The genre isn’t in any way new—but after the roaring success of Black Panther (2018), it’s an essential imaginary to highlight nonetheless.

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.