Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color by Joy Sanchez-Taylor

Abstract

Reviewed by: Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color by Joy Sanchez-Taylor Joan Gordon Oblivious No Longer? Joy Sanchez-Taylor. Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color. Ohio State UP, 2021. x+ 188 pp. $129.95 hc, $29.95 pbk & ebk. With the US under stress from a pandemic, fault lines have appeared; one of the most important in our field is how glaringly apparent a general obliviousness to the contributions of people of color has been in sf scholarship. I am glad to see all that "free time" we had under lockdown has been spent eliminating some of that scholarly dearth, judging by the number of books published in 2021 acknowledging the important work of BIPOC sf writers. On my bookshelf alone I see three books: the moving The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought by Roger A. Sneed; Jayna Brown's beautifully written and profound Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds; and Miriam C. Brown Spiers's pointed and perceptive Encountering the Sovereign Other: Indigenous Science Fiction. All will be valuable remedies for that obliviousness and can point scholars toward enriching their understanding of sf in general. Joy Sanchez-Taylor's contribution, Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color, is particularly important, I think. It is wide-ranging in its coverage, dealing with works by Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian Americans, and doing so in clear, jargon-free prose, always careful to define terms. It would be a suitable companion to a wide range of audiences: fans, scholars, undergraduates, graduate students, and stodgy old professors. Sanchez-Taylor's aim is, as she says in her introductory chapter, "An Image of Tomorrow," "to explain how science fiction authors of color are juxtaposing tropes of science fiction with specific cultural references to comment on issues of inclusiveness in Eurowestern culture" (2). Moreover, she wants to discuss works that "make people of color and their cultural experiences an integral part of the narrative" (3). The introduction, while avoiding blanket generalizations among these disparate and distinctive works, notes some interesting recurring patterns. Often, she says, these works "recycle and re-purpose 'old' technologies or blur distinctions between science and spirit," so she uses "an expansive definition of science fiction" (4). She also asks us "to consider not only the ways that people of color are alienated in Eurowestern cultures but also how science-fiction depictions of othered beings or aliens have contributed to this alienation by privileging a Eurocentric perspective." She is careful, however, not to "homogenize all races and ethnicities" (8), although she sees thematic connections that justify the [End Page 585] organization of her book into four chapters, each about what she sees as a commonly used trope in work by people of color: space travel and first contact. race and genetics, apocalypse and post-apocalypse, and indigenous science. In every chapter, Sanchez-Taylor parses particular texts by BIPOC authors and mentions other works illustrating her theses. Thus, she points out that while "each can be read independently, … together, they provide a broader context of the current state of science fiction writing by authors of color in US and Canadian cultures" (9). Obviously, then, she leaves a space for further work with sf more globally considered. After these four central chapters, a conclusion and an invaluable bibliography follow. The first of the central chapters, "Space Travel and First Contact Narratives," sets up the plan Sanchez-Taylor will use for the other three as well. After a brief explanation of the chapter's trope, she develops its significance in several densely reasoned explorations of works by writers of color. In this chapter, she looks at sf's most characteristic trope, that of confronting the alien, a trope that Sanchez-Taylor points out has traditionally "served to impose the same themes of white exceptionalism found in colonized countries" onto sf narratives (15). How, then, can writers of color avoid these colonialist narratives in their work? She claims that "each author in this chapter utilizes science-fiction tropes to draw attention to the power structures between colonizer and colonized and to show the effects of colonization from the view of the colonized...