Afrofuturism provides a whole new center of gravity for speculative fiction, away from the white Anglocentrism of traditional sci-fi and much cyberpunk. It can be broadly described as the notion that “there are black people in the future,” as Florence Okoye put it for How We Get To Next’s 2016 series on Afrofuturism—but there are specific implications that this is a future built on different cultural terrain than our present. These are worlds centered on African and diasporic history, culture, and cosmologies. Many writers (not least the mother of the genre, Octavia Butler) explore counter-histories, and blend sci-fi with fantasy, to create new imaginary futures—not just for black life today, but for the lives of everyone.

The term was coined by Mark Dery in 1993 but birthed in the minds of enslaved Africans who prayed for their lives and the lives of their descendants along the horrific Middle Passage. The first Afrofuturists envisioned a society free from the bondages of oppression—both physical and social. Afrofuturism imagines a future void of white supremacist thought and the structures that violently oppressed Black communities. Afrofuturism evaluates the past and future to create better conditions for the present generation of Black people through the use of technology, often presented through art, music, and literature.