Kilgore concludes his introduction with a discussion of Homer H.

Science writing is, then, “deeply implicated in debates on race, class, and gender inequities thought to represent the chief impediments to the perfection of democratic society” (4-5). Kilgore sees writing about space exploration, both in fact and fiction, as being “distinguished by its close connections to engineering projects funded by the government and the military” and as sharing a number of dramatic conventions: “characters that embody the future of humanity the historical, political, literary, and scientific knowledges that those characters represent the environments they craft, explore, or occupy and the machines/instruments they create, control, and deploy” (2). He manages this without letting us, or the works in question, off the hook. Kilgore uses a version of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s idea of paranoid and reparative readings as part of the protocol for handling his materials, resulting in a fair, thorough, and sometimes liberating view of works it might be easier to dismiss, or to feel guilty for remembering with a fondness that implicates us in racism. Instead, it focuses on popular science writing and sf as they deal with the subject of race while constructing utopian futures in their treatment of space flight. In spite of the title Astrofuturism, which gestures toward Afrofuturism, and despite the mention of race in the subtitle, Kilgore’s book is not about black sf writers, nor is it a study of race in sf, although it will be a useful tool to examine those two subjects. in SFS 32.2) and a number of articles paving the way. Criticism lags behind, however, with only a slim volume by Sandra Grayson, Visions of the Third Millennium: Black Science Fiction Novelists Write the Future (2003 rev. in SFS 28.1 and 31.3), it has become apparent that the number of black sf writers is increasing. Thomas’s two Dark Matter anthologies (20, rev. With Nalo Hopkinson’s success and with Sheree R. Delany and Octavia Butler and perhaps Steven Barnes. In the last few years, the black presence in sf has become stronger, no longer dominated solely by Samuel R.

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