Well, anyone who read* American Gods* would at least know that Anansi is a Black man (or a giant spider, depending), so assume his sons are also black (given the setup for their mother’s background)
Speaking of Gaiman - there are, if I recall, at least 2 Black characters in Neverwhere - well, definitely Hunter, but I think also the Marquis.
Smantha Mumba is not Polynesian. She’s biracial Zambian/Irish. And very tasty.
One of the things that made my mouth drop in shock watching the BBC adaptation of Neverwhere was seeing the Marquis played by Peterson Joseph, who not only played it as a dandy, but a distinctly gay fop. Somehow I had missed the possible racial connotations of the brief description of the first appearance of the marquis in the novel:
’ “Mine, I believe,” said the marquis de Carabas. He wore a huge dandyish black coat that was not quite a frock coat nor exactly a trench coat, and high black boots, and beneath his coat, ragged clothes. His eyes burned white in an extremely dark face. And he grinned white teeth, momentarily, as if at a private joke all of his own, and bowed to Richard, and said, “De Carabas, at your service, and you are…?” ’
Actress Tanya Moodie plays Hunter, and British comedian Lenny Henry also has a co-writing credit for the original BBC series (and also does the reading of the audiotape for Anansi Boys, which, along with MrDribble’s assertion, helps support THAT argument). Besides, Anansi is explicitly described as a black man in American Gods, although the gods of Egypt in Memphis (Tennessee) are given a terrific racially ambiguous description… which… I can’t type, because after I paused just now to grab the books from my shelf, while I see my copies of The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, Coraline, Good Omens, Stardust, Neverwhere, Smoke and Mirrors and assorted Sandman trades, I don’t see my copies of American Gods or Anansi Boys. Or MirrorMask, for that matter. How trebly odd. )
Apparently Gaiman has talked of writing a short story to resolve a minor plot hole from Neverwhere to be titled, *How the Marquis Got His Coat Back. *
Certainly in the original. It’s a bit debatable whether the natives seen on Skull Island are meant to portray postmodern stereotypical black natives in the remake; I think a pretty strong argument can be made either way. I will point to Evan Parke playing the capable sailor/hunter Mr. Hayes in Peter Jackson’s remake (whom I correctly had pegged as the movie’s Sacrificial Negro.Parke has also appeared in bit parts in Planet of the Apes, Nightstalker, Charmed, Medium and the cancelled TV pilot All Souls, about a haunted hospital.
Speaking of Planet of the Apes, I don’t know how we got this far without explicitedly mentioning Michael Clarke Duncan. We have? Oh, well. I’ll do it again. He’s done numerous memorable roles in sci-fi and fantasy movies since his breakthrough role in 1998’s Armageddon, including The Green Mile, the Apes remake, the Scorpion King, Cats & Dogs, Daredevil, lots of TV animation and video game voice work, The Island and the upcoming Transformers movie.
Angela Bassett in *Strange Days, Supernova * and *Contact. *
Sanaa Lathan in *Aliens Vs. Predator. *
Kelly Rowland in Freddy vs. Jason.
Usher and Brandy Norwood in *The Faculty *
LL Cool J in Halloween: H20 and *Rollerball. *
An interesting side note - in the comic book adaptation of Neverwhere, published by DC’s Vertigo line, the Marquis is depicted not as black, as in of African heritage, but rather as truly black. He looks like a shadow, except for his eyes, mouth and clothing. Unfortunately, I can’t find a picture of the comic version online.
I read the first issue of the VERTIGO adaptation and decided that, as Gaiman project’s go, I’d pass. That’s an interesting interpretation of the Marquis visually. It does make the marquis’ resurrection from being killed at the hands of Valdemar and Croup a lot less of a surprise and quite a bit less ingenious if that’s the case, though.
MrDribble writes:
> Smantha Mumba is not Polynesian. She’s biracial Zambian/Irish. And very tasty.
Hmm, you’re right. Samantha Mumba is the daughter of a Zambian father and an Irish mother. What’s more, the Eloi in this film (which came out in 2002, not 2001) were played by quite a mixture of people. It appears to me (although this is just a guess from the IMDb entries) that they were chosen to each be multi-racial. A bunch of them are people who work mostly as stunt people.
Excuse me, that should be “MrDibble”, not “MrDribble”.
It is? *:: Checks post. :: * Oops.
Also the “I Know What You Did Last Summer” franchise, IIRC.
I can generally tell when people do it deliberately rather than absentmindedly, so no worries. But thanks, Wendell Wagner 
Askia
Remember that at one point, Marquis asks if Hunter can also pull off that little trick. She says she could if she wanted to. Whatzizface (the guy with the rope coat and all the birds- Rook something?) also knows exactly what’s in the box when he sees it. I got the impression that most people could do it, but don’t.
Isn’t there also a mention of the Marquis’ skin when he meets the sewer people, and when Rook uses what’s in the box?
I always pictured the Marqui as a black man with his hair in braids- both for a flashy appearance, and so that he could unobtrusively hide things in his hair. IIRC It doesn’t come up in the book. But, he struck me as the kind of guy who might hide lock picks, a razor blade or two, a few small bills, and a pen and paper on his person.
This is a bit out of the time range that you requested (96-06), but the Arthur C Clarke Rama series has Nicole des Jardines, a black cosmonaut.
OK, then, she would count. And I agree on the tastiness: That movie had many flaws, but she wasn’t one of them. Come to think of it, in that same movie, the library hologram guy was also black, but he wasn’t so big a character.
And I’ve never read Small Gods, but I thought that everyone knew that Anansi was an African trickster god, in the form of or associated with spiders. Maybe I just knew that because my mom was an elementary school teacher, big on teaching her students about world cultures (so there were always kids’ books about Anansi and other such interesting characters lying about the house).
Chronos writes:
> The Time Machine movie of a few years ago (2001?) had all of the “Eloi” brown-
> skinned, and the “Morlochs” pale albinos, a reversal from the more typical
> depictions.
It’s not very easy to say what the “typical depiction” of the Morlocks is. In the book, the Eloi and the Morlocks are both scarcely human. Both the 1960 and the 2002 movies changed that, partly I suspect because they wanted to cast the role of Weena with some flavor-of-the-month hot young babe. In the 2002 version, the Eloi are played by actors that I assumed for some reason to be Polynesian. In fact, they seem to all be racially mixed. In the 1960 version, they appear to be cast to look like new-Agey California surfer dudes and chicks. I kept expecting someone to yell, “Cowabunga, dudes, surf’s up!”, and they would all rush to grab their surfboards and head for the beach.
. . . and I hope I’m not repeating anything someone else has said, But my friend Terry Taylor is a sci-fi/horror/fantasy writer (just starting out in the field after years in public television). He’s in a new collection, Dark Dreams, and will be in the follow-up, too.
When I asked him about this thread, he gave me a list of current “writers of color” (though the color seems to vary somewhat) in that field:
Any disagreements, yell at Terry, not me!
I reread Snow Crash this week and realized that Hiro Protagonist is black. I don’t know how I missed it the first time as it rather matters in some parts of the plot. His father was an American black in the Army and served in World War II. His mother is Chinese. He is a computer programmer, and the worlds greatest sword fighter, says so on his business cards.
Eve, thanks for that list. Some writers, like W.E.B. Dubois, Charles Johnson and Gloria Naylor and Atlanta writer Pearl Cleage I’m very familiar with, but I was not aware that they’d written sci-fi, fantasy and/or horror. (Though I suppose strictly speaking Johnson’s Middle Passage and Oxherding Tale can be all three, and also in a humor section, because they’re often funny as hell.)
I have here an interesting flyer which mentions Nayor’s 1996 as a factual account of her struggle against government mindcontrol. A look at mindjustice (dot org left out to avoid a trackback), confirms that it was not intended as fiction.
Apologies if she was already mentioned in this thread, but there was the black character Original Cindy in the “Dark Angel” TV series which starred Jessica Alba as the title character.