Black Alienation in SF

"Do I feel that, deep within my work, I've situated material that encourages the reader's engagement with some of the political questions that the disenfranchised people in this country, victimized by oppression and an oppressive discourse based on the evil and valorized notion of nationhood and its hideous white - no other color - underbelly, imperialism, must face but cannot overcome without internalizing some of the power concepts and relationships inescapably entailed in the notion of "nation" itself?"

Is "black SF" different from what we would consider "traditional," or "white SF?" In the works of Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany that we have read, the theme of black nationalism is a massive force behind the literary work of the novel. In such works of "black SF," the science fiction genre seems to take a back seat to the more important ideas of race, of blackness, of otherness. Or are all of these ideas inherently tied into the genre of SF already?

It is difficult to discern whether there really is such a thing as "black SF," as the themes that constitute the "black SF" genre seem to surface in all types of SF writing. As we have discussed, the process of creating a future reality for humans is actually a process of critiquing and identifying what our present reality, society is.

Why is it that there are so few black SF writers? Is the theme of otherness so glaringly present in SF works that it repels black readers or makes them feel uncomfortable, as if there is no place for them in the future? What is it about technology that alienates black people? Is it the use of technology by whites against blacks, to keep them in their place, in such instances as the Tuskegee experiments?

Given the presence of alienating forces present in SF literature, it seems to me that blacks would identify more strongly with the genre rather than the other way around. I believe it is for this very reason that the few black SF authors chose the genre in the first place - to write about the alienation of their people, to create a world that mirrors the problems that exist in our own.