Description: Literary explorations into the radical, hopeful racial futures imagined by science fiction
Brief description: Isiah Lavender III is Sterling-Goodman Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he researches and teaches courses in African American literature and science fiction. He is author of Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement; editor of Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction and Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction, both published by University Press of Mississippi; and coeditor of Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century.
Review Quotes: Isiah Lavender has assembled some of the field's top scholars and most important emerging voices in an essential volume that shows the range and depth of science fiction's engagement with questions of race and racism. This groundbreaking collection combines work on well-known writers of colour such as Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler with analysis of work by indigenous and Latino writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Ernest Hogan. Reading this collection leaves no doubt that racial difference structures the science fictional imagination, and Lavender's volume demonstrates both the dangers of complicity with imperialist ideology to which SF can succumb and the power of its tools in the hands of writers of colour to resist and revise racist stereotypes and articulate a more promising future. Black and Brown Planets promises to be an indispensable reference for understanding the critical ethnic imaginaries of twenty-first century science fiction.--Sherryl Vint, professor of science fiction media studies, co-director of the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Program, University of California, Riverside