Transfer Orbit

Library of America is publishing an Afrofuturist anthology

Andrew Liptak -

Here's an intriguing-looking book that I came across that should make for an excellent read when it's released next year: The Black Fantastic: Twenty Afrofuturist Stories, which will be edited by andré m. carrington and published by Library of America. .

The book is slated to be published on February 4th, 2025, and will contain 20 stories that "celebrate Black identity, community, and imagination," featuring "Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award winners alongside emerging and experimental voices." carrington is an Associate Professor of English at UC Riverside, and he's the author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, in which he examines the history of Black science fiction and fandom.

Here's the back cover blurb for the anthology:

Black speculative fiction has never been better than it is here and now. 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.

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.

This sounds excellent, and it'll be joining a lineup of other recent anthologies that celebrate Black speculative fiction, such as Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight, and Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams.

Library of America to publish the works of Octavia Butler
Nonprofit publisher Library of America is expanding its speculative fiction offerings: it’ll release a volume containing the works of Octavia Butler in 2021, co-edited by Nisi Shawl and Gerry Canavan. Shawl revealed the news on Twitter, noting that they’ll be writing an introduction for the book, which will
Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak

Library of America has been increasingly including speculative fiction authors in recent years, collecting the works of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeline L’Engle, and collections of novels from the 1950s and 1960s from Gary K. Wolfe, and anthologies like Lisa Yaszek’s The Future is Female!