Dark Matter is an anthology of new and old black science fiction. It has contributions from famous science fiction writers like Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, less known writers like Kiini Ibura Salaam and Nisi Shawl (a Seattleite who has contributed excellent book criticisms to this paper), and unexpected contributions from those outside of the genre, like W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt. As with all anthologies, the experience of reading this collection is very personal. One reads anthologies not like a machine that indiscriminately gobbles up all of the texts, but selectively--locating here and there writers who match one's sensibilities.

For example, some of the stories in Dark Matter are too earthy and spiritual for my tastes, like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers' "Sister Lilith," which opens the anthology. I prefer instead the spaceships, robots, and mad computers to be found in the fiction of, say, Samuel R. Delany. Or the more sociological stories that investigate or enstrange (make strange) race through extreme speculations, such as "Black No More" by George S. Schuyler (the story is about a mad scientist who turns black people into white people).

This dense variety of styles and concerns constitutes the very success of Dark Matter. Where it fails, however, is in the introduction by the editor, Sheree R. Thomas--it's too short (four pages long when it should be at least 30). This is disappointing because the introduction of an anthology serves to ground readers and gives them an accurate map of the unfamiliar territory. Before a personal path can be formed through an anthology, one must be vigorously exercised by an exhaustive introduction.

What Dark Matter makes clear is that blacks are superbly positioned to appreciate the possibilities and rewards of science fiction for two good reasons: one, as many writers have pointed out before, the kidnapping of Africans by Europeans in the past was as close as humans ever got to alien abduction on an interplanetary level. Two, the very fact that the present situation for blacks is still miserable; the future, as Sheree R. Thomas points out too briefly in her introduction, at least offers the chance of improvement.

There is one more important point I want to bring up about this anthology. It has to do with what black theologian Cornel West once said about how black literature, despite its great achievements, did not come close to the achievements made by jazz music. Jazz music claimed a large and very independent talent pool that challenged the legitimacy of "the musical tradition." Black literature, on the other hand, became only an adjunct to "the canon," and not a self-contained, self-renewing art. The same problem exists for black science fiction writing--it sits in the shadows of the science fictions produced by black musicians.

Black science fiction in musical form (which British critic Kodwo Eshun calls in his book, More Brilliant Than the Sun, "sonic fiction") is to be found in the late-jazz of Sun Ra, the electro of Newcleus, Mantronix, and Soul Sonic Force, and the cyber-funk of Dr. Octagon and the marvelous MF Doom. Agreed, many of the speculative fictions produced by black writers are great and underappreciated, but still none of them comes close in popularity and creativity to even Keymatic's 1984 sonic fiction "Breakers in Space," which imagined, with great detail and beauty, a space station that's occupied by the best breakdancers in the universe.

Dark Matter does have a story by Kalamu ya Salaam that's inspired by sonic fiction, and also an essay by Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), who is the most important producer of sonic fiction today, but, for the most part, it doesn't address the matter of its more popular counterpart--nor is it supposed to. Dark Matter is about black texts, not black music. So why bring up the issue of sonic fiction in the first place? To simply point out a fact that confronts any black artist who operates outside of the medium of music (film, novels, art): We are oppressed by the ridiculous brilliance of black music. Even an impressive anthology like Dark Matter is reduced to a mere moon by the massive sun of black music.