien and principles
of deconstruction to problematize his readers’ assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and language.
Octavia Butler’s works and their reception also show the impact of academia, this time in labeling and interpreting the works of an African American female science fiction author. The conflicting interpretations are most evident in readings of Butler’s alien encounters, which can be read as allegories from colonialism to neo-capitalism; many of those readings are, in Tucker’s words, “overdetermined” by the author’s race (“The Human Contradiction” 173). What Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy and “Bloodchild” do, however, is to transform the science-fictional motif of the alien encounter that is often paired with demonization of the other in many classic works of science fiction. In doing so, she travels the trail blazed by Delany, whose fiction from the very beginning avoids equating difference and otherness with evil.
Nalo Hopkinson, emerging in the genre in the late 1990s, assumes a more openly critical stance toward genre conventions. In many interviews, she declares that she is subverting science fiction, and this motivation is evident in her fiction. In Midnight Robber she populates the future society with Afro-Caribbean people and has her narrator and characters speak Creole.
Furthermore, by subverting readers’ assumptions about colonialist power relations she questions the genre conventions of the alien encounter.
Hopkinson’s quest to change science fiction has also shaped fandom: she was one of the key figures in founding the Carl Brandon Society, which aims to make the genre more inclusive. Hopkinson’s fiction also demonstrates the role of definitions and labeling: because of its Afro-Caribbean features, her work is often described as going beyond science fiction.
The early years of the twenty-first century brought more discussions on race and racism inside the genre community, which finally erupted in the so-called RaceFail ’09 discussions. The positive aspects arising from the debate were plenty, but they were soon followed by an attempted backlash in the form of the Puppygate controversy. This is the context for Okorafor’s “The Magical Negro,” a short story whose titular main character declares to readers that the speculative genre they are reading is about to change. Allen’s “The Venus Effect,” on the other hand, parodies the racist conventions and stereotypes abundant in popular culture by thematizing the real-life tragedy of police brutality. In the end, there emerges a tale of the opposing forces of inclusion and prejudice, subversion and tradition. Whereas the genre these writers have chosen to write in/into may be said to have to some extent limited and thwarted their writing and the themes and motifs available, today black science fiction authors today are consciously changing and subverting the genre into something more inclusive, which does not flinch in the face of diversity, but lives up to the potential of the genre as literature of change and possibility.
The authors’ insistence on changing the genre while still remaining in it underscores the issues that are at stake with genre definitions and even theoretical notions of genre. Rieder argues:
The attribution does not just classify the text, it promotes its use by a certain group of readers and in certain kinds of ways (e.g., with a high level of seriousness, or a lack of it). When “we” point to a story and say it is SF, therefore, that means not only that it ought to be read using the protocols associated with SF but also that it can and should be read in conversation with other SF texts and readers. (“On Defining SF” n. pag.) This is a central feature in the works discussed in the thesis, and the dialogue with other science fiction texts and readers gets a pronounced role in many of them, especially in Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, Okorafor’s “The Magical Negro,” and Allen’s “The Venus Effect.” John Frow rightly argues that “texts do not ‘belong’ to genres but are, rather, uses of them” (2) or “perform the genres by which they are shaped” (25). In the context of these authors, however, the notion of “belonging” to a genre becomes more significant, as the texts are intended by their authors to widen the definition of the very genre they want to belong to. In other words, such changes in the field entail widening the traditional definitions of what science fiction is.
ALIEN ENCOUNTERS
Throughout this dissertation, I have focused on the authors’ ways of transforming the central motif of science fiction, the alien encounter. Leonard argues that the potential of science fiction to imagine otherness has sometimes been underestimated. She claims that a “large argument-cum-explanation has tempted some—that White SF writers, sending White protagonists to defeat (Black) aliens, stage the meeting of difference only to reassert White superiority, so the genre’s compulsive re-enactment of racial supremacies and suppressions makes it hostile to Black liberation” (13). On the other hand, despite the racist conventions Leonard describes, the opposite potential in allegorical alien encounters—that is, the possibilities to discuss difference and otherness through the figure of the alien other—has been commended as one of the reasons why African American authors and readers are—or should be—
writing and reading science fiction.
However, none of the authors analyzed in this thesis completely conforms to the metaphor of aliens as racial others in their works. In Delany’s The Ballad of Beta-2, differences like race, gender, and sexuality are discussed allegorically, despite the context of human characters and their obsession with normativity and the persecution of difference among themselves. The actual alien encounter in Delany’s early work is often based on resolving misunderstandings, and the real danger for the main characters is posed by fellow humans. This motif is to some extent also present in Stars in My Pocket, depending on how one reads the role of the mysterious aliens known as the Xlv. Even though Delany’s early fiction is in many ways located at the core of genre science fiction, the differences between human/alien encounters in Delany’s fiction and, for instance, van Vogt’s “The Black Destroyer,” where
white characters encounter and defeat a murderous black alien, are striking.
In The Einstein Intersection, on the other hand, the encounter between humans and aliens is not explicit but occurs when humans are already gone from the surface of the planet. In this novel, Delany’s aliens function as what I term agents of double estrangement, as they interpret and enact human culture, but base their interpretations on a culture of a future human society which is largely unknown to the readers. Therefore, readers cannot know, for example, whether the aliens, who are mostly black, deliberately choose to take the form of black people, or whether that is the default makeup of humanity in the far future, on which the aliens are basing their interpretation of humanity.
In Delany’s Stars in My Pocket, humans and aliens coexist peacefully on most of the planets in the galaxy. The variety of life forms and different cultures makes communication a challenge, and societies are usually the result of compromises. Just as in The Ballad of Beta-2 and even The Einstein Intersection, the crucial division is not humans versus aliens, but the characters’ attitudes toward difference. In Stars in My Pocket, the opposing forces are demonstrated by the two ideologies striving for societal stability, either through conserving and setting norms or by allowing for the free play of ideas and encouraging adaptations to new circumstances. The evelmi’s role in the novel is also a kind of metaphor for racial difference, as Delany has his characters refer to the evelmi both as a different species and as a different race.
In Octavia Butler’s fiction, aliens seem to have the upper hand, but they are also dependent on humans in order to survive. Whereas issues of power do not play a significant role in Delany’s human/alien encounters, Butler’s encounters are defined by power versus powerlessness, together with questions of responsibility and ethics. These themes have caused many critics to read Butler’s aliens as allegories of various “Earthly” groups. Due to the aliens’ position of power in Butler’s works, their otherness is usually not read as a metaphor for blackness, for example, but rather as an allegorical portrayal of colonialists and slave masters. However, this interpretation poses the risk of simply reproducing the power structures which Butler’s fiction aims to overturn. Furthermore, as we have seen in Chapter 4, the changing ethical judgments in Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy and “Bloodchild” complicate allegorical readings and may force critics to read against the narrative’s structure of ethical judgments or ignore parts of the plot. Hence, I claim that Butler’s alien encounters, rather than being primarily allegorical, function as correctives to the genre’s traditional trope of the alien encounter, where the alien is othered and demonized, or indeed where the encounter is presented as unproblematic. While Butler’s works promote embracing difference and symbiotic coexistence through the ethical judgments they evoke, they show that it is never easy to reach an agreement and maintain a functioning relationship between humans and aliens.
Nalo Hopkinson’s aliens, for their part, mostly do function as a colonial allegory, but they never fit the mold of a helpless colonial subject at the mercy of white colonialists. First, the aliens in Midnight Robber are represented as
perfectly capable of looking after themselves, even when the human characters treat them in a manner redolent of colonialism. Second, the allegory is complicated by the fact that the human characters are from cultures previously colonized by white Europeans. Hopkinson thus builds a similar tension between tradition and subversion as Butler, but in a more outspoken way, which lets readers recognize a science-fictional motif before rejecting it in its stereotypical form.
In the short stories by Okorafor and Allen discussed in Chapter 6, encounters with the other do not end well. In Allen’s “The Venus Effect,”
seeing the human other as a stereotype leads to catastrophic consequences, as the narrative anomaly of the man in the police uniform repeatedly kills the main character. The actual extraterrestrial aliens’ roles in the narrative are constantly thwarted as well when each of the short chapters ends abruptly in the main character’s death. The alien girl from Venus and the main character Apollo never get to “have some romantically-charged adventures fighting evil aliens,” like the narrator describes the direction the plot should have taken. In Okorafor’s “The Magical Negro,” there are no alien characters, but the human other, the Magical Negro, rejects his stereotypical role in a white genre and transforms into an Afro-Caribbean deity. Okorafor’s Binti trilogy, briefly discussed in the context of Africanfuturism in Section 6.3, in many ways returns to the traditional alien encounter narrative, where the alien can be a deadly enemy—if humans so choose. Still, understanding, negotiation, and hybridity prove to be the solutions for coexisting with the other in Binti as well.
The human-alien encounters studied in this thesis usually involve a conflict which is resolved by negotiation and compromise. Often the best negotiator is a hybrid figure, due to his or her intrinsic understanding of both parties.
Hybridity in the novels and short stories analyzed is thus a strength, combining the best of both worlds. In this sense, the hybrid characters represent the science-fictional grotesque, beings that break categories and are thus seen as monstrous by some critics. Rather than demonizing the other or the grotesque, however, these authors have designed their alien encounter narratives so that the main difference between the two groups in the novels and short stories is not the classic “us versus them” divide between humans and aliens but the way the characters relate to otherness and difference. In fact, those who demonize difference turn out to be monstrous.
THE POLITICS OF DEFINING
Another facet of generic change is the practice of labeling. Naming can be an act of inclusion or exclusion, or, as noted in Section 6.2, a form of taking control, as Okorafor’s use of the term Africanfuturism demonstrates.
Okorafor’s move is a textbook example of the strategy Westfahl describes in
“Who Governs Science Fiction”: influencing the genre by coining a new name for the literature. Okorafor insists that “Africanfuturism is a sub-category of science fiction” (“Africanfuturism” n. pag.). In other words, her new term is
inclusive in the sense that it specifically aims at including her work in the genre. The same impulse seems to be behind Kali Tal’s discussion of the “black militant near-future novel,” which she names a “subgenre of African American science fiction” (66). Tal argues that the works she discusses, such as Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer (1962) and Sam Greenlee’s The Spook who Sat by the Door (1969), have previously been “ignored and miscategorized”
because of their authors’ blackness (66). In such cases, labeling a work as representing a particular subgenre of science fiction can help bring it under the generic umbrella without raising the objections of those policing the edges.
However, sub-genre labeling often ends up having an opposite effect. As McDonalds points out in her discussion of Nalo Hopkinson’s work, novels like Midnight Robber and Hopkinson’s debut novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) are often classified as “science fiction and…”;—in other words, they are considered hybrids rather than as full members of the genre. McDonald notes that the “generic matrix […] has compelled some scholars to declare alternative genres, subgenres, and entirely different nomenclatures for types of speculative writing that are based in more than just the white, Western mode of scientific thinking” (n. pag.).
Still, all of the writers included in this dissertation clearly want their work
Still, all of the writers included in this dissertation clearly want their work