This is Science Fiction’s new Golden Age. That is what they would have you believe. Short fiction markets are better than ever before, exploring ideas of equality, gender, sexuality, neurodivergence, disability, and most of all what it means to be human.
It really is science fiction’s new Golden Age.
If you’re white.
What does it mean to be Black and look at intersectional issues of equality through the lens of science fiction and fantasy? Where are those stories in the canon? There is Black excellence out there waiting to be discovered and not tokenized. Octavia Butler is our past and she is an amazing ancestor, but she should not be our only storyteller.
This is the future of Black SFF.
FIYAH rises from the ashes of the Black literary tradition started by Fire!! in 1926. We aren’t here for respectability. We’re here to ask what it means to be Black and extraordinary. We are a place to showcase your stories and grow your career. Part literary incubator, part middle-finger to the establishment, we know you have stories to tell, and we are here for it.
We want to spill tea and throw shade in the most delightful way. We are intersectional and welcome our disabled, LGBTQIA, and neurodivergent brothers and sisters. Don’t hesitate to send us your stories. Don’t self reject.
So give us your Black elves, your Black space captains, your Black heretics standing against prophecies and insurmountable odds. Send us your Black wizards and Black gods, your Black sergeants fighting on alien planets. Give us all of your horror, SFF, and relevant subgenres. Because the future of genre is now.
And the future ain’t going to write itself.
“And we set out to publish Fire!, a Negro quarterly of the arts to epater le bourgeois, to burn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of the past … into a realization of the existence of the younger Negro writers and artists, and provide us with an outlet for publication not available in the limited pages of the small Negro magazines then existing.” Langston Hughes
