The Black Fantastic

A cutting-edge collection of the best short stories in contemporary Afrofuturist fiction—from Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker award-winning Black authors

"This is essential reading." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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.

Edited by SF-expert andré carrington, and including Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award winners alongside emerging and experimental voices, The Black Fantastic showcases the artistry of these breakout literary stars and celebrates the diversity of their talents.

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 is essential reading." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A truly excellent, wide-ranging collection of speculative fiction by contemporary Black writers; its tutelary spirits are Octavia E. Butler and Sun Ra." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“The Library of America has done the world and the reading public a great service with its new anthology… a beautiful variety of works that together help give expression and voice to the wide range of Black creative experiences of the unreal and the possible. This volume would be an excellent introduction for students and scholars alike to the Afrofuturist sub-genre…” —Ancillary Review of Books "andré carrington's skillful curation of this beautiful, very necessary, collection is extraordinary. The tales within dodge and weave throughout time and space and show the sheer grace and tenacity of the black imagination coupled with the power the aesthetic traditions of the African Diaspora." 
—John Jennings, Hugo Award–winning illustrator of Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation andré carrington, editor, is the author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (2016). He is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where he directs the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science program.