#102 = Volume 34, Part 2 = July 2007
Mark Bould
Come Alive by Saying No: An Introduction to Black Power SF
Walter Mosley, lauding the genre’s potential to produce visions that “shout down the realism imprisoning us behind a wall of alienating culture” (406), suggests three reasons for the small number of black sf writers. For many years, the “white literary establishment’s desire for blacks to write about being black in a white world” kept black writers from entering “popular genres in force” (406). The American imagination is overwhelmed by images valorizing whiteness. And sf itself poses a problem:
The power of science fiction is that it can tear down the walls and windows, the artifice and laws by changing the logic, empowering the disenfranchised, or simply by asking, What if? This bold logic is not easy to attain. The destroyer-creator must first be able to imagine a world beyond his mental prison. The hardest thing to do is to break the chains of reality and go beyond into a world of your own creation. (407)
A fourth reason is the way hegemonic definitional structures and practices within sf, sf studies, and literary-academic canon formation have concealed black sf.1 This essay examines black sf novels from the 1960s and 1970s that were hidden in plain sight and that embody, sometimes very consciously, the historical constraints that Mosley describes: William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer (1962); Warren Miller’s The Siege of Harlem (1964); John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969), and Captain Blackman (1972); John O. Killens’s ’Sippi (1967); Julian Moreau’s The Black Commandos (1967); Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1969); Chuck Stone’s King Strut (1970); Barry Beckham’s Runner Mack (1972); Blyden Jackson’s Operation Burning Candle (1973); John Edgar Wideman’s The Lynchers (1973); Nivi-kofi A. Easley’s The Militants (1974); and Chester Himes’s Plan B (written 1969-1972; published 1983).2 These novels vary tremendously in quality, from A Different Drummer’s intricate structure, The Man Who Cried I Am’s exemplary realism, and Runner Mack’s fabular brilliance to the incoherent power fantasy of The Black Commandos and the fumbling crudities of The Militants, but without exception they are about black power and imagine a black revolution against white supremacist America.3
The strange space-times of black power sf. Near the end of his Autobiography (1965), Malcolm X writes: “I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form” (500). There is a strangeness to this passage—a life-work and a life’s work remain unfinished, while this anticipation of incompletion is fulfilled—as if one is caught in some temporal knot, an uncanny space-time, in which the threefold nature of the present moment, composed equally of the past (memory) and the future (expectation), is brought into consciousness: “not a future time, a past time, and a present time, but … a present of future things, a present of past things, and a present of present things” (Ricouer 60).4 Such peculiar temporalities, resonating with the tension between the utopian impulse’s openness and utopia’s closure, are common in black power sf.
The Autobiography depicts a fantastical US, an unhomely home. It describes the “white man … solving the problems of sending men exploring into outer space—and returning them safely to earth,” leaps intuitively to the military- industrial complex that designed the A-bombs dropped on Japan “to save American lives,” and recalls the “one hundred thousand loyal naturalized and native-born Japanese-American citizens … herded into camps” before asking “how many German-born naturalized Americans” were treated like this, not quite bringing us back full circle to NASA’s Nazi rocket scientists (373).5 This is a science-fictional world, not just of rockets and atomic technologies but also of bizarre fantasies extrapolated from the long legacy of “scientific” racial discourses. In this uncanny space-time,
The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved … is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that 22 million black people have not risen up against their oppressors—in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the democratic tradition! It is a miracle that a nation of black people has so fervently continued to believe in a turn-the-other-cheek and heaven-for-you-after-you-die philosophy! (Auto-biography 349; emphases in original)
Black power sf struggles against this miracle, depicting great refusals and demands for a here-and-now home within an unhomely land. It focuses on the defiant moment when revolution becomes possible, comes to life, promising rupture and new realities.
Malcolm X fantasized various engineering solutions to black poverty (such as building up black-owned businesses, as if it were possible to contradict the logic of capital within the space-time of capital), but they all betray the desire to find a space for blackness within. Even when he eventually acknowledges this—“The Negro’s so-called ‘revolt’ is merely an asking to be accepted into the existing system!”—his subsequent attempt to imagine a “true Negro revolt” goes no further, arguing for “separate black states within this country” (Autobiography 485; emphases in original). This proposed secession of larger, albeit relatively self-sufficient and hermetic ghettoes, remains contained. Similar imaginative constraints are common in black power sf, which cannot picture the future for which it yearns. Generically unhomed, it operates on the borderland of traditionally defined sf, predicated not on the extrapolative tenet of “if this goes on …” familiar from Heinlein and the 1950s’ satirical comic infernos—or even on the “this can’t go on” of the contemporaneous feminist utopian novel—but on a cry of “this has gone on for far too long: it stops now!” Despite lacking some overtly-stated device to justify divergence from “our” world, black power sf occupies fictive, counterfactual space-times akin to yet significantly different from “reality.” For example, the present moment from which The Man Who Cried I Am is recollected seems to be a slightly alternate very near past (May 1964) that closely resembles our February 1965, while Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is set just four years in the future (the US occupation of Vietnam has escalated to border clashes with China, which targets the US with nuclear missiles). Even The Siege of Harlem, set seventy-five years after Harlem’s secession, gives few hints as to the nature of its future, instead restrospectively focusing on the revolution. An oft-told bedtime story recounted by a Veteran of the First Day to his grandchildren, it does not chart the collective creation of a post-revolutionary reality but takes the form of white legend: the revolutionary leaders—Lance and Art—fall into Arthurian roles, with Lance’s wife Crystal as Guinevere. Even so, Harlem’s Camelot is preferable to Kennedy’s.
Harlem has long functioned as a locus of utopian hope for African-Americans, and it provides the key location for revolution in black power sf. Plan B, for example, is the final volume of Chester Himes’s exaggerated, hyperreal Harlem cycle. In eight earlier novels, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, larger-than-life black police detectives, manage to solve crimes and make some sense of their world, but as the series progresses Harlem becomes bleaker and increasingly incomprehensible. In the eighth novel, Blind Man With a Pistol, Grave Digger reminds Ed that fighting in World War II taught them that “the only difference between the home-grown racist and the foreign racist was who had the nigger. Our side won so our white rulers were able to keep their niggers so they could yap to their heart’s content about how they were going to give us equality as soon as we were ready” (358). In Plan B, these festering ills—and Himes’s impatience—break forth in an absurdist apocalypse. Tomsson Black starts secretly to distribute “ten million guns and a billion rounds of ammunition” to black men, intending to train them in guerrilla warfare before issuing “an ultimatum to the white race: grant us equality or kill us as a race” (200). His scheme unravels, however, as the recipients of the weapons do not wait to start using them, and so he decides to “complete the distribution of the guns and let maniacal, unorganized, and uncontrolled blacks massacre enough whites to make a dent in the white man’s hypocrisy, before the entire black race [is] massacred in retaliation” (200-201). The action of the novel moves in two directions: into the past, telling the history of the rape-, sodomy-, and incest-prone white southern family who originally owned the land on which Black establishes his headquarters; and into the future, as a race war engulfs the US. Himes’s customary broad gestures, stereotypes, caricatures, and violent excesses escalate into the vengefully carnivalesque.
While carnival is a temporal enclave, as contained as the black states Malcolm X imagined, black power sf imagines its extension into a future in which hierarchy is not reinstated. Freeman, the protagonist of The Spook Who Sat by the Door, spends years playing two roles—a subservient, grateful negro around white people and an upwardly mobile playboy around the black middle-classes—so that he can train as a CIA agent and then organize ghetto gangs into a revolutionary army.6 These roles, which defy white supremacist logic even as his exceptionalism is used to justify it, threaten a carnivalesque inversion, which finally occurs when, under the nom de guerre of Uncle Tom, he announces the revolution. His Black Freedom Fighters of America launch an attritional campaign of practical jokes—Bakhtin’s “numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings” (Rabelais 11)—against the forces occupying Chicago’s ghettoes, culminating in the abduction of the National Guard’s commanding officer, who is later released in blackface and tripping on acid. Armed struggle follows.
Stone’s King Strut celebrates the carnivalesque elements of black revolution in a six-page digression on “strutting.” Observing prominent black Congressman Hiram Quinault, Jr., the white Vice-President recalls the “Saturday night nigguhs” of his Oklahoma youth, who would bathe, dress up, and douse themselves in perfume to “jes’ strut up and down the sidewalk, stepping off into the gutter and dropping their heads to their chests as a white man passed them. But they would wait patiently as the anthropomorphic symbol of white supremacy passed, then ease themselves casually back onto the sidewalk in a deliberately obsequious manner so as not to offend the passing white with any unintended display of audacity. Within seconds, their heads would rise and they would return to cakewalking as if there had been no interruption in their gaited exercise” (190). When on public display, Quinault struts, performing a “swaggering, swellheaded, supremely egotistical panache of uncontainable bravado” (193). Through such impropriety he gestures, like “Saturday night nigguhs,” towards an overturning of hierarchies. Only “black people can strut,” because to strut is “to have suffered, been ’buked and scorned, beaten and mistreated, abused and refused, humiliated and harassed, lynched and lashed, trampled and tortured, chained and choked, whipped, bombed, murdered, castrated, raped, enslaved, cremated and politely interred” (194). It is also “the joyous birth of a today that was almost exterminated by a yesterday of sorrow” and “a black restatement of life” (195). To strut is carnival, representing “a utopian hope, the desire for a world of equality and abundance” (McNally 141).
In Plan B, the movement backwards and forwards in time shows history and futurity fully occupying the present. Himes could not imagine a future beyond his comical polarization of the races, each hunting and killing the other (and he could not even complete the novel). In the final scene of the posthumously reconstructed version, Coffin Ed threatens to kill Black rather than let him risk genocide, but Grave Digger intervenes, killing his partner because Black’s plan “might be our last chance.… I’d rather be dead than a subhuman in this world” (202). Black then kills Grave Digger, an abrupt and unsatisfactory conclusion that ends the novel in medias res even as the deaths of the series’ protagonists shut down the present moment’s provisionality. Himes’s struggle to conclude his comic apocalypse, and his dissatisfaction with the near-complete manuscript, suggest an inability to imagine an optimistic present of future things, to find in the carnival a vision of a full and happy future beyond fear.
Perhaps this is why black power sf generally falls just short of becoming conventional pulp-and-paperback sf.7 For example, John A. Williams repeatedly arrives at the same impasse. The very model of the black author trapped by the white literary establishment’s desire for him to write about being black in a white world, Williams started his career with realist, semi-autobiographical novels that depict and analyze the systematic and day-to-day operations of the intertwined systems of capital and race, with the protagonist of Sissie (1963) “finally accept[ing] the truth of his situation by concluding that his paranoia is not pathological but practical, a rational response to the reality of life in America” (Bryant 253). In his next two novels, The Man Who Cried I Am and Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light, Williams developed this critique through the imaginative apparatus provided by genre fiction, adopting thriller structures and techniques to penetrate the veil of accumulated naturalist detail and insist with robust urgency on structural and systemic determinants. For more than half its length, The Man Who Cried I Am appears to be a far more ambitious and accomplished version of The Angry Ones (1960), jumping back and forth between May 1964 (when Max Reddick, following his friend Harry Ames’s Parisian funeral, visits his estranged Dutch wife, Margrit, en route to visiting Harry’s lover) and moments from the preceding twenty-five years, following Max’s career as a novelist and journalist. It depicts an America of “unreal tranquillity” (369), in which “the majority” generally prefer not to accept “the truth” (52) of their society’s “sicknesses and weaknesses … described by a person who is a victim of them” (51)—such as Harry’s contention that the US is not even “based on dollars directly or alone, but dollars denied men who are black so dollars can go into the pockets of men who are white” (52). Thirty years later, Max concludes that “democratic capitalism [is] implicitly duplicitous, meaning all its fine words and slogans, but leaving the performance of them to unseen elfs, gnomes and fairies” (368).
In the final tenth of the novel Max discovers two terrible conspiracies. In 1958, Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, Australia, Spain, Brazil, South Africa, and the US formed the Alliance Blanc to forestall newly independent African nations forming a Pan-African federation. The US, “sitting on a bubbling black cauldron” (349), also developed the King Alfred plan, to “be put into action immediately” in “the event of widespread and continuing [domestic] racial disturbances” (354). The National Security Council considers race war inevitable: “we must expect the total involvement of all 22 million members of the Minority, men, women and children, for once this project is launched, its goal is to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of American society, and, indeed, the Free World” (355). The Department of Defense ominously reports that “during a six-year period, Production created 9,000,000 objects, or 1,500,000 each year. Production could not dispose of the containers, which proved a bottleneck. However, that was almost 20 years ago. We suggest that vaporization techniques be employed to overcome the Production problems inherent in King Alfred” (358). Williams leaves his reader to decipher these euphemistic allusions to the Holocaust.
The novel ends in a hesitation between possible futures. Whatever Max does, he is going to be assassinated. If he does nothing, King Alfred will still be in place should the rising tide of black resistance be deemed a “national emergency,” while disseminating the information might provoke a “national emergency.” He decides to tell the radical muslim Minister Q about King Alfred, which opens up a further hesitation as the novel hovers somewhere between a slightly alternative past and a roman à clef (Senator Braden “is” Joseph McCarthy, Paul Durrell “is” Martin Luther King, the President who briefly hired Max as a speechwriter “is” John Kennedy). A CIA agent hears Max’s phone call to Minister Q and orders his assassination with “shotguns and .45s” (374) before he can address a meeting, implying that he “is” Malcolm X (although it is almost a year before Malcolm X’s February 1965 assassination).8 The novel ends with the no-longer estranged Margrit waiting for Max at their favorite restaurant, unaware that he has already been killed:
She signalled the waiter and ordered a Pernod for Max to have when he returned, like yesterday, and that would be any minute. The sun was out now and the tables around her were filling up. She and Max would sit at the table drinking and talking until dinner. Maybe they would eat inside again, at their window. After, they would go home. (384)
In black power sf, the phallocentric revolution is frequently contrasted with a feminized retreat from the radical break. Margrit builds expectation upon memory, not knowing that this future has already been denied to her.9 For all its utopian longing, the novel never loses sight of the powers that would deny its fulfillment. Hesitating between genres and outcomes, it lingers on the past-in-the-present (the history that has brought Max and the US to this juncture) while suggesting that the best imaginable future-in-the-present is the barely possible prevention of genocide.
Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light goes a stage further. A white cop shoots and kills a young black man but avoids prosecution. Concluding, “It would always be open season on blacks until blacks opened the season on whites” (22), civil- rights activist Eugene Browning abandons non-violent gradualist reform and hires a mafia hitman to assassinate racist murderers who have escaped justice. However, responsibility for killing the cop is claimed by Morris Greene, whose militant black organization plans to destroy Manhattan’s bridges and tunnels, cripple New York, and issue demands for reparations as well as for social and political reforms that would find them allies among impoverished whites. In the closing pages, Woody, the white boyfriend of Eugene’s older daughter, Chris, joins the family at their beach house to help protect them. Eugene and his wife, Val, who have been drifting apart, reconcile. Unlike Max and Margrit, they are permitted this domestic solace. After they make love, Eugene tells her, “Better. It’s going to be better” (279). Val, like the reader, senses he is not just talking about their relationship.
This relationship is mirrored in the friendship between Greene and his protégé, Trotman. At the start of the novel, Eugene muses, “You won’t think back to our dreams as a point of reference, all those things we talked about in so many places and at so many different times. About a good world. I look and listen and you’ve become, night by night, deed by deed, just like the others. You don’t dream any more and perhaps you never did” (9). Echoing this, Trotman thinks of Greene, “How many nights had they reviewed the actions of the Congress, state legislatures, white spokesmen; how often had they dissected newspaper, radio and television reports, all to find it mandatory to strike, to attack the system physically near the center of power.… And unless that were done soon things would begin to slip back into old molds—as whites wanted them to; and blacks grew tired of talk, no action and the one-at-a-time murder of their leaders” (177). While Eugene and Val (and Woody and Chris) signify hopeful, if precarious, reconciliation, however, the revolutionaries are forced apart when, for security’s sake, Greene incarcerates Trotman overnight. Greene
wanted to rush to the closet, throw open the door and take Trotman in his arms once again; tell him that black people were not going to have the same kind of revolutions that white people had had, where at some point, always, white turned against white as the revolutions progressed. He wanted to apologize to Trotman for behaving like a white man, and tell him that the essence of their revolution was that, yes!, black people were going to be better than whites, were not going to make the same mistakes as white people; white brothers were going to be made, not white enemies.… That’s what this revolution is all about, to forge the opening to be better. (240-41; emphases in original)
He cannot do so, however. Next morning, Trotman explains that if the situation had been reversed, “Just to change the goddamn pattern, man; just to make it a different bag altogether, to break the continuum of revolutionary history, to take the fork in the road from the white cats—I’d have trusted you” (243). The rift between them cannot be healed, though, and the novel ends with hope and irony interwoven as, offscreen, revolution hangs in the balance.
Captain Blackman switches between the present moment, in which Captain Abraham Blackman, serving in Vietnam, is wounded trying to save his men from ambush, and the history of black American soldiers since the War of Independence. The latter strand takes up most of the text, as Blackman is apparently projected back to Lexington in 1775 and then to the War of Charleston, the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, and the Korean War (it remains ambiguous whether he is actually transported in this way or whether he imagines it, drifting in and out of consciousness). This popular account of a suppressed aspect of American history emphasizes how consistently black soldiers were mistreated by their own army; and by historicizing Blackman’s situation, it enables him, while recovering, to perceive what he must do. The final chapter, set thirty years in the future, begins with high-ranking officials planning the resegregation of American armed forces so that they can be relied upon to suppress black domestic insurgency. Blackman and many of his comrades have disappeared into Africa to build an army, however, while infiltrating light-skinned blacks into every part of the high-tech military to seize the US nuclear capability and global communications and control systems.10 The novel ends with a white General pleading with the President:
Whittman said we’d just lost a war to the niggers. We don’t understand, sir. What war, what niggers? Is this a joke, sir? Can you tell us what is going on? We just don’t understand, sir.… Can you brief me quickly on what’s going on, what posture we should take? We gotta have a posture. What’s this business with niggers, sir? How could they do anything—. (264)
Blackman’s plan reiterates Sons of Darkness’s emphasis on trust and reconciliation between peoples of color. Blackman, who was shot through the scrotum and lost a leg, must accept that Mimosa, his lover, loves him despite this symbolic castration, and learn to trust the “mulattoes, quadroons, and octaroons” who “historically seem to have dealt treacherously … with their darker Brothers” (259; emphasis in original).11 Like Williams’s previous novels, Captain Blackman cannot imagine a post-revolutionary future, but it nonetheless pushes his embrace of genre further. By telling an ambiguous time-travel story, Williams avoids the melodramatic crudities of John Jakes’s Black in Time (1970) and the sf rationalizations even Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) falls back on, while producing a longer view of US history, situating the treatment of African-Americans within the growth of US imperialism.12 This also enables Williams to project his novel into the near future without the distracting fetishization of superficial detail genre sf would demand. Although Captain Blackman ends on a more triumphant note than his previous novels, its emphasis and conclusion demonstrate his reluctance to detract from a past that so heavily imbues the present.13
This trend in black power sf takes its most extreme form in ’Sippi and The Lynchers. For 430 pages, the former recounts the intersecting lives of a poor black man and a rich white woman, before ending with a black leader’s assassination and a single page intimating armed revolutionary response. The latter, dotted with sf imagery, concerns four black men conspiring to murder a black prostitute, and then frame and publicly lynch her white cop pimp so as to precipitate an apocalyptic confrontation:14
To free the Black God I will drop the hanged cop into the fire. The contorted silhouette will flash darkly on the screen. There will be no turning back, no hiding in the shivering smoke. The lynched white cop will not only be an ineradicable element in the future, but it will seem as if he and his lynchers have always existed, patiently waiting to be perceived, a mystery to be worshipped. To tear such a hole in history. To assist at the birth of a God. These are worth any sacrifice. (Killens 172-73)
Their plan, however, comes to nothing and everything remains the same. King Strut ends with revolutionaries retaliating for the assassination of Quinault by attacking Congress. Although the novel ends with all black Americans being rounded up, supposedly for their own safety, a note of optimism is sounded as a black policeman helps the gunmen escape. Runner Mack is less hopeful: the eponymous radical commits suicide because only a handful of people attend the meeting intended to start the revolution, and the protagonist, who might take up his mantle, is hit by a truck. Operation Burning Candle ends with the leader of the revolution bleeding to death after assassinating prominent white supremacists, but hints that it might not have been in vain. In The Militants, COON, “a black organization dedicated to the overthrow of the government, Capitalism, and Honkyism in general” (Easley 53), conducts an effective reign of terror but their revolutionary goals are quickly forgotten, leaving the government, capitalism, and Honkyism pretty much unscathed. The Black Commandos ends with their leader still, “in spite of all the killing, in spite of his complete and astounding success … a very angry man!” (Moreau 228). The Spook Who Sat By the Door ends with gutshot Freeman “listening to the first of the shooting, the rapid crackle of automatic weapons, the spit of rifles, the explosion of grenades” counterpointing Billie Holiday’s “God bless the Child” on his stereo, his dying thoughts of his gang-turned-revolutionaries: “go on, you black-ass Cobras, go get your own” (Greenlee 182).15
Four ways to break the chains of reality. Black power sf writers, already “othered” by racism’s material and ideological realities, could not depend on genre sf’s techniques to resolve their situation or engineer solutions, but they did succeed in developing at least four ways—refusal, immanentization, veil-rending, and pornotopianism—to narrativize the problem of breaking the chains of white reality.
Kelley’s A Different Drummer, carefully structured around an absence and a refusal, is not about taking over but taking leave. On Thursday, May 30, 1957, in an unnamed state in the Deep South, black farmer Tucker Caliban sows his land with salt, kills his horse and cow, destroys his grandfather clock, burns down his house, and, with his wife and child, walks away. A mass exodus follows. By the end of June there is not a single black left in the state. The narrative viewpoint moves from character to character but is never entrusted to Tucker or other non-whites. The novel narrates a complex history in which two families (the white Willsons, the black Calibans) are intertwined, first as slave-owners and slaves, then as white employers and black employees. Only a lengthy plot description could convey the extent to which Kelley does not explain Tucker’s actions or tell the story of the black exodus. Instead, he circumscribes this key event which, like Tucker, does not speak. As the townsfolk circle his farm, a space where none but he and his family tread, narrating voices circle around that moment, tying in other times and places. Subsequently, departing black people are observed catching buses and trains, walking or driving by, but when questioned give no very clear explanation, although they might speak “with more defiance than seemed necessary” (56), while prominent blacks fear a “grass roots” movement spreading “through spontaneous combustion” (127) outside of their control. Kelley thus captures a politics of refusal: enough is enough, explanation superfluous.
Tucker’s silence and actions are afforded symbolic resonance by a moment 120 years earlier. Dewitt Willson, at the docks to receive the delivery of a grandfather clock, saw a slaveship unload its cargo and immediately swore to own the massive African chief, Tucker’s great-great-grandfather: “He’ll work for me! I’ll break him. I have to break him” (14). As soon as he is paid for, the African, bearing his infant son, escapes. An epic pursuit zigzags across the state, nearly killing Dewitt, but eventually the African is betrayed. Finally face to face, “They stared at each other, not like they was trying to stare each other down, more like they was discussing something without using words. And finally it seemed like they came to an agreement because the African bowed slightly like a fighter bows at the beginning of a match” (24-25), and then Dewitt shot him. This silent mutual incomprehension, and their tacit agreement, lasts until 1956 when Tucker asks David Willson to sell him land on which to build a farm: “I got to do it, even if it’s all wrong. If I don’t do it, ain’t none of these things going to stop. We’ll go on working for you forever. And that has got to stop” (186). The understanding between Dewitt and the African, and between subsequent Willsons and Calibans, is symbolized by the grandfather clock, which passes from one family to the other. When Tucker destroys it, the mute contract comes to an end.
It is unclear whether Kelley knew Ray Bradbury’s “Way in the Middle of the Air” (1950), which features a similar black exodus from the Deep South— but to Mars by rocketship. The future Bradbury depicts is of a clichéd unchanging South, his only innovation the rocketships, glimpsed as “golden bobbins rising in the sky, far away” (148). Kelley’s contemporary South is likewise premodern, a place in which Reverend Bradshaw’s fancy car is an otherworldly, ancient-yet-modern intrusion, “like a chariot in a movie … a rocket ship” (61). Both texts turn away from depicting an explicit future, constructing the past as a constraint on the present. They emphasize those who stay behind, not those who depart into a future. Just as Bradbury’s 2003 is a complex of past, present, and future rather than a cross-section of the orderly progression implicit in Campbellian extrapolation, so Kelley’s various inseparable recent pasts produce a complex present, but A Different Drummer remains as silent as to the nature of its future as to the meaning of Tucker’s action.16 It refuses.
In contrast, the future in The Black Commandos is immanentized through the eponymous group, who, “through advanced technology,” have “appropriated powers that all previous cultures considered transcendental or heteronomic” (Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. 27)—as a survivor of a raid by this army of black super-scientific warriors says, “they weren’t ordinary niggers … almost like from the future” (Moreau 128). Their leader, Denis Jackson, driven by revenge for the murder by white cops of his father and a childhood friend, has dedicated himself to bringing “his body to a peak of physical perfection no other man in all history had attained!” (23) and raising his IQ until it “was well over two hundred, well beyond the power of any known test of intelligence to measure!” (24).17 His futurity is not just that of “some sort of superior mutation” (64), but of a black Superman. Born on a world more technologically advanced than Earth, DC’s Superman is effectively from the future, a figure “appear[ing] on the American industrial landscape in the 1930s” with “a new kind of body—only the Man of Steel has the constitution, organs, and abilities equal to the rigors of the Machine Age” (Bukatman 53). Jackson has remade his body to similar design parameters: “Jackson could turn on a dazzling blaze of speed bordering on the superhuman! Running, ducking, twisting, dodging and firing all the time— Jackson appeared to be running directly into the line of fire, but miraculously escaping injury.… The explosion occurred in three seconds, but Jackson was already more than a hundred yards away” (Moreau 85, 201). By sheer willpower, he has embodied the future so as to survive, and conquer, the present.
He recruits “people talented in and prone to do—murder, … people with violent tempers and excessive brutality! Psychopaths!” (22), typically by beating them in a fistfight. Abducted to his secret island base, they are conditioned by “auto-hypnotic techniques developed by Denis Jackson to a sublime degree” (169) and trained to become super-strong, super-fast, and super-skilled. The island is “full of geniuses … headed by a super genius—Jackson, himself” (64), whose inventions include a fleet of giant flying saucers “powered by negative cosmic magnetism” (88), which fly “at the speed of light and ma[k]e practically no sound above a slight stirring of breeze. [Their] power source and flying dynamics were both secretly discovered by Denis Jackson and they were a thousand years ahead of anything the present world was aware of!” (162). Assaulting a Klan rally, the narrator is “almost tempted to pity” the Klansmen, but only “if one lost sight of the fact that these men and others like them in generations past had labored ceaselessly and viciously to create, like Dr. Frankenstein, the monster that was destroying them tonight” (78). The Black Commandos, then, do not merely represent the return of the repressed but a repressed articulated in terms of futurity—a technologically-constructed monster which, in Shelley’s novel, represented the proletariat, a future people brought into being by capitalist-modernity.
The novel follows the Commandos’ 90-day mission to “execute key members of the racist power structure” (72) so as to speed its total collapse. Finally, they flood major cities with a fatal gas (with reversible effects), forcing the President to meet their rather vague demands for “prompt justice” and “complete amnesty” (219). On the penultimate page, the narrator suggests that “if Jung’s Collective Unconscious had any validity at all it might well have been the combined burden of the souls of successive generations of black folks which finally collapsed the white power structure” (227). In Operation Burning Candle, Aaron Rodger’s entire revolutionary strategy hinges on precisely such a veil-rending mechanism. Drawing on Frantz Fanon and his own sense that that there “has always been a thread that ties” black people together, a kind of “collective consciousness” that has somehow been augmented by “technological progress in communications” (Jackson 174), he theorizes that real change can only be achieved by an event so traumatic as to
reverse the dynamics of that social process for an entire generation of black people in one fell swoop, make an alternative to acceptance and resignation not only real but imperative, and provide a source of strength and pride absent in the perception of themselves and the world imposed upon them by their history. A trauma from which even the white folks couldn’t escape because the accomplished fact of it would necessarily shatter their own self-concept and all the myths, complacency, and the concept of black people as passive, accepting and afraid. (93; emphasis in original)
Persuaded that public espousal of this semiotic shattering of the hegemonic prison-house will prompt his assassination, he drops out and joins the army. In Vietnam, he recruits a guerrilla force to perform the “final symbolic act” (104) that will “break the chain so that the next generation of black children will start out with a whole new psychological framework” (174). This “collective psychotherapy”(174) requires “a final act of rebellion directed at the Southerners, for they are the living continuum of slavery, the last link between the present and the past of black folks and therefore the future” (177), and so he targets for assassination prominent racists at the Democratic National Convention.
The consequences of this attack remain unresolved. Fatally wounded, Aaron makes his way to Harlem, hallucinating that he is on an African beach as the first slaveship arrives. He wants to “run into the safety of the forest,” to “his own family-tribe, secure and loving,” but the white slavers catch and bind him. Looking back from the slaveship, he “saw the torch lights of his people and fought his way back above the pain” (221). When Aaron announced the intended attack on a major New York target, he urged Harlemites to “Light a candle and put it in a window, so that we know that your home is our home” (128). As the present swims back into focus, the torch lights of African forebears become myriad candles burning in Harlem’s windows. Aaron’s hallucination echoes an earlier reality-slippage experienced by his estranged father during a protest march: “the candle that had been thrust into his hand became a torch which lit the night, for there was no fear, not even of the jungle night, in this army of warriors” (151). Together, these ambiguous incidents seem to validate Aaron’s theory of a collective consciousness that reaches not merely between people but also between times, throughout the living continuum of slavery. In these moments lie not only memory or Heimat (home) but also expectation or Hoffnung (hope). “Always more than a return to the past” (Zipes 10), Heimat is “an anticipated state of reconciliation with conditions of possibility that do not as yet exist, and indeed will not exist until present conditions have been radically reconceptualized so that they can be transformed into something as yet impossible to define” (Daniel 59; emphasis in original). These veil-tearings are ambiguous, however, their meaning not fixed by some science-fictional rhetoric, and it remains unclear whether Aaron’s detonation of a reality-altering semiotic bomb worked, or to what extent.
Rather than altering reality, The Militants articulates black power sf’s powerful utopian hope through imagining privatized space-times of pornotopian plenty. Promoted to the front office, Nick and his new white co-worker, Italian-American beauty Gina, become lovers. She is disowned by her family. Her equally attractive best friend Phyllis is similarly horrified, but eventually befriends Nick. Aware of the growing attraction between them, Gina encourages them to become lovers, joining them in a ménage à trois. Phyllis does not know that Nick is the head of the COON, however, or that Gina has joined this black revolutionary cell. When a member of COON is murdered by patrolman Stebbins, Nick issues a press statement, saying that until Stebbins
is killed, we shall kill one cop per day.… [W]e will force the pigs to kill Stebbins, or have him killed.… They will slowly come to realize that they are at our mercy, that they can’t stop us, and that we mean business.… [T]hey will start seriously considering our demand And they will kill him!! They will have no choice. When this happens we will have won a victory of inestimable value. No matter how they cover up his death, the whole country will know that we forced them to do it. And that knowledge will be the equalizer; they won’t dare kill us off anymore whenever they get the urge, because they know that with all the hotheads around some of them are bound to try the same thing we did—or worse. (72, 74; emphasis in original)
While this plan and a bombing campaign against Manhattan targets successfully unfold, problems develop elsewhere. First, Phyllis discovers her lovers are members of COON, so they must kill her. Second, Nick and Jackie, a stunning high-class hooker he recruited into COON, become lovers—but fortunately Gina responds by inviting Jackie to join them in a three-way relationship, and they all move into a swanky new apartment together. It is worth considering this banal dénouement in some detail, beginning with the last of the novel’s several extended and relatively explicit sex scenes. Jackie fellates Nick, then Nick performs cunnilingus on her before she pulls him on top of her. They both come again,
and when he flopped onto his back exhausted Gina quickly sucked the come off his cock. Then she got between Jackie’s legs and after watching the come drip out for a few seconds, began to lick and suck the sopping pussy. If Jackie was surprised she didn’t show it; she pulled Gina’s head tightly against her crotch and threw her legs into the air, spreading them as much as possible.
Nick got in back of Gina and rammed his cock into Gina’s asshole. She screamed out in pain and pleasure deep into Jackie’s vagina, and moved her hips violently from side to side as he went in and out. They all climaxed more or less simultaneously, and after resting a few minutes went at it again having sex in just about every way possible until well into the morning. (148-49)Throughout the novel, sex scenes like this function, in the absence of any political vision, as an affective utopia, a hyperbolized version of the relationship in Williams’s novels in which domesticity acts as a limit upon, alternative to, or figure of revolution. COON does not possess any plan beyond their brief reign of terror, and afterwards there is no hint of social change. Instead, there are sex scenes. Common to them all—beyond the participants’ athletic and technical mastery and the repertoires through which they work—is an emphasis on plenitude. It is not merely that everyone gets to fuck everyone in various ways, but that fluid is plentiful—to the extent that whenever Nick performs cunnilingus his partner ejaculates, apparently by the cupful. Jackie’s cry of “pain and pleasure” when Nick sodomizes her emblematizes the dialectic of dreary reality and utopian impulse, as does the fulfilment of their plenitude-fantasies by moving not into a post-revolutionary utopia but into an apartment in a better neighborhood.
Because it is so phallocentrically overdetermined and organized, it is perhaps difficult to consider this interracial threesome as the image of utopia. This particular arrangement points to key limitations of the black power movement itself, in which women were generally cast in subservient roles (see Estes). Such gendered divisions are evident in Easley’s pornotopia, as his suppression of the intense homosociality and homoeroticism found in much black power sf (the latter signified by the excessive quantities of female ejaculate Nick consumes, the descriptions of one lover licking up his semen as it leaks out from his other lover, and his occasional sodomy). Shadowing Easley’s phallocentric pornotopia of sexual plenitude are hints of a broader, more all-encompassing rainbow alliance, of different races, ethnicities, sexualities, hinting at a coming identity politics soluble in mutual pleasure—a Marcusean drive “toward gaining more intensive and extensive pleasure, toward the generation of libidinous ties with one’s fellow men, the production of a libidinous, that is, happy environment” (Marcuse 19). But The Militants is a long way from even being able to think this, let alone depict it. The world beyond barely seeps through the chains of reality.
Conclusion. The US state’s violent, often illegal, and sometimes murderous suppression of the Black Power movement is relatively well documented.18 The Militants indicates some other, internal, reasons for its dissolution, as well as reasons for black popular culture’s frequent marginalization of sf in favor of crime genres. Although popular cultures are often structured around ways of perceiving, comprehending, and acting in the world that stem from the experience of oppression, they are nonetheless contained in various ways by dominant social groups:
The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his practical activity.… His theoretical consciousness can indeed be in opposition to his activity. One might also say he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or contradictory consciousnesses): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed. But this verbal conception is not without consequences. It holds together a specific social group, it influences moral conduct and the direction of will, with varying efficacity but often powerfully enough to produce a situation in which the contradictory state of consciousness does not permit of any action, any decision or choice, and produces a condition of moral and political passivity. (Gramsci 333)
Obviously, this resonates with both Du Bois and Fanon, but in conclusion I want to think beyond their important arguments about double consciousness and colonized minds; or, rather, not limit them to questions of racist ideology. While black power sf fantasizes violent revolution so as to negate an existing order, that order persists precisely through rendering its own acts of violence normative, legal, and effectively invisible. Many might perceive the ongoing need to revolutionize American space-time, but grasping the means to do so is often hampered by the consciousness inherited from the past. As Easley’s pornotopic vision and his better-life-in-a-better-neighborhood conclusion demonstrate, other inheritances also need to be overthrown, and not just by African Americans.
Bakhtin wrote, “I am situated on the boundary of the world I see” (“Author” 8). This position guarantees the uniqueness of individual experience, but also indicates the need to be completed by others, beyond the immediate reality of one’s own spatio-temporal experience. Central to American ideology is the concept of individualism. The Militants opens with three third-person sections, devoted in turn to the perspectives of Nick, Phyllis, and Gina, but Easley promptly drops this multiple perspective in favor of Nick: all other characters are subsumed into him. This is evident in the way the sex scenes are orchestrated around him giving and receiving pleasure; he alone is permitted subjectivity. This phallocentric individualism perpetuates the masculinism that, however problematic, was so essential to certain aspects of the civil rights and black power movements (see Estes).19 Although The Militants does end, soon after the sex scene quoted above, with the words “Let’s go to bed” (158), at the core of its dénouement is the “perfect” new apartment:
The living room walls were painted in large two-foot square, red and white designs, like a gigantic checkerboard. There were two large closets with sliding doors, one red and the other white, and the floor was tiled with alternating squares of red and white. The kitchen was done in tangerine, the bathroom in small checks of lilac and orchid, the second bedroom in large black and orange checks, but the master bedroom was the masterpiece of the whole apartment. All four walls were covered with glass tiles, which made the room seem many times larger than it really was, and the effect was indescribably beautiful.… His eyes got misty. (158)
Although one might question Nick’s taste in interior design, the apartment, in combination with the ménage à trois, represents a utopian enclave, a separate state within. This is emphasized by the reflective bedroom walls, which replace the world with multiplied images of the threesome’s entwined bodies. This utopia is heavily, libidinally invested in the commodity form, and this cathexis is perhaps the single most significant (because most invisible) inheritance and constraint on the black power sf imagination and revolutionary consciousness more generally.20 Even The Spook Who Sat By The Door, which excoriates the black middle classes for their actively-pursued accommodation with white bourgeois power structures, lingers, like Ian Fleming or William Gibson, over the many wonderful commodities Freeman must possess to make his cover effective, and which he himself relishes.21 While the classical utopian text performs an end run around history and into post-revolutionary everyday life, with perhaps a glance back at “the Event … the moment of revolutionary transition,” compressing “all of diachronic time … into this single apocalyptic instant” (Jameson 187), black power sf starts on our side of such a convulsion. Jameson argues that the utopian text contains a “formal flaw”: “how to articulate the Utopian break in such a way that it is transformed into a practical-political transition” (232). In black power sf, this “flaw” demonstrates, regardless of auctorial intention, that a successful antiracism cannot occur either on its own or within capitalism—as Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983), an excellent film just outside the scope of this essay, shows us, revolution must be not only permanent, but also total.
NOTES
1. Further exclusionary structures are provided by hegemonic racial discourses and other material practices regarding access to, use of, and innovation within technology.
2. See Tal, “That Just Kills Me.” Related novels, like Joseph Nazel’s Black Uprising (1976) and Ernest J. Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men (1983) find revolution unimaginable, settling instead for isolated resistances, while others, like Donald Goines’s Kenyatta series (1974-78), reduce black militancy to violent crime.
3. Space prevents a detailed account of the constellation of “black power” positions, but for key statements, see Williams, Negroes With Guns (1962); Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power (1967); de Coy, The Nigger Bible (1967); Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968); Lester, Look Out, Whitey (1968); Brown, Die Nigger Die! (1969); Seale, Seize the Time (1970); Jackson, Soledad Brother (1970) and Blood in My Eye (1972); and Newton, To Die for the People (1972) and Revolutionary Suicide (1973). Constraints on space also prevent treatment of four types of related fiction that have shaped my understanding of black power sf. First, “precursor” texts. From the outset, novels by African Americans featured, to varying degrees, armed insurrections against white supremacism, as in Brown’s Clotel (1853), Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), Delany’s Blake (1859-62), and, rather later, Bontemps’s fictionalized account of the 1800 Virginia slave revolt, Black Thunder (1936). (No biographical information is available about King Wallace, author of The Next War [1892; see Clareson 54-55].)
Of particular interest are the marginal sf of Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), Du Bois’s Dark Princesse (1928), and Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), as well as the unequivocal sf of Johnson’s Light Ahead for the Negro (1904), Tracy’s The White Man’s Burden (1915), and Schuyler’s Black No More (1932) and Black Empire (1991), the latter collecting two weekly newspaper serials, “The Black Internationale: Story of a Black Genius Against the World” (1936-1937) and “Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa” (1937-1938). Second, the contemporary fiction of writers like Samuel Delany and Ishmael Reed. Third, related fiction by white authors. Novels of interest include Bennett’s The Long Way Back (1954), Bateman’s When the Whites Went Away (1963), Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold (1964), Brunner’s The Jagged Orbit (1969), Lightner’s The Day of the Drones (1969), Seymour’s The Coming Self-Destruction of the U.S.A (1969), Jakes’s Black in Time (1970), Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972), Reynolds’s North African trilogy (Blackman’s Burden [1961-62] and Border, Breed Nor Birth [1962], published as an Ace Double in 1972, and The Best Ye Breed [1978], a fix-up of two 1973 stories), Robinson’s Night of Power (1985), and Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain (1988). I have been unable to uncover relevant biographical material concerning Edwin Corley, author of Siege (1969). Fourth, the development by Marvel and DC of blaxploitation superheroes, including the Black Panther, Black Lightning, Black Goliath, Blade, Brother Voodoo, The Falcon, and Luke Cage. See <http://www.blacksupero.com.history.html>; Lendrum; and Brown, Black Superheroes.
4. Malcolm X appears in Kent Smith’s time-travel novel, Future X (1990), in which his great-great-grandson, Ashford Henderson, travels back from a late-twenty-first century US ruled by the White Supremacist Party to prevent his assassination. After Malcolm’s too-early murder, Ashford Henderson takes his place and tries to foment a revolution in order to prevent the future dystopia his time-travel has caused.
5. A similar fantastical America, contrasting racialized urban poverty and military-industrial technoscientific accomplishments, appears in Gil Scott-Heron’s track “Whitey on the Moon” (1970), while Wideman’s The Lynchers depicts a white cop patrolling a black neighborhood in similar terms: “Donohue felt he was an astronaut orbiting alone beyond the earth. He felt the astronaut’s profound detachment from all things familiar and real, a growing bitterness and fear at being deserted amid the cold immensity of the stars. Only a metal shell between himself and extinction” (120). Muhammad Ali promised to hit Joe Frazier so hard he would go into orbit as the world’s first black satellite. H. Rap Brown suggested that “They gave negroes an astronaut; but, I bet they lose that nigger in space” (140; emphasis in original). On black responses to the 1969 Apollo moon landing, see Nye (242).
6. His fear that he no longer knows who he is, and his contention that “the nigger was the only natural agent in the United States, the only person whose life might depend, from childhood, on becoming what whites demanded” (83), melodramatizes W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness.
7. Perhaps, too, this is why Delany favors space opera, a form that overleaps the present of future things.
8. King Strut seems to be set in an alternative 1970, but the Founding Convention for a Black Nation is held on February 21, the tenth anniversary of the murder of Nathaniel X. If it is roman à clef (e.g., it depicts the FBI head as a Hoover-like closet homosexual whose sexuality is an open secret no one dares talk about because of his extensive secret files), and Nathaniel “is” Malcolm, then it must be set in 1975.
9. On masculinism in civil rights and black revolutionary thought, see Estes.
10. Schuyler’s Black Empire and Reynolds’ North Africa trilogy offer similar visions of Du Bois’s “talented tenth” building a pan-African state from which to oppose white imperialism. In Tracy’s White Man’s Burden, building the African utopia must wait until after white America is defeated.
11. Malcolm X suggested that “if there was a racial showdown, those Negroes ‘passing’ within white circles would become the black side’s most valuable ‘spy’ and ally” (383). In The Spook Who Sat by the Door, light-skinned blacks rob banks with impunity because a “nigger with a gun in a bank with a lot of money had to be white because niggers snatched purses and rolled drunks—any cop could tell you that─they just didn’t rob banks” (107). In the film adaptation, Freeman also renders his recruits invisible by dressing them as janitors.
12. In which a moderate black tries to conserve the world by undoing the time-tampering of a white supremacist and a black militant who are trying to produce a US free from, respectively, blacks and whites.
13. Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory,” outlined in Beloved (1987) and various essays, self-consciously articulates this dilemma. Williams’s Jacob’s Ladder (1987) returns to such matters. Set in the late 1960s, it tells of a West-African country trying to secure its recent independence by establishing a nuclear capability, provoking a US military response.
14. For example, a prostitute unchaining her door sounds like “a robot undressing” (158); a motorcycle cop is “dressed for the moon in helmet, boots and airtight leather” (244); passersby are “Each sunken in some alien universe, speaking another language, thinking words and forms indecipherable” (219).
15. The film adaptation ends with superimposed footage of black uprisings in eight American cities, as Freeman, fatally wounded, raises a glass in salute and freeze frames. In Watermelon Man (Van Peebles, 1970), racist health fanatic Jeff Gerber (Godfrey Cambridge) wakes up one morning to find he has turned black. He eventually finds pride in his blackness. In the final scene, he works out with two dozen black men, practicing a martial art with mop and broom handles. The final shot zooms in over these men and onto a medium close-up of Gerber as, yelling, he thrusts his mop handle toward the camera, freeze-framing for a full ten seconds. Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song (Van Peebles, 1971) ends with two captions flashing up on screen “WATCH OUT” and then “A BAAD ASSSSS NIGGER IS COMING BACK TO COLLECT SOME DUES….” Space is the Place (Coney, 1974) ends with Sun Ra’s spaceship departing, as the Earth blows up behind it, for an alien garden world where he intends to establish a colony to see what black people can achieve without white people around.
16. The novel opens with an entry about the unnamed state from the fictional 1961 Thumb-Nail Almanac, in which the departure and continued absence, four years later, of blacks is mentioned. While this passage reveals the successful action of the novel, it gives no sense of its consequences. Perhaps it had no far-reaching consequences, or they were of a nature unimportant to the almanac’s compilers, but ultimately the effect of this silence is to deny the reader any easy sense of the exodus’s meaning.
17. The author’s real name is J. Denis Jackson.
18. See O’Reilly, and Churchill and Vander Wall.
19. Significantly, Nick only ever sodomizes white women, and although anal sex is in no way inherently debasing, it is part of a recurring revenge fantasy against white supremacist ideology—a black man fucking a white woman in the ass, and her enjoying it—constructed through a carnivalesque inversion of that ideology’s own fears and propaganda. For a self-consciously excessive example, see “KKK Bitch,” a 1992 track by rap-rock band Body Count, in which Ice-T presents himself as every white supremacist’s nightmare image of black-man-as-sexual-monster, not only falling “in love with Tipper Gore’s two twelve-year-old nieces,” but also being sufficiently potent to impregnate the daughter of a KKK Grand Wizard through consensual buggery.
20. Cecil Brown’s The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (1969) precisely delineates the dissatisfactions of the libidinal-affective utopian enclave.
21. Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976) satirizes the problem of black emancipation within consumer capitalism. Stray Leechfield seeks freedom from slavery through prosperity, stealing chickens on a grand scale so as to purchase his freedom:He had taken so many over a period of time that he was over in the other county, big as you please, dressed up like a gentleman, smoking a seegar and driving a carriage which featured factory climate-control air conditioning, vinyl top, AM/FM stereo radio, full leather interior, power-lock doors, six-way power seat, power windows, white-wall wheels, door-edge guards, bumper impact strips, rear defroster and soft-ray glass.… He had set up his own poultry business, was underselling everybody in eggs, gizzards, gristles, livers—and had a reputation far and wide for his succulent drumsticks. He had a white slave fronting for him for ten percent. (36)
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ABSTRACT
This essay considers a group of novels from the 1960s and 1970s about African-American revolution, by Barry Beckham, Nivi-kofi A. Easley, Sam Greenlee, Chester Himes, Blyden Jackson, William Melvin Kelley, John O. Killens, Warren Miller, Julian Moreau, Chuck Stone, John Edgar Wideman, and John A. Williams as examples of black power sf. It focuses in particular on their inability to imagine a post-revolutionary future, and the strategies they adopt in place of more conventional sf techniques of extrapolation—such as refusal, immanentization, veil-rending, and pornotopianism—in order to narrativize the problem of what Walter Mosley has characterized as breaking the chains of (white) reality.
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