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Dark
Matter:Reading the Bones
Edited By Sheree R. Thomas
Following on the heels of the first
innovative and highly praised collection of speculative fiction
by black writers, comes the much anticipated follow-up,
Dark
Matter: Reading the Bones (Warner Aspect Hardcover; $29.95;
January 2, 2004) edited by series creator, Sheree R. Thomas. In
this continuation to the critically acclaimed Dark Matter: A
Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
(Aspect; 2000), a winner of the noted World Fantasy Award for
Best Anthology, Thomas has once again gathered a group of
extraordinary writers, with stories and essays in the science
fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction genre.
Aptly subtitled,
Reading the Bones,
which is an illusion to the practice of gleaning futuristic
information from animal bones that is still alive in Africa and
the Caribbean, the twenty-five stories and three essays cover a
wide range of writers from the African Diaspora. Included are
acclaimed authors such as Samuel R. Delany, Tananarive Due, Nalo
Hopkinson, and Walter Mosley, as well as an array of emerging
writers serving up an offering of haunting and disturbing tales
that stretch to the farthest reaching corners of the human
imagination.
From award-winning science fiction veteran,
Samuel R. Delany, "Corona" (1967) is the story of an
intergalactic rock star and the effect of his hit song on a
telepathic little girl, while Nalo Hopkinson's "The Glass
Bottle Trick" (2000) is an eerie tale of one man's hatred
of his dark skin and the bizarre outcomes it leads to. Amongst
the newer contemporary voices, one will be hard pressed to see
nannies with quite the same innocence after reading "Old
Flesh Son" (2004) by Haitian writer Ibi Aanu Zoboi, who
weaves a hypnotic story about about the power of one woman's
persuasive chant.
It seems fitting
that the anthology opens with "ibo landing" (1998), a
story of the middle passage crossing told in stark and wrenching
imagery by ihsan bracy. "Desire" (2004) combines raw
animal energy with sensuous magic as Kiini Ibura Salaam
illustrates the boundless sexuality waiting to be unleashed even
in a seemingly dead marriage. Henry Dumas' "Will the Circle
Be Unbroken?" unfolds in a series of throbbing, electric
jazz riff and motifs and culminates in a stunning conclusion.
--Publisher
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After the spectacular
Dark
Matter
(2000), Thomas offers something of a mixed bag in her second
anthology of speculative fiction from the African diaspora. Of
the stories set during the days of slavery, ihsan bracy's "ibo
landing" proves that stylization of subject matter can be
more powerful than historical fidelity. The shimmering, brutal
outlines created by such simple sentences as "each in their
own way understood the distance. they would never again be
home" stay with the reader for a long time.
By contrast, the weight of research muffles
the emotional impact of a story like Cherene Sherrard's
"The Quality of Sand." Similarly, Charles R. Sanders'
"Yahimba's Choice" seems written by an anthropologist
studying a distant culture, the story unable to move past
surface ritual and wooden dialogue.
The strongest entry is Kiini Ibura Salaam's
"Desire," an experimental retelling of a folktale
that's wonderfully fresh, with exquisite detail: "Quashe's
back formed one gleaming stretch of reptile skin. Her torso,
neck, and arms were honey-amber, human-soft skin moist with
river dew." This story will probably appear in at least one
year's best collection.
Other stories of
note include Pam Noles' "whipping Boy" and Tananarive
Due's "Afternoon." Solid reprints from Samuel R.
Delany and W.E.B. Du Bois, among others, round out the volume,
along with several essays of varying quality.
--Publisher's Weekly
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Editor Sheree R. Thomas' first anthology of
science fiction by African-American writers, Dark Matter,
was released in 2000 to critical acclaim. Her second entry in
the series,
Dark
Matter: Reading the Bones, $25.95, 416
pages ISBN 0446528609), once again showcases a wonderful
selection of new and established writers. Thomas' latest
collection is a wide and deep survey of the burgeoning field she
defines as "speculative fiction from the African diaspora."
The 24 stories range from straightforward
science fiction (by writers David Findlay and Kiini Ibura
Salaam), to reprints from the field's leading lights (Nalo
Hopkinson, Samuel R. Delany).
Cherene Sherrard's "The Quality of
Sand" is one of the key stories. Escaped slaves Jamal and
Delphine run a pirate ship in the 19th century Caribbean. When
they rescue a woman from Jamal's home country, there is an
unexpected and deep recognition between them. Sherrard's
successful mix of slavery and freedom, gender and religion,
belief and duty mirrors many of the concerns expressed elsewhere
in Reading the Bones.
Some of the writers explore the darker
aspects of life such as Hopkinson's version of the Bluebeard
fairy tale, "The Glass Bottle Trick," Kevin
Brockenbrough's near-future vampire story, "'Cause Harlem
Needs Heroes," and Pam Noles' "Whipping Boy," in
which the lead character cannot escape his role of taking his
people's pain into himself. Given that, there is still space for
humor throughout.
Reading the
Bones illustrates the strength and diversity in the field of
speculative fiction and makes us hop that many more volumes in
the Dark Matter series are yet to come.
--Gavin J. Grant, Bookpage
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Sheree R. Thomas' groundbreaking 2000
anthology
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from
the African Diaspora came as something of a revelation to
many readers, not so much because of its historical content
(only three of the stories dated from earlier than 1967, and a
good swath of African-American fantastic writing went largely
unexplored), but because it revealed the breadth of interest in
SF, fantasy, and horror among contemporary black writers; no
fewer than 15 of 28 stories were original to the volume, and the
contributors included not only familiar names with
already-established reputations in these fields (Octavia Butler,
Samuel R. Delany, Steven Barnes, Jewell Gomez), but well-known
authors from other fields (Walter Mosley, Amiri Baraka) and
newer writers such as Tananarive Due and Nalo Hopkinson, whose
reputations have grown substantially since the publication of
that anthology.
Like that first volume,
Dark
Matter: Reading the Bones consists mostly of new stories (17 out of
24, plus two essays and a transcript of a panel discussion) and
reveals a slight emphasis toward SF (with a third of the stories
reasonably so classifiable). Again, the historical material is
rather thin, with only five stories dating from earlier than
2000; Samuel R. Delany's "Corona" (1967) and W.E.B. Du
Bois' "Jesus Christ in Texas" (1920) are the oldest
pieces in the book. Ten of the authors represented in the new
book also had stories or essays in the earlier volume, lending a
trace of déjà vu to what originally had seemed a voyage
of discovery.
Thomas avows that she had no preconceived
framework in mind in selecting or inviting contributions, yet
what she ends up with suggests -- as did the first volume --
that there is indeed a sensibility at work among these writers
which has largely been marginal (read: barely visible) in the
genre traditions involved. If SF and fantasy have historically
gotten nervous about sex and politics, the contributors to Dark
Matter are downright assertive.
There's a far more overt voice of protest in
many of these stories, while at the same time there's a more
comfortable focus on matters of sensuality and the body --
sometimes even in the same story. Walter Mosley's "Whispers
in the Dark," for example -- the lead story in his 2001
Futureland collection and one of the strongest -- features a
brilliant kid in danger of being removed from his poor black
family as part of a government-sponsored elite education
program, until his uncle rescues him by selling various parts,
including his eyes and his sex organs, in order to raise the
money needed to keep the child at home.
This notion of a brutal bureaucracy invading
people's lives is also central to Charles Johnson's "Sweet
Dreams," in which a government strapped for cash in the
wake of anti-tax initiatives is reduced to taxing people's
dreams; in Wanda Coleman's "Buying Primo Time," in
which a woman artist barters sexual favors for loans needed to
buy additional weeks of life from the "Life Security
Assurance Council"; in Jill Robinson's "BLACKout,"
which depicts an unexpected and unpleasant aftermath to a
decision to pay government reparations to descendants of slaves;
and in Kalamu ya Salaam's "Trance," about a
time-travel project to recover lost black history which is
threatened by a worldwide "One Planet" movement to
eliminate cultural diversity by turning everyone a uniform shade
of beige.
With the exception of the latter, which is
the longest and most fully-developed SF tale in the book, most
of these are little more than provocative ideas dressed in
barely serviceable plots.
Those tales which focus more on matters of
the body than the body politic include Charles R. Saunders'
"Yamiba's Choice," featuring his heroic Doussouye
challenging the ancient spirits who seem to demand ritual
clitorectomy; Kiini Ibura Salaam's "Desire" and David
Findlay's remarkable "Recovery from a Fall," which
recast religious or mythical tales in sensualist (and sometimes
narratively experimental) terms; Pam Noles' "Whipping
Boy," which adapts the old sin-eater legend into a modern
horror story involving select individuals whose role is to
absorb -- in rather graphic terms -- the frustration and rage of
the urban poor; and Ibi Aanu Zoboi's "Old Fresh Song";
in which an embittered homeless woman who gains sustenance by
absorbing the life-energy of babies meets her match when she
encounters a nanny who is also a soucouyant.
Meeting one's match is another recurrent
theme in the tales, sometimes in terms that directly reflect a
kind of pop-culture wish fulfillment. Douglas Kearney's brief
"Anansi Meets Peter Parker at the Taco Bell" is pretty
well summarized in its title (Peter Parker, for those who
forgot, is the alter ego of Spider Man), while Nnedi
Okorafor-Mbachu's "The Magical Negro" pits a
Conan-like barbarian hero named Thor the Brave against a
jive-talking, cigar-puffing brother from another fantasy.
In Kevin Brockenbrough's "Cause Harlem
Needs Heroes," a Harlem besieged by vampires and abandoned
by the government is protected instead by a family of legendary
vampire-killers. And in John Cooley's "The Binary,"
evil Japanese spirits called oni are challenged by
supernaturally empowered good guys called "binaries"
because of the ancient spirits which co-inhabit their bodies.
The slave trade also comes up against
supernatural balance sheets in ihsan bracy's poetic re-visioning
of an Ibo legend in "ibo landing" and Cherene
Sherrard's "The Quality of Sand," in which a band of
what in any other context would be called pirates rescue the
prisoners of slave ships.
A more purely science-fictional treatment of
the slavery theme on a planet called New Bahama; the story
represents one of the most thoroughly-realized SF settings in
the book, along with Andrea Hairston's novel fragment
"Mindscape," in which a mysterious glittering barrier
divides a world into isolated segments, and the Kalamu ya
Salaam's story already mentioned.
Music is the guiding metaphor in both Henry
Duma's "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" and Samuel
Delany's "Corona" (as in the first volume, Thomas
rather oddly reaches back into the early years of Delany's
career for this tale), and art of another sort shows up in
Tyehimba's Jess's ingratiatingly manic "Voodoo Vincent and
the Astrostoriograms," in which a street artist is given
the power of prophecy and gets his comeupance when he fails to
use his newfound wealth to help his people.
It's not surprising that even even the early
Delany is one of the most beautifully written pieces in the
book, and it's equally clear why Nalo Hopkinson (here
represented by "The Glass Bottle Trick," a kind of
duppified version of Bluebeard) has emerged as one of the
field's more distinctive voices in the last few years (see
above). Tananarive Due is another writer whose reputation and
skill have grown noticeably in recent years, although her
"Afternoon" is more of a clever conceit (a
dermatologist who treats werewolves) than a fully-realized
story.
The most famous name in the book, of course,
is the oldest: W.E.B. Du Bois, whose avuncular homily
"Jesus Christ in Texas" is far less compelling than
his "The Comet" in Thomas' first volume.
As with the first
anthology, or as with any anthology of largely original stories
by largely newer writers, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones
is predictably uneven, with some writers tentatively and
awkwardly probing the possibilities of the fantastic, some
driving their lessons home with a hammer, and some finding
entire new ways of using these materials, but it again serves to
remind us that fantastic literature, at least in terms of the
popular genres, has barely begun to open its doors to
alternative voices and sensibilities.
--Gary K. Wolfe, Locus (11/03)
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update 22 June 2008 |
