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Up and away… October 16, 2016

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.
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And here’s Obama’s favourite Science Fiction films and a documentary… a man of his generation I would say (given I’m of the same generation and like much the same stuff!).

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1. sonofstan - October 16, 2016

First comment in the guardian is on the whiteness of the list…
I’ve been reading up on afrofuturism recently for teaching purposes and there’s a trope that’s repeated a lot to explain the Afro-American encounter with SF. At it’s crudest, it equates the middle passage with alien abduction; African slaves experienced a world as alien as any imaginative construction of another planet. The other trope that surfaces is the equation of slavery and robotics/ post humanism – the world the rest of us are hurtling towards has been the Afro- American experience for nearly three centuries.

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Michael Carley - October 16, 2016

I read a story in an SF anthology from Tallaght library, fado, fado, which revolved around barroom talk before the first Martians came to Earth, mixed with the news reporting, and the background to the discovery of life on Mars.

The drinkers are already making racist jokes about Martians, in terms familiar from all racist jokes. The story ends with one of the group saying he reckons the Martians’ arrival will make no difference to anyone at all on Earth.

The Black waiter very quietly begs to differ.

Anyone know the story?

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WorldbyStorm - October 16, 2016

That rings a bell. I’ll have to go look.

I guess in fairness to Obama in cinema science fiction wasn’t hugely oriented towards the non-white (though matters did improve fairly sharpish albeit in the context of representatives of non white groups rather than stories told from that perspective). But in terms of written SF there were a number of non white authors even in the latter part of the so-called golden age and that as time those numbers have – thankfully increased and increased.

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