We here at Danville Public Library are very excited about the release of Black Panther in theaters this weekend. The film takes place in Wakanda, a fictional African country that is easily the most technologically advanced nation in the world. As such, the Black Panther comics (which we’ve reviewed in the past) and the upcoming movie are great examples of Afrofuturism.
What is Afrofuturism? From CNN, Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic that “intersects science fiction, technology, and ancient African mythologies.” To perhaps oversimplify, this genre places Black people at the forefront of science fiction and magical realism stories.
Once you’ve seen the film, you may just want a greater taste of this genre, so here a few examples that are available in our library system:

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
Twelve-year-old Sunny Nwazue, an American-born albino child of Nigerian parents, moves with her family back to Nigeria, where she learns that she has latent magical powers which she and three similarly gifted friends use to catch a serial killer.
 
 
 
Everfair by Nisi Shawl
A neo-Victorian alternate history novel that explores the question of what might have come of Belgium’s disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier.
 
 
 
 
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemisin
Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother’s death and her family’s bloody history.
 
 
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
An elevator inspector becomes the center of controversy when an elevator crashes. The inspector, Lila Mae Watson, is a black woman who inspects by intuition, as opposed to visual observation, and now she must prove her method was not at fault. A study of society’s attitude to technology and a debut in fiction.
 
 
 
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
In 2025 California, an eighteen-year-old African American woman, suffering from a hereditary trait that causes her to feel others’ pain as well as her own, flees northward from her small community and its desperate savages.
 
 
 
 
Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkison
Possessing no magic but a beautiful singing voice, Makeda leaves her formerly conjoined twin sister, Abby, to set out on her own for a life of independence, but must reconcile with her sibling after her father goes missing.
 
 
 
 
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politics among far-flung worlds. First published in 1984, the novel’s central issues–technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism–have only become more pressing with the passage of time.
The novel’s topic is information itself: What are the repercussions, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other’s perfect erotic object out to “point nine-nine-nine and several nines percent more”? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by “cultural fugue,” and the other is–you!*

*Description for this title comes from Goodreads.

Note: All book descriptions are from the SHARE library catalog except as noted. All book covers are from Google Images.