Page 21 - BCALA Summer 2018

“I DIDN’T KNOW THAT PEOPLE OF COLOR WRITING SCIENCE FICTION WAS A THING”: The Influence of Librarians on Black Girls’ Access to Science Fiction
By S.R. Toliver, University of Georgia
I have loved speculative fiction
my entire reading life, but science fiction (SF) has always been my favorite subgenre. There was something freeing about envisioning a future wrought with undiscovered possibilities; understanding a universe beyond the immediate realm of my real-life experience; and imagining innovations that could impact how the current world shifts and changes. However, even though
I loved reading SF, I kept my love for the subgenre secret in middle and high school because, according to most of the people I knew, SF was not written or created for Black girls.
At the time, the idea that I was
not allowed to enjoy SF because I was Black and because I was a girl baffled me. I did not understand why people wanted to put my reading options into a box. However, I soon
discovered why so many people
were in disbelief: there weren’t that many SF books written by Black authors and published through traditional publishing houses, and there weren’t that many SF books with Black protagonists, female or male. Therefore, how could SF be written for Black girls if we weren’t writing them and we weren’t included in them? Instead of attempting to answer this question as a young girl, I read whatever SF books I could find, kept my preferences to myself, and continued to wonder when I would see a mirror of myself in a SF story.
Sadly, it was not until college that I learned about the existence of Octavia Butler, a Black female SF author who won Hugo and Nebula awards and was the first SF writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. I stumbled across “Parable of the
Sower”, and I was amazed at the ways in which Butler’s main character, Lauren, spoke to me. Yet, I was introduced to her work in the mid 2000s, while the book was published in 1993. It was at that point that I realized the limited access I had to the wonderful SF books written by and about Black women and girls during my younger years. I also realized that prior to that reading,
the only futures I had access to were the ones in which white characters thrived and Black characters were erased, silenced, or metaphorically inserted as aliens.
My journey with SF has impacted my current research, and it led me to writing an article in Research
on Diversity in Youth Literature (RDYL) about the need to imagine new hopescapes (Hamilton, 1986) in order to expand Black girls’ mirrors
BCALA NEWS | Volume 45, Issue 3 | 21