Visions of the Third Millennium: Black Science Fiction Novelists Write the Future

In Visions of the Third Millenium, Sandra Grayson analyzes how writers of African descent use the codes of science fiction to explore race and gender, myth and language, slavery and freedom, alienation and difference.

Focusing on established and relatively new writers such as Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Steven Barnes, and Nalo Hopkinson, Grayson’s groundbreaking study is concerned with how black science fiction writers interweave the memories of enslaved Africans in their works, revealing journeys in time through Africa that are both metaphorical and literal in their span of physical space, traditional beliefs, and African history. By simultaneously looking back and forward in their novels, the writers reflect a construction of time as a pendulum moving in patterns of recurrence that represent inseparability among the past, present, and future.

Grayson argues that these black science fiction writers call for positive activism and encourage the reader to reconsider the myth of individualism that is especially pervasive in North American society and to conceptualize a society that recognizes and appreciates all nations and people as connected to a larger global community.

Refreshingly original, this book highlights the importance of black science fiction writers and marks another significant contribution to scholarship by Grayson.