And here’s the thing: women have been in SFF from the very beginning. We might not always have been visible, hidden away behind initials and masculine-sounding pseudonyms, quietly running the conventions at which men ran around pinching women’s bottoms, but we were there. And people of color have been in SFF from the very beginning, hiding behind the racial anonymity of names and pseudonyms — and sometimes forcibly prevented from publishing our work by well-meaning editors, lest SFF audiences be troubled by the sight of a brown person in the protagonist’s role. Or a lesbian, or a poor person, or an old person, or a transwoman, or a person in a wheelchair. SFF has always been the literature of the human imagination, not just the imagination of a single demographic. Every culture on this planet produces it in some way, shape, or form. It thrives in video games and films and TV shows, and before that it lived in the oral histories kept by the griots, and the story circles of the Navajo, and the Dreamings of this country’s first peoples. People from every walk of life consume SFF, with relish, and that is because we have all, on some level, contributed to its inception and growth.
We tread upon the mythic ground of religions and civilizations that far predate “Western” nations and Christianity; we dream of traveling amid stars that were named by Arab astronomers, using the numbers they devised to help us find our way; we retell the colonization stories that were life and death for the Irish and the English and the Inka and the Inuit; we find drama in the struggles of the marginalized and not-quite-assimilated of every society. Speculative fiction is at its core syncretic; this stuff doesn’t come out of nowhere. And it certainly didn’t spring solely from the imaginations of a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys in the 1950s.
Last August, Weird Tales magazine, long a fixture on the speculative fiction landscape, got hit with a heavy dose of online fury. The publication had made plans to publish an excerpt from an ecolog…
A night of literary, experimental, unapologetic queerness in the tradition of Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan and Essex Hemphill served by writers who smash on gender norms and blur the boundaries of poetry, prose and performance. The Summer installment of Black Futurists Speak, a quarterly literary, technology and arts collaboration featuring forward thinking Black artists from the Bay Area and beyond.
Featuring:
Saeed Jones
Marvin K. White
Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene
Juba Kalamka
Taijhet Nyobi
Bushmama Africa
Betti Ono Gallery July 6, 2013 6:30-7:30pm 1427 Broadway Oakland, CA 94612
“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” —James Baldwin
You can still attend our birthday celebration for Lady Butler. Send your birthday wishes for Octavia Butler by clicking on “Submit Love Notes to Octavia on her 66th Birthday” on our tumblr page.
We give our dead
To the orchards
And the groves.
We give our dead
To life.
Death
is a great Change-
Is life’s greatest Change.
We honor our beloved dead.
As we mix their essence with the earth,
We remember them,
And within us,
They live.
Please share your memories, thoughts, favorite characters, passages, and hopes for this future. You can submit videos, text, photos, links, and your favorite quotes. Be creative and dedicate a song, poem, photo or other artwork. Send us links to events, commemorative blog posts, academic articles and papers, audio and visual recordings.
Be sure to give credit when it is due by listing the source/author/artist/origins of any material that does not belong to you. Tag yourself or sign your entry so we know who you are.
Each submission will be reviewed before posting, so please submit as early as possible to ensure that your post gets added to the #visitoctaviabutler2013 stream on June 22nd.
Don’t forget to use #VisitOctaviaButler2013 in your posts for her birthday, June, 22, 2013.
‘I’ve been writing stories since I was around nine or ten years old. As a little girl I loved stories of the paranormal too. During the 1990s I rediscovered my love of SF reading folks like Octavia Butler and Tananarive Due. When I caught the “fire” and started writing fiction again it had to be speculative fiction. I’m in love with this genre — in love with stories of the fantastic and strange.
In the 21th century there are very still few characters like us, and out of this small pool many are post-modern “Step-and Fetchits” (stereotypes). This is why speculative fiction is so important. This genre helps us to see outside reality, to say: what if? It helps us to imagine and create spectacular, wondrous realms, step back and find the beauty and wisdom there, and then transform our own space.
We need to dream, and we need our writers to help us to dream. Even if – especially if – these dreams are of fantastic, imaginary creatures and happenings. We need this because dreaming can be an escape. One should never underestimate the power of escape. Imagine a child living in squalor, and escaping into pages of a novel. Or a slave reading by lamplight and envisioning her freedom. Or a man working as a sharecropper, and at sunset telling his story with harmonica. We all need to escape, at least sometimes, into the worlds of those who dream like us, who understand us; who look like us. To paraphrase B.B. King, we need authors who get us where we live. Second of all dreaming helps us to change. If you can dream it, you can do it. You can move yourself and your corner of life forward.’
Author Valjeanne Jeffers
Orginally submitted on BlackFaery (UbatiMweze mythwhispering)
![The AfroFuturist Affair is a proud supporter of Day #3 of Rockers 3rd Annual BBQ Weekend [Sunday July 21, 2013]!
Featuring:
Sun Ra’s Space is the Place pop-up film w/ Liberation Arts & Culture Works and MythMedia:21
Screen printing workshop with Philadelphia Printworks
Quantum Time Capsule workshop with The AfroFuturist Affair
Zine Fest featuring zines from Metropolarity & Moor Mother Goddess & House of Hayes & Rockers
Pop-up shop with Rocker’s Closet
Firebreathing, capoiera, and contortion workshops
BBQ, Bands, and more!
ROCKERS! Giving women of color bands in Philly a place to play since 2005.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/0d3901b6d68d5438cc7a8af9e0abd19a/tumblr_moknvpVJVf1r41qp4o1_500.jpg)
