The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories

Title

This edition

"The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories". Ed. andré m. carrington. New York: Library of America, 2025. viii+368 pp.

Table of contents

Introduction / by andré m. carrington -- Herbal / Nalo Hopkinson -- All that touches the air / An Owomoyela -- Bludgeon / Thaddeus Howze -- A guide to the fruits of Hawai'i / Alaya Dawn Johnson -- Sanford and sun / Dawolu Jabari Anderson -- A song for you / Jennifer Marie Brissett -- Tender / Sofia Samatar -- The malady of need / Kiini Ibura Salaam -- The Venus effect / Violet Allen -- The secret lives of the nine Negro teeth of George Washington / Phenderson Djèlí Clark -- The hospital where / Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah -- The ones who stay and fight / N.K. Jemisin -- The final flight of the unicorn girl / Alex Smith -- Calendar girls / Justina Ireland -- Shape-ups at Delilah's / Rion Amilcar Scott -- Habibi / Tochi Onyebuchi -- Spyder threads / Craig Laurance Gidney -- The orb / Tara Campbell -- We travel the spaceways / Victor LaValle -- Ruler of the rear guard / Maurice Broaddus.

Publisher's description

● "On the shoulders of Afrofuturist masters like Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany and pioneering visionaries before them, a new, abundant, and brilliant generation of contemporary Black authors, some of them just beginning their careers, is conjuring up a very real renaissance. Edited by SF-expert andré carrington, and including Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award winners alongside emerging and experimental voices, The Black Fantastic showcases the artistry of these breakout literary stars and celebrates the diversity of their talents. Including Afrofuturist science fiction, weird and fantastic tales, horror and the paranormal, apocalyptic lyricism, time travel, superheroes, and more, here are twenty mindblowing, horror-strewn, weird, woke, nerdy, terrifying, liberating, fantastic, utopian, surreal, genre-defying and empowering short stories, all of them worth reading and rereading now and far into futurity. Reclaiming histories of racism and oppression and seizing the day, these writers are forging kaleidoscopic new senses of Black identity, community, and imaginative freedom" (publisher's description).

● "Inspired by Afrofuturist pioneers like Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, a new generation of Black writers is fashioning a renaissance in speculative fiction. Edited and introduced by SF expert andré m. carrington, The Black Fantastic brings together Hugo, Locus, Nebula, Bram Stoker, Tiptree/Otherwise, and World Fantasy Award winners with emerging voices to showcase this watershed moment in American literature.

Here are twenty beguiling, unsettling, and visionary stories spanning the cosmos and a dazzling array of alternate timelines. Phenderson Djèlí Clark and Alaya Dawn Johnson stare down the specters of history in their haunting fictions, set, respectively, on a Founding Father’s brutal plantation and in the vampire-built internment camps of a dystopian Hawai‘i. Violet Allen’s would-be superhero stories turn to searing metafiction when her main character is repeatedly shot and killed by the police. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Rion Amilcar Scott explore otherworldly forces at play in a small-town barbershop and in a young writer’s ambitions, while Victor LaValle tells the story of a man living on the streets of New York City, his bag of deposit bottles and cans bearing urgent messages from another dimension.

Other stories are by turns comic, provocative, and terrifying: Thaddeus Howze delivers a crowd-pleasing tall tale about a battle with aliens over the fate of Earth, by way of an epic baseball game; Maurice Broaddus spins a coming-of-age fantasy about an American girl in a utopian future Africa; Craig Laurance Gidney offers a Lovecraftian tour of the ballroom drag scene; Tara Campbell weaves a spell of ecofeminist horror; and much more.

Reimagining the past and laying claim to the future, these writers are bringing forth kaleidoscopic new visions of Black identity and creative freedom.

andré m. carrington, editor, is the author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (2016). He is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where he directs the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science program."

Reviews and notices of anthology

● Brett, Jeremy. "So Many Voices, Singing." "Ancillary Review of Books" 23 June 2025.
"This volume would be an excellent introduction for students and scholars alike to the Afrofuturist sub-genre, alongside Sheree Renée Thomas’s groundbreaking 'Dark Matter' (2000). In fact, reading the 'Dark Matter' series together with 'Black Fantastic' provides a rewarding, century-long passage through the power of the Black imagination. . . . 'Dark Matter' introduced many readers to earlier generations of fantastical Black fiction, and now 'The Black Fantastic' brings us the imaginative joys, sorrows, tragedies, triumphs, and societal concerns of new writers inspired by those pioneers."

Ancillary Review of Books

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