The African American Science Fiction Character in Literature, Television, and Film

Even more unique to the SF genre is the emergence and inclusion of African American heroes and heroines created by Black authors, besides Samuel R. Delany, such as Octavia E. Butler, Walter Mosley, and Steven Barnes et al. Butler is most known for her series of novels about superhuman telepaths in Wildseed, Mind of My Mind, and Patternmaster. Barnes is known not only for collaborations with famed SF writer Larry Niven but also for his contribution to Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek universe with the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel Far Beyond the Stars affirming, via formulae of the [mythic] hero, that black characters, especially in that novel, are and will always be a strong presence in science fiction literature. Mosley, most known for his detective fiction featuring Black private eye Easy Rawlins, has ventured into SF literature with his novel Blue Light.

Today, there may be no doubt that Black SF characters are written as heroic and non-stereotypical, and now in the 21st century they remain complex trailblazers in the genre, ever-growing, ever-changing to solve human problems. However, the origin of the black character in classic 20th century science fiction literature is appropriate. Interestingly, until Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End, a Black male or Black female character is nowhere to be found in any other mainstream science fiction literature; afterward, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human in 1953 introduces Beanie and Bonnie, Black telekinetic twins. Nonetheless, Clarke’s character, Jan Rodricks, a black man who becomes the last human on earth to witness man’s evolutionary ascendance, through his children, to the stars is unique in many respects: First, he is created by a white author in non-stereotypical fashion; second, his relationship to the alien Overlords, who appear as winged devil-like beings, is pivotal in the novel; lastly, he comments on the disintegration of the racist, oppressive regime of apartheid in South Africa, due in part to the intervention of the alien Overlords. However, there is no "blackness."

Unfortunately, and for obvious reasons, there are not enough Rodricks with who black readers can identify; nothing else is learned of Rodricks--he is simply a bland representation for white readers. His racial identity may not have been an issue for Clarke--again for obvious reasons--and/or Clarke was culturally ignorant of Black Americans--when the book was published in the 1950s--of the very thing that is quintessential to black people--a soul borne out of the struggle against traditional segregation and institutional racism.