Spacefunk! Building Futures in Full Color at Georgia Tech, Across Atlanta, and Around the World

Lisa Yaszek, Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies, shares her insights on Georgia Tech’s recent event, Spacefunk! A Science Fiction Reading Meet ‘N’ Greet.

One of the most rewarding parts of my work as Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech is connecting the scientists, engineers, and policy makers who are literally building the world of tomorrow with science fiction artists who are imagining our many possible futures today. We take these connections seriously at Tech; indeed, as a member of the steering committee for Georgia Tech’s new Space Research Institute (SRI) I’m particularly pleased that we’ve included the study of “making space” in art and culture as one of our Institute’s founding principles. 

To that end, on Thursday, September 17, we gathered science fiction fans, Black art aficionados, and space enthusiasts in the Georgia Tech Library’s Crosland Tower Stairs event space for Spacefunk! A Science Fiction Reading Meet ‘N’ Greet, which I hosted with support from the Georgia Tech Library (be sure to check out our world-class science fiction collection and reading lounge!). The event began with an introduction by Spacefunk! editor and publisher Milton J. Davis, who explained why outer space has long been one of the premiere places for Black technoscientific genius and artistic creativity. Afterward, attendees broke into small groups with featured authors and poets Balogun Ojetade, Bryant O’Hara, Jessica Cage, Kyoko M, and Glenn Parris, who read from their Spacefunk! contributions and then talked with their group members about their processes for understanding and representing outer space in art.

While the Spacefunk! event was immediately designed to celebrate Georgia Tech’s new SRI, it was also part of Georgia Tech’s longstanding commitment to science fiction education. My predecessor, Irving “Bud” Foote, offered one of the first college-level science fiction classes for credit in 1971 and then began the tradition of bringing science fiction authors including Fred Pohl, Ursula K. le Guin, and Kim Stanley Robinson to campus soon after. Since the 2000s, I’ve sought to expand that commitment by partnering with Atlanta-based speculative writers, artists, and fans to highlight the excitement of our city as a vibrant space for science fiction across media. Some of my first and most successful partnerships were with Davis and other members of the local Black science fiction community, and over the past decade and a half we have successfully co-hosted author readings, daylong symposia, and even a con or two at Georgia Tech. Last spring I had the pleasure of introducing Davis to Georgia Tech’s space community during our Yuri’s Day Symposium, and so it seemed natural to all of us to keep the party going this year with events that allowed even more members of our two communities to interact with one another.  

One of the things I found most rewarding about the Spacefunk! event was its powerful reminder that the stars have always been all of ours. Most histories of space flight in modern science fiction begin with speculative pioneers Edgar Allen Poe and Jules Verne before moving on to space opera luminaries such as E.E. “Doc” Smith and hard science fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. However, the fifty-plus Black-authored works collected in Spacefunk!, coupled with Davis’s introductory essay on the long history of Black contributions to the U.S. space program, invite us to tell a different story about the history of space flight in science fiction. Told through the lens of Black speculation, we should instead begin that history with the enslaved Black colonial poet Phillis Wheatley Peters, whose 1773 poem On Imagination gave us our first images of genius-level Black star children escaping the gravitational pull of Earthly racism on the Mothership of Imagination—images that quite literally came to life in the late 1970s with Parliament-Funkadelic’s life-sized “Mothership” stage prop, which singer George Clinton always insisted was the embodiment of Black liberation!  

Black authors continued to reach for the stars in the African American newspapers that flourished throughout the first half of the twentieth century, where journalists including George S. Schuyler and Mary E. Stratford used space stories about strange encounters between alien races as funhouse mirrors to the strange encounters between human races on Earth and especially in the U.S. These newspapers were also the birthplace of commercially oriented Black genre fiction, giving readers the first-ever Black-authored space opera: John P. Moore’s Amazing Stories: One Hundred Years Hence (1930), which follows the adventures of three Black scientists—and one Black science fiction author!—who travel to an all-Black, high tech Mars.  Perhaps not surprisingly, when Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler integrated the White science fiction community in the 1960s and 70s, some of the first major works they gave readers—Nova and the Xenogenesis trilogy—were in the form of space stories organized around race relations. Today, of course, we enjoy a variety of critically celebrated Black space operas including Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti novellas, Marcus Broaddus’s Sweep of Stars series, and, of course, new short works such as those collected in the Spacefunk! Anthology. Together, these space stories turn the implicitly and sometimes explicitly racist and colonialist impulses of the classic, White-authored space opera on its head while dramatizing the intellectual and technoscientific abilities of Black peoples across space and time. 

Another exciting aspect of the Georgia Tech Spacefunk! event was that it gave members of the Georgia Tech community the opportunity to meet Black speculative fiction creators specifically associated with Atlantafuturism. As artist (and Georgia Tech alum!) Floyd Hall explains, audiences across the world increasingly associate our city with the future because it is the backdrop for so many MCU films, including the Black Panther series—indeed, for many people, Atlanta seems to benothing short of a real-life Wakanda. The danger, of course, is that as this Hollywood-produced vision of Atlanta takes root in the global cultural imaginary, we run the risk of erasing our city’s very real history of forging new and better futures not through the accidental discovery of some marvelous new element, but through the long, hard, and often dangerous work of civil rights activism. As Floyd puts it: Atlanta-as-Wakanda “both sells short the generations of Black struggle in Atlanta while ignoring the vulnerable legacy of that struggle in the present, as income inequality, economic immobility and violence upon the Black body pose consistent and dire threats to the city’s Black culture.” As founding members of the Atlantafuturism artists’ collective, Milton Davis and many of the other authors who participated in the Georgia Tech Spacefunk! event introduced Georgia Tech scientists and students to the principles of Atlantafuturism through space stories that dramatize both Black technoscientific genius and the history of communal Black social activism. As such, the Spacefunk! artists do the important work of reminding us that we are not alone, and that the wicked problems we face in the opening decades of the twenty-first century are quite like those that people across the world have grappled with for hundreds of years now. In doing so, Atlantafuturists, especially those who are also proud Spacefunkateers, give us templates for action in the present that can build truly more inclusive futures for us all.