The Indianapolis writer makes Black speculative fiction answer to neighborhoods, institutions and the people who build them.
In discussing Pimp My Airship with the Indianapolis Recorder, Maurice Broaddus named streets and neighborhoods familiar to Indianapolis readers: Indiana Avenue, Delaware Street and Haughville. He also pointed to the history of Unigov, the city-county consolidation enacted in 1969 and put into effect in 1970. Broaddus's account of the novel places an airship above a city with a specific political geography. The extraordinary vehicle matters partly because the ground beneath it is not interchangeable.
Broaddus describes his fiction through Afrofuturism, while keeping the term open enough to include histories and places that have not always looked futuristic to mainstream publishing. He is the Afrofuturist in residence at Indianapolis's Kheprw Institute, where the work includes public conversations about what a community wants its future to be. In a first-person interview, he gave the recurring questions plainly: Where are we now? Where do we want to be? How do we get there? They are questions for a neighborhood meeting as much as for a novel.
That double location distinguishes his practice. Broaddus writes speculative stories and works with people who negotiate housing, education, technology and power in Indianapolis. His fiction moves from that city's altered sky to a traveler carrying a child through a town with a gallows, then to a spacefaring community with a ceremony for choosing a name. Each setting gives a social question a different scale.
The city inside the airship
The Recorder interview records Broaddus's move from treating Afrofuturism as an uncertain label to recognizing its usefulness for his work. He had heard the word applied to his 2017 story collection The Voices of Martyrs. The prominence of Black Panther later made the idea more widely legible, but his own imaginative territory remained closer to Indianapolis. The city does not merely supply a familiar street name for readers to applaud. Its distribution of resources and representation makes a world that speculation can expose.
Unigov is one example. A municipal arrangement can sound like background administration until one asks how it changed the political power of a Black urban community. Placing such a history inside a steampunk or alternate-world story gives the machinery a local counterpart. The airship is spectacular and visible; the boundary of government is less visible but can be just as consequential for where people can move and what they can claim. Broaddus's attention to both prevents the fictional technology from swallowing the city's lived politics.
Another Broaddus work supplies a closer view of what location does to an inherited genre. In the publisher's opening of Buffalo Soldier, former Jamaican agent Desmond Coke and a boy, Lij Tafari, travel through an alternate North America. Desmond remembers Jamaica through food, music, weather and his mother's warnings about spirits. He is not merely an espionage figure moving across a decorative steampunk map. His memories change the emotional temperature of a cold western landscape. The river route through the Tejas Free Republic is planned as an escape from agents pursuing the boy, yet the pair's immediate problems are water, a place to sleep and whether Lij can bear another unsettling encounter.
The excerpt slows its machinery for an exchange about attention. Desmond asks Lij to look at him while speaking; Lij replies that he hears him, then lifts his head. The scene reveals both Desmond's anxious effort to care for a child and Lij's own way of perceiving and responding. Later, in a town called Abandon, a giant steamman stands near a courthouse and a gallows. Broaddus gives the metal spectacle and the instrument of execution the same civic square. That placement does more work than a generic claim that technology and inequality coexist. It lets a reader see the local government and its violence alongside the machine meant to signal an alternate future. Buffalo Soldier does not need Indianapolis to make Broaddus's concern with place legible; this passage finds another address and makes its structures matter to two travelers.
The city is not confined to the novels. On his own site, Broaddus describes his Kheprw Institute role as part of work to examine past events, present dilemmas and possible futures of the African diaspora. Its Afrofuture Fridays have asked participants to connect a popular film to questions of community agency, then brought local technologists and artists into the room. Broaddus told Women Write About Comics about interviewing younger people he had mentored when their projects became the focus. The exchange reverses a simple model of the established author instructing everyone else. He has to listen to what the next group is actually making.
He also set out three linked changes he wants: the collapse of systems that never served everyone equally, healing from their harm, and the building of new ways to live. Such a sequence matters. A science-fictional scene of overthrow can be exhilarating, but it leaves open what happens the following morning. Broaddus asks how relationships, education, economics and policing might be organized after a community identifies what must end. Fiction can make a future vivid; public practice tests whether its promises have procedures.
A refuge among the stars
Sweep of Stars takes Broaddus farther from the city into a spacefaring future. The publisher's excerpt of chapter two begins with Jaha dressing for her work at the Muungano embassy and talking with her cultural attaché. Near the excerpt's end, a blast throws her off balance, the ceiling gives way and a voice tries to locate her in the dark. That progression matters: the threat arrives after the scene has made the community's habits, disagreements and institutions visible. A refuge may be built deliberately and still remain vulnerable to attack, error and internal conflict. The human task is to respond without losing what made refuge worth building.
Broaddus has described the series' premise in a first-person interview with Vol. 1 Brooklyn as a meeting of Black Panther and The Expanse. The comparison offers scale but cannot substitute for the book's choices. He names musical, historical and literary allusions within its world. A spaceship is named for Toni Morrison. Such naming turns the vessels of a future civilization into carriers of a chosen cultural archive. The community does not have to abandon the artists who helped it think in order to travel farther than Earth.
The space setting also sharpens an old Afrofuturist question: what does self-determination require when a threatened people can build institutions of their own? A protected place can become closed, controlling or brittle if its founders treat survival as a reason to stop arguing. Broaddus's interviews place his interest in cooperation and accountability beside the pleasure of a large science-fictional world. The two belong together. A dreamed polity needs ships, but it also needs ways for its members to disagree and decide.
The blast near the end of the excerpt puts that need at the level of sensation. Jaha cannot conduct a debate about the ideal society while falling through rubble. Somebody calls out to her, and the question becomes who will find whom. Broaddus moves from the embassy's ordinary work and conversation to the fragility of a body under a collapsing ceiling. Whatever scope the series takes later, its politics must eventually account for this kind of moment: the disaster, the unseen neighbor, the voice that keeps searching.
The named vessel makes the archive of earlier Black art visible inside the future Broaddus describes. The embassy scene and the naming-ceremony scene ask a more searching literary question: how a person finds another in a collapse, and how a young citizen can choose a name in the presence of a community spread across planets.
Broaddus reads a passage set in this world during Carnegie Hall's Afrofuturism cypher. A young person approaches a second naming ceremony in the Muungano Alliance. The first name was given shortly after birth by family and neighbors on Earth; now she can interpret herself as a full member of a community spread between a lunar capital, Mars, Titan and a mining outpost. The scene puts a right to self-definition inside a carefully built social ritual. Space travel has not made names arbitrary. It has made the public recognition of a chosen name a way to belong across great distances. The arrival of people from far settlements gives that intimate choice a political audience.
Broaddus told Vol. 1 Brooklyn that Walter Mosley's Futureland helped him see how to dream of a future on his own terms. This is a writer describing an encounter with another writer's possibility. His ships carry cultural references in a similar spirit. They show that a future is built partly from works already made, read and argued with. An allusion becomes useful when it changes the reader's sense of who belongs in science fiction's long conversation.
An imagined future in the present tense
Broaddus's community work keeps that literary conversation from becoming a closed club. The Kheprw Institute's Afrofuturist program does not need every participant to publish a novel. Its questions concern work, technology, art and the ability to shape a neighborhood. In the Women Write About Comics interview, Broaddus described Afrofuturism as imagining better futures through a Black cultural lens and then creating desired conditions in the present. The step from imagination to practice is where a meeting, a mentorship or a local project can become part of the art's social life.
One Afrofuture Friday discussed Black Panther and the agency of its community. Broaddus said the conversation was sometimes fraught. This detail is valuable because it keeps the blockbuster from operating as an automatic consensus. Different viewers can share delight in a Black technological power while disagreeing about rulers, resources and relations to people beyond its borders. A serious public program makes room for that disagreement. It does not ask a popular image to settle political questions for everybody.
Another session gave space to Rasul Palmer and Madebo Fatunde, younger makers whose work involved technology. Broaddus described them as people he had mentored and then interviewed. The sequence fits his stated interest in changing how society values teachers and storytellers. Mentorship is not a one-way transfer of wisdom from a famous author. The mentor becomes a listener when the mentees begin defining the future through their own projects. This is a small institutional design with large implications for who can speak as an expert.
The locality of these sessions also matters to the fiction. A space empire can be imagined from anywhere; a useful conversation about Indianapolis has to know its particular histories. Broaddus's stories and civic role both insist on an address. The city names in Pimp My Airship are not a claim that all Black futures must remain local. They are a demand that expansive imagination begin with attention to where people actually are.
Broaddus's own writing crosses genres and audiences. He has published Buffalo Soldier, Pimp My Airship, Sweep of Stars, stories, essays and work for younger readers. The Indianapolis Recorder profile records that he was born in London and moved with his family to Indiana at age six. That journey may help explain some of his interest in movement and belonging, but his books need not be flattened into autobiography. What connects them more securely is their use of speculative forms to ask who holds power in a constructed world.
In Pimp My Airship, that world is a city with an altered sky. In Sweep of Stars, it is a polity among the stars. At Kheprw, it is a room where residents and artists can contest the present. Each scale requires different tools. A scene can make a crisis felt; a conversation can bring people with competing views face to face; a local initiative can turn a shared question into a decision. Broaddus's Afrofuturism works across these scales without claiming one is a substitute for the others.
A politics of relation
Broaddus has summarized one possible future as a shift toward cooperation instead of competition. The phrase can sound easy until a narrative gives it cost. The voice calling for Jaha at the end of the excerpt from Sweep of Stars makes another person's presence audible as the ceiling gives way. Desmond's care for Lij in Buffalo Soldier has a different scale, requiring patience before the pair even reaches the next town. Those scenes give the argument human form in two distinct places.
That is why his work cannot be measured only by a list of speculative devices. The airship, the Arthurian echo and the spacecraft each make a different part of the social order visible. A city border, a myth of rightful rule and a refuge's founding institutions are all constructed. They can be rebuilt. Broaddus's imaginative permission is paired with a demand for practical specificity: if a different world is possible, what is its address, and who is doing the work there?
Krull's report on Futuristic Dreams follows a Stockholm editorial project involving creatives with connections to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its geography and medium differ from Broaddus's Indianapolis novels. Both give a speculative image a location and a set of makers whose histories matter to the result. Neither asks futurism to erase the city or community from which the work begins.
The answer to Broaddus's three public questions is never final. A neighborhood changes; the people in its conversations change; a novel can be read against a crisis its author did not foresee. His achievement is to keep the questions connected. Where people are now determines what a future has to repair. Where they want to be gives invention its direction. How they get there requires stories, institutions, disagreements and one another. The sky can open above Indianapolis, but the first route still runs through its streets.