Black History Month Reading Recommendations

[kate_schaefer]

I'm a member of the Carl Brandon Society, which is dedicated to addressing the representation of people of color in the fantastical genres such as science fiction, fantasy and horror. I got involved with the Carl Brandon Society because it administers the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund. One of the benefits of belonging to the CBS is that I get reading recommendations I wouldn't run into otherwise. Sometimes I like the stuff I find this way; sometimes I don't.

I've only read two of the following books, and they are the two you'd expect, by the two most famous black science fiction writers to date. Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren is not just one of my favorite books; it's the book I've read more often than any other, to the point that I can no longer really read it again, since I know the words so well. It's about a group of people scrabbling for survival in an odd urban landscape after some unspecified disaster in the near future; it's about sex, social organization, the artistic process, drugs, death, religion, psychiatry, and personal adornment.

I read Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower much later in life, so it didn't have the opportunity to whack me upside the head the way Dhalgren did. It, too, is a post-apocalyptic novel, moving from a crumbling, deadly urban landscape to a beautiful, idyllic pastoral setting that's just as deadly; it's about religion, social organization, the artistic process, death, and messianic movements.

The books I'm going to read from the list this month are Mindscape, by Andrea Hairston, and The Coyote Kinds of the Space Age Bachelor Pad, by Minister Faust.

The Carl Brandon Society recommends the following books for Black History Month:

So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany
My Soul to Keep, by Tananarive Due
The Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad, by Minister Faust
Mindscape, by Andrea Hairston
Wind Follower, by Carole McDonnell
Futureland, by Walter Mosley
The Shadow Speaker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
Zahrah the Windseeker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

And the 2005 Carl Brandon Society Award winners:

• PARALLAX AWARD given to works of speculative fiction created by a person of color: 47, by Walter Mosley

• KINDRED AWARD given to any work of speculative fiction dealing with issues of race and ethnicity; nominees may be of any racial or ethnic group: Stormwitch by Susan Vaught

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I read Futureland by Walter Mosley. It was really bleak.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I've read a few pages of it, but it didn't grab me. Of the rest of the list, I'd be most interested in the postcolonial anthology and Nnedi Okarafor-Mbachu's work, since she just won a hefty award from Macmillan.