Mothership Rising: Afrofuturism in the Radium Age

A mind-expanding anthology of early Black science fiction—the visionary origins of Afrofuturism.

The future is waiting—come aboard.

This collection, introduced by Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Nisi Shawl, remixes the past to reveal a tradition of speculative thought too long overlooked: the pioneering Black writers, playwrights, and poets whose future-facing imaginations helped lay the groundwork for artists from Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler to Parliament-Funkadelic and Janelle Monáe.

Edited by Lisa Yaszek, Mothership Rising gathers early twentieth-century visions—utopian and dystopian alike—from Pauline Hopkins, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Marita Bonner, George S. Schuyler, and others. Here are strange technologies, hidden histories, cosmic journeys, and revolutionary futures—transmissions from an earlier twentieth century, received now as a call to imagine otherwise.