A guide to speculative fiction

Reading lists

Black No More

'A liberating and lacerating critique of American racial madness, capitalism and white superiority ... Schuyler's wild, misanthropic, take-no-prisoners satire of American life seems more relevant than ever ... Afrofuturist before such a term existed' New York Review of Books 
 
Telling the extraordinary story of a mysterious process that can turn black skin white in 1930s America, Black No More is a pioneering and caustic work of Black speculative fiction from one of the great Harlem Renaissance authors. 
 
'A clever and biting satire' Isabel Wilkerson, The New York Times Book Review 
 
'No one is safe from Schuyler's biting mockery' The New York Times

A liberating and lacerating critique of American racial madness, capitalism, and white superiority . . . Black No More resists the push toward preaching and the urge toward looking backward into history. Afrofuturist before such a term existed, it insists, instead, on peering forward into what could come to be.

George S. Schuyler (1895-1977) was one of the most prominent African American journalists of the early twentieth century. Born in Rhode Island, Schuyler spent his early years in New York, before enlisting in the US army in 1912. He returned to New York after briefly being AWOL to pursue a career in journalism. He wrote for black America's most influential newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, in addition to The Nation, The Washington Post and H. L. Mencken's The American Mercury.

It's New Years Day in 1933 in New York City and Max Disher, a young black man, has just heard the news: a mysterious doctor has discovered a strange process that can turn black skin white - a new way to 'solve the American race problem'. Max, who is tired of being rejected and abused because of his dark skin, leaps at the opportunity. After receiving the 'Black-No-More' procedure, he becomes Matthew Fisher, a white man who is able to attain everything he has ever wanted: money, power and a beautiful wife. But it soon becomes apparent that America, whiter than ever, is becoming more and more dangerous . . . 
 
An extraordinary, cutting satire, Black No More is an utterly unique work of science fiction, and one of the first works of Black speculative fiction.

George S. Schuyler

Brooks E. Hefner

Black Empire tells the electrifying tale of Dr Henry Belsidus, a Black scientific genius desperate to free his people from the crushing tyranny of racism. To do so, he concocts a plot to enlist a crew of Black intellectuals to help him take over the world, cultivating a global network to reclaim Africa from imperial powers and punish Europe and America for white supremacy and their crimes against the planet's Black population. 
 
At once a daring, high-stakes science fiction adventure and a strikingly innovative Afrofuturist classic, this controversial and fearlessly political work lays bare the ethical quandaries of exactly how far one should go in the name of justice.

Black Empire

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