Orson Scott Card wrote Magic Street at the urging of, and with the help of, a black friend who was concerned about the lack of black characters in the fantasy genre. It’s a modern-day fantasy set in a Baldwin Hills, a middle-class black neighborhood in LA, and almost all of the characters are black.
I strongly recommend the audiobook read by Mirron E. Willis. We listened to it on a long car trip.
More horror, fantasy and sci-fi horror.
Juuuust making the cut for inclusion is Candyman 3: Day of The Dead, the third entry of the Clive Barker-created trilogy about the folklore legend of a slave nicknamed “Candyman” who was brutally tortured and murdered. If you look into a mirror and call his name five times, you will summon him. Actor Tony Todd portrayed Candyman in all three movies, beginning in 1992. Since Candyman, Todd has carved a niche as a familiar-looking character actor in the sci-fi and horror genres in TV and the movies, appearing in The Crow, Star Trek DS9, Xena, Star Trek: Voyager, Hercules and various Sci-Fi channel movie roles.
Juuuust missing the cut for inclusion by a year, but I’m going to mention it anyway, is the campy horror movie Tales From The Hood, executive produced by Spike Lee, from a concept by writer-director Rusty Cundieff and starring a whole smack o’ black character actors, including ** Joe Torry, De’aundre Bonds, Samuel Monroe Jr., David Alan Grier, Paula Jai Parker** and Roger Guenveur Smith, as well as others. The most apt way to describe it is “a black Tales From The Crypt,”-- with three interrelated stories told at a funeral parlor being robbed by gangbangers with Clarence Williams III playing wisecracking cryptkeeper duties as the mortician who encounters the would-be thieves and tells his tales.
While Octavia Butler and Roger Delaney have gotten nods as notable writers, I think mention needs to be made of two other writers, Robert Fleming and Sandra Jackson-Opoku. Although Fleming is largely a straight-up horror writer and writer of erotica, Jackson-Opoku’s far more magic literary approach comes closer to being metaphysical fantasy in the vein of, say, Alice Walker’s Temple of My Familiar or classic Toni Morrison. But The River Where Blood Is Born is a sweeping epic about one family’s matrilineal links to Africa that defies categorizing – one onlne bookvendor has it under three categories: “Fiction - Psychological; Fiction - Romance; Fiction - Romance - Contemporary.” None of which touches on the fantasy aspect that is undeniable as this family regularly communes with spirits and at least one trickster god. The River may end up being her magnum opus – 20 years in the making – and is certainly one where her literary reputation is cemented. And a damn good book.
Can we mention Delany as the true mark of equality? Because he sucks!!! We will never achieve a color-blind society until we can call anyone, regardless of skin-tone, a talentless hack.
Dhalgren is an affront to all that is holy. Trees died for this garbage.
No one should be immune to charges of hackwork, regardless of ethnicity. or sexual origin. That said, I’ve read exactly ONE short story of Samuel Roger Delany’s – Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand (from Terry McMillan’s Breaking Ice anthology) – excerpted from a larger work and while I liked it, I haven’t been moved to read anything else of Delany’s, either.
Speaking of Tony Todd, the Stargates have made a habit of casting underappreciated black actors in morally ambiguous roles in the last couple years. Off the top of my head, they have had Wayne Brady, Isaac Hayes, Lou Gossett, Tony Todd and Ernie Hudson. I’m expecting Richard Brooks any day now.
Also on DS9 were the rest of the Sisko family, with special mention for Brock Peters, who was good in everything he did.
Delany’s best work was in his early days. Most of his short fiction is collected in Aye, and Gomorrah : And Other Stories which takes all of his first collection, Driftglass, and adds several more stories to it. The collection includes the title story, a Hugo and Nebula winner, “Driftglass,” a Nebula winner, and the Zelaznyesque “We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line,” nominated for both awards. Then it gets better. “Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones,” a dual award winner, may be one of the very best sf stories ever written. And yet “The Star Pit” may be better. If the novella is the ideal science fictional length, as many people have said, these two stories are exemplars.
At the same time he was writing these masterworks, he also managed to write The Einstein Intersection and Babel-17, both Nebula Award winning novels, and then topped himself with Nova, the starting point for everything that would a decade later become cyberpunk. If Delany wasn’t the best sf writer in the world in those few years, then it’s only because the quality of the competition was so incredibly high.
His later books were equally interesting. Dhalgren sparks anger in many traditional sf readers for reasons I can’t understand. It certainly is a literary novel but not at all difficult. And Tales of Neveryon combines the first two volumes of his Neveryona series, one of the most fascinating attempts to create a complete and functioning alternate sociology in a fantasy setting. The first book is more interesting than the later ones, which get more academic and lecturing.
The novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is easily Delany’s worst sf book, IMO. I don’t know what a short version of it would be like, but Delany’s early writing is nothing whatsoever like it. Do NOT use it to judge how good a writer Delany is.
Not to mention that, for the last five years, he’s been Sydney Bristow’s partner on “Alias”; you want a secret agent who can make with the futuristic gadgets when ancient prophecies start coming true, top operative Marcus Dixon is ready as explosives expert, cat burglar, trained marksman, and suave con artist with an at-need Jamaican accent.
I didn’t think I could get away with calling Alias “sci-fi.” Lumbly’s clearly an awesome talent, period, and not just a “black talent in sci-fi, horror and fantasy.”
Similarly, I think the Wayans Brothers – Keenan, Shawn and Marlon ** – and co-star Regina Hall, who’s been in all four films and rumored to be in the next, if the Zucker Brothers continue the series – deserve recognition for their skewering of horror movie precepts and genre trappings in the profitable Scary Movie * series. The rack of black actors and performers making appearances in the filns is impressive, and lately crossed over into hip-hop territory, with folks like the Wu Tang Clan, Master P and Queen Latifah* and more all having cameo roles.
Askia writes:
> That said, I’ve read exactly ONE short story of Samuel Roger Delany’s – Stars In
> My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand (from Terry McMillan’s Breaking Ice anthology) –
> excerpted from a larger work and while I liked it, I haven’t been moved to read
> anything else of Delany’s, either.
I’m astonished that you’re asking about blacks in science fiction and yet you’ve read almost no Delany. Delany is by a long shot the most important black writer of science fiction. (Yes, even Octavia Butler isn’t close.) He’s one of the top ten science fiction writers of all time in many science fiction fans’ opinion. (Yes, silenus, your opinion is noted, but I think you’re outvoted here.) When Delany moved from teaching at University of Massachusetts to teaching at Temple University a few years ago, Michael Swanwick remarked, “I guess that I can no longer claim to be the best science fiction writer in Philadelphia.” I can only guess that most of you are relative youngsters. Delany was born in 1942 and wrote his best stuff before he was 40. His science fiction criticism is also excellent. Read his criticism in particular to find out how brilliant Delany is. He was quite a child prodigy and was turning out brilliant fiction in his twenties.
I’d discovered Butler’s Kindred at thirteen, devoured her works for the better part of 10 years, then had the immense pleasure of meeting her in person one summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college. So, for me, she will always be “the” preeminent science fiction writer of my ethnicity, the one I looked to and first had the thought, “Hey, she’s like me. I can do what she does, too!” By then I’d heard that Delany was the “other” black science fiction writer of note, but the first time I was exposed to and read one his stories – that “Stars In My Pocket” excerpt from that Breaking Ice anthology I talked about – I was underwhelmed. It was just… okay and unlike the times I first read Butler, or Prachett, Alan Moore, Heinlein, or Clarke, or Ellison (Ralph and Harlan) I wasn’t particularly moved to read any more.
Rest assured, though, having been read the polite riot act by you and Exapno Mapcase, I will remedy my oversight in the near future.
Not so. Ace, Sylvester McCoy’s companion, was black and originally hailed from the late 1980’s. There was a very good story about her acompanying the Doctor back to 1950’s London to look for Daleks, and being pissed off by the racial attitudes she encountered.
Oh, and Don Cheadle’s scientist marooned on Mars in the turgid Mission To Mars, Kel Mitchell as Invisible Boy {alas, he’s only invisible when no-one’s looking} in the excellent Mystery Men, and Daryl Mitchell {plus whoever played him as a kid} as Lieutenant Laredo in Galaxy Quest, and of course Morgan Freeman in the President in Deep Impact and Lucius Fox in Batman Begins.
Ace was black? Are you thinking of another companion?
Re Time As A Helix Of Semiprecious Stones
I love this story. ‘Word got out that a Singer was Singing in the lobby.’ ‘He could come back for the briefcase later. After all, there was nothing in it that wasn’t his.’ I wonder how much Delany I’ve read while going through dad’s library over the years.
You know, that reminds me: Dennis Haysbert probably doesn’t qualify for “24”, but most assuredly does for “Now and Again”.
Well, I would have mentioned Delany back in post #5 if I thought he had written anything that fitted the OP - he’s not exactly had much out in the last decade…
But he is well worth reading!
It was interesting when there was a thread on Neil Gaiman’s latest, Anansi Boys, and somebody came in to bitch about why were these all white people hanging out with African myths and bumming around on Carribean islands acting like they were black people, why couldn’t they just be black people, and it was pointed out gently that one assumes they were black people, but their skin was never mentioned. I guess people just assume that if nothing is said, then a character is white. (Eventually I think late in the book somebody’s skin is described as chocolaty or whatever, but it wasn’t until you were way into it.)
Dualla on Battlestar Galactica (the new one) is black, and cool, but she is the Uhura officer.
Since horror is specifically mentioned in the title, I think the movie Deep Blue Sea (a movie about huge, pissed off genius sharks) should count for this thread, since it has two black actors (Samuel L Jackson and LL Cool J) in it, and at the end:
LL Cool J is still alive. Samuel L Jackson was killed off in a spectacular way halfway through, and I was guessing that LL Cool J would also get it and that it would just be the main hunky guy and hot scientist girl that were alive at the end, but the scientist girl died instead and LL Cool J lived.
And while House on Haunted Hill is a very crappy movie, it’s a horror movie that if my memory serves me correctly, counts for this thread:
Taye Diggs’s character is one of the two characters that survives until the end. Of course, the two characters are on a very high window ledge and could fall to a horrible death instead of eventually being rescued, but as the credits are rolling they are alive and hopeful.
Neither of these is exactly great cinema, but are notable for the things I’ve mentioned here.
And since I bet that most of you are unfamiliar with Michael Swanwick, let me point out that he is definitely one of the best short fiction writers in the field today and his novels, while not quite up to that standard, are pretty good as well.
That science fiction, historically a field for outsiders, cannot attract black writers is a puzzle and a crime. All the leading black writers are anomalies, though Delany is closest to what should be a logical career path. He attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, after all, and came from a distinguished upper-middle-class family. But he used to introduce himself when he spoke as a black gay Communist science fiction writer, thereby covering every touchstone of things normal people looked down on. The number of openly gay males in sf until very recently was about equal to the number of openly gay NFL players.
Butler was a lonely California girl who escaped from a grim reality into sf. There’s absolutely nothing in her background that would hint that she would become an sf star.
Steven Barnes is a hypnotherapist and martial artist, two occupations that are impossible to imagine being listed in the bios of any classic sf writer.
Nalo Hopkinson may be an exception, and a hope for the future. She went through a standard writing path, getting her MA in Writing Popular Fiction under the tutelage of James Morrow. (Another exceptional literary sf writer you’ve never heard of.)
None of them are very much like any other of them, in personality or style of writing. Ironically, Delany in the beginning kept being confused with Roger Zelazny, a poor white Polish kid from Baltimore. Back in 1970, James Blish wrote:
Of course, on the same page Blish wrote that when The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula, “I stepped quietly out into the kitchen and bit my cat.” Thus the old guard passes. 
I think the Sci Fi channel’s Earthsea is interesting for one reason. Nobody in the books is white. In the movie, everybody is white except Danny Glover who plays the wise country wizard Ogion. The change in color is one reason why LeGuinn hated the movie.
The Kargads are white.
I’d say the TV series Lost is definitely Science Fiction and possibly Fantasy (the jury’s still out on that). It has several black characters in crucial roles: devoted, tortured single dad Michael, his possibly-psychic son WAAAAAAAAlt, the serene Rose (married to a white guy, no less), and Mr. Echo, a humungous African killer priest.