African-American SciFi Authors in the 1950's "Golden Age"?

As an avid SciFi reader, I like the stuff that Heinlein, Asimov, Van Vogt, etc., wrote in the 1950’s. My question: were there any good African-American writers in this period?
Is SciFi a popular genre for African-Americans?

Very few. Samuel R. Delany had his first novel published in 1962 (he’s one of SF’s greatest writers overall) a little later than the time period you’re talking about, and he was one of the first to make a reputation. There may have been an individual story or two published by a Black author earlier, but no one who developed any reputation or long-term success.

The early readers of the SF genre and pulps was overwhelmingly white and male. That started changing in the 60s (other than a handful of earlier successful female writers like Leigh Brackett, Rosel George Brown, Judith Merrill, and C. L. Moore).

Not entirely certain, I very rarely bother to find out about an author’s personal life. If they can write, I read them, if they can’t write for shit I don’t want to waste my time and effort reading them.

Why should it possibly matter what the ancestory of any particular writer happens to be?

Or I could get really rude and point out a couple things … casual bastardy is far in excess of what many people think and anybody in the US has a real chance of having a ‘nigger in the woodpile’ and Roman civilization didn’t care what color you were as long as you were a citizen, and blacks traveled and intermarried all through the empire thanks to the habit of the legions retiring from their last duty station on land purchased while they were stationed there. The light cavalry from just after the second Punic war through around 300 AD tended to come from the African provinces that hosted the Berbers [back then called Mauri]. To make things even worse [?] the Moors had the temerity to raid and conquer up into Spain and southern parts of France, Balearics, Sicily, Sardinia, Malta and assorted areas in the Mediterranean, and the Ottomans raided and conquered their way to the gates of Vienna. I am quite sure that all those soldiers had a lovely time playing backgammon and chess and discussing the virtues of chastity. [nothing pisses off a prejudiced redneck white supremicist quite as much as pointing out the historical niggers in their woodpile.]

Color has nothing to do with someone’s ability to write SF. There may be no actual way to answer your question - you never had to meet your agent or publisher - back then as today most contact between writers and agents/publishers tended to be by mail and courier.

George Schuyler published a couple of stories in the 1930’s which I’d call SF:

Black No More, about what happens when science can turn black people white, and Black Empire, which incorporated a lot of speculative science.

He may have written other stuff in the genre that I’m not aware of.

There was Benny Russell. :slight_smile:

But there was plenty of contact between writers and fans (i.e., conventions) and among writers. SF is a pretty closed-knit community and people do tend to meet each other all the time. This was perhaps even more true in the 1950s; most of the people breaking into the field were active in SF fandom before breaking in and it was pretty easy to meet them.

The demographics of early SF was that it was popular mainly with urban white, middle-class males who read the pulps and got involved in it. The Black community just didn’t read the genre and, if they chose to write, wrote something else.

Even now, Black SF authors are rare: Wikipedia lists only 13 names. That’s not definitive – it’s missing Nalo Hopkinson (there has been a small influx of black women writing SF in the past decade, possibly due to the influence of Octavia Butler) and at least one other I’m aware of.

Sheree Thomas compiled an anthology, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, which includes several early stories by black authors. Before the specialized pulp magazines authors wrote stories, some of which were fantastic, and they were considered just a variety of fiction.

In the anthology:

To repeat what Chuck said, everybody knew everybody in the field until it exploded in size in the 1970s. There were one or two exceptions, as there always are: Cordwainer Smith was a deliberate recluse. Even so, the odds of somebody selling more than a very few stories and remaining unknown were astronomically low, to coin a phrase. When the Science Fiction Writers of America formed in 1965, they had only slightly more than 100 members.

In addition, the lack of black writers was - and is - a long-standing disgrace in the field. It’s impossible to believe that any individual who didn’t deliberately want to hide an identity, as with Smith, wouldn’t have been immediately celebrated, as Delany was.

Science fiction is still better than country music, heavy metal, hockey, and NASCAR.

Jesus Christ, Under Water Basket Weaving is better than country music, hockey or nascar.

As for Heavy Metal, Jimmi Hendrix is better.

Apparently I wasn’t clear. I wasn’t making an aesthetic judgement. I meant that science fiction was better than than country music, heavy metal, hockey, and NASCAR as far as having black participation.

This thread really made me pause. Other than the Big Three (Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke) I really had no idea about the ethnicity of the science fiction writers I enjoy. I know a fair bit about Niven, Brin, Pohl, Scalzi, Pournelle, and half-a-dozen others, but honestly, I have no idea if they’re white. Hell, even Verne and Wells could be black for all I knew; I just assumed that they were white because it’s such a white-dominated field. And frankly, if someone had informed me that Clarke was black (or Arab, or whatever) I’d have had to pause and think about it. Really, I knew Heinlein was white because I’d seen pictures, and I had a pretty damn good idea that Asimov was Jewish because his first name is Isaac and I recall a comment he made. But though I’ve read Delany, I had no idea at all that he is black. Ignorance fought.

EDIT: And frankly, on reading Delany’s Wikipedia page, I still can’t tell that he’s black. His picture is overexposed and he has a giant white beard covering the rest of his face. His bio notes that he was born in Harlem, which is a giant hint, but not conclusive.

The Berbers were not “black”. Dark, yes, but so are Indians, and Indians are not black.

Unless you know something that I don’t, no one was stopping black men or women from writing during the 50s, nor discouraging them from doing so, and it’s quite possible that your average scifi author and reader wouldn’t have cared a bit. If no one was doing anything disgraceful and quite possibly wouldn’t have done anything disgraceful, then how do you come to the conclusion that this is a disgrace?

Being unaware of a problem doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist. There have been people who have been aware of this issue for decades. I can remember discussions back in the seventies and eighties about why there were almost no black SF writers.

The following seems to be a fairly complete list of black science fiction authors. It may omit a few who wrote one or two stories but who aren’t well known to the science fiction community. It may also omit some who wrote in other fields but one novel might be considered science fiction:

Samuel R. Delany (clearly the most famous)
Octavia E. Butler (a little bit less famous but well up there)
Steven Barnes
Nalo Hopkinson
Tananarive Due
Andrea Hairston
John M. Faucette
Linda Addison
Charles R. Saunders
Nisi Shawl
Sheree Thomas (really known only as an editor)
Walter Mosley (a mystery writer who has also done some science fiction)

Seems like a pretty complete list. I’d add Nnedi Okorafor who writes Young Adult SF novels. Maybe Minister Faust but he’s only written two novels.

Thanks for mentioning Minister Faust – I loved The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad but couldn’t remember the author or title.

Tobias Buckell describes himself as ‘light but not quite white’ although he’s not an African-American so may not count for this thread.

This is bullshit. There is no colour bar in fiction, at least so far as the majority of readers are concerned. Any hand-wringing done on the subject is classic white guilt.

I don’t think Chip Delany mentioned any roadblocks to entering the field. He did say that one thing that was an influence was discovering that Juan Rico in Starship Troopers was black (actually Filipino, but the fact Rico had dark skin – something mentioned only in passing in the book – resonated with Chip). The book came out a year or two before Delany started writing The Jewels of Aptor and may have been at least one impetus for him to go into the field. Chip also came from a solid, middle class urban background – the same profile as most early SF writers.

But race or anything else other than talent did not keep anyone out of the field. Editors are only interested in quality and have no idea of a person’s race. It was simply a matter that Black authors weren’t interested in writing SF.