Black writers of speculative fiction once struggled to find a place on bookshelves. As Samuel R. Delany wrote in his 1998 essay âRacism and Science Fiction,â even when Black writers did get published, sometimes their works were whitewashed, like the early book covers of Octavia E. Butlerâs works, or were otherwise sidelined. Thankfully, this is changing.
Speculative fiction is blossoming across Africa. The Nommo Award, established in 2017 by the African Speculative Fiction Society, highlights some of these exciting new works. Major writers like Nnedi Okorafor and Tade Thompson have, between them, won the fieldâs highest honors, including the Hugo, World Fantasy and Clarke awards. And a wide assortment of authors from the African diaspora have been creating ambitious, well-regarded African-inspired fantasy and science fiction, such as Booker Prize-winner Marlon Jamesâ recent âBlack Leopard, Red Wolf.â
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Artistic movements in architecture are often Utopian in their impulses, as I mentioned. This film explores the utopian community. Modernism, Brutalism, Bauhaus, all these sorts of things, began as genuinely Utopian visions for how societies could or should be engineered to make homes and buildings a better steward of human energy. This film explores the little community that formed around experimental handmade cottages made by star architects and designers now abandoned, existing as ruins in a beautiful national park in Massachusetts and the strong idealist bonds formed there.
So much of American and Australian architecture carries a desire to reject the worst excesses of classism and elitism in European traditions and to build something new, with new materials and new ideas and new social structures. Utopianism is a foundational impulse in both architectural theory and science fiction traditions. People with such good intent never quite see the full outcome of what they may pro