The writer and editor made an anthology into an argument, then kept widening the room for Black speculative art.
Sheree Renée Thomas went looking for a book she wanted to read and could not find it. Black writers were making science fiction, fantasy and other speculative work, but their stories were difficult to see together. She knew Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany; she also knew that the field was larger than the few names a mainstream reader was likely to encounter. In a 2009 interview about Dark Matter, she described that absence as a reader's problem before it became an editor's project. The book she assembled answered by changing what could be found on one shelf.
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora appeared in 2000. It brought together writers from different generations and genres, including authors whose presence in a speculative anthology unsettled the usual boundaries of science fiction. Thomas made a historical claim through sequence and company. Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Octavia Butler and living writers could be read as participants in a long conversation rather than as isolated exceptions. The collection did not create Black speculative art. It made the distance between its visible representatives harder to maintain.
That editorial act is central to Thomas's Afrofuturism. She writes fiction and poetry as well, but her anthologies show how a future can be made by changing the architecture of a present cultural institution. Selection, order, introduction and invitation determine what a reader is able to encounter. An anthology can make an overlooked lineage legible while leaving its differences intact. Thomas has continued that work across Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, her own stories and the later collaboration Africa Risen.
The gravity of a title
The title Dark Matter borrows from a scientific term for matter inferred through gravitational effects even when it cannot be seen directly. It offers a figure for cultural presence with consequences beyond visibility. The metaphor does not say that Black speculative writers were physically absent. It points to the habits of cataloging, reviewing and teaching that made their influence easier to feel than to name. Thomas's collection turned that invisible force into a reading experience.
A contemporary review describes a book with twenty-five stories, three novel excerpts and five essays. Its range matters. Samuel R. Delany's “Aye, and Gomorrah” asks how space travel reshapes desire around astronauts altered for their work. Octavia E. Butler's “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” imagines a devastating hereditary disease. Du Bois's “The Comet” places a Black man and white woman in a suddenly emptied New York. These pieces do not share a single setting or mood. Seen together, they challenge the idea that Black science fiction needs one approved kind of space, body or political message.
The essays add a second form of reading to the fiction. They allow contributors to discuss the conditions under which speculative work is written and received. Walter Mosley anticipates more Black writers entering the field; Delany reflects on racial assumptions within science fiction. An anthology with criticism inside it is not merely a showcase. It gives readers tools to ask why this writing had so often been treated as peripheral despite its abundance.
Thomas's editorial choice to include older work complicates the common habit of beginning Afrofuturism in the 1990s, when the name became established. The stories and authors preceded the label. Thomas did not have to pretend every writer used it or wanted it. She could show a continuity of Black speculative imagination without erasing the historical terms each author wrote under. This distinction keeps a useful word from becoming a retrospective claim that everyone in the book belonged to a movement they had not chosen.
The collection's effect is visible in how Thomas described its contributors years later. In a joint interview about Africa Risen, she recalled that some contributors were not widely known when Dark Matter appeared, and she followed the paths their careers later took. An anthology cannot account for an author's success by itself. It can give readers and other writers an encounter that changes what they seek next. Thomas's interest in those later paths suggests she considers publication a beginning of relation, not the final proof of an editor's good taste.
The dream in the room
Thomas's story “Aunt Dissy's Policy Dream Book,” published by Apex Magazine, begins with a child's hand. Cassie remembers Aunt Dissy reading the lines on her palm and making a disturbing prediction about love and luck. The scene puts several kinds of knowledge into immediate contact: an elder's trained reading, a child's desire for candy, a family's history of warnings and a future that seems to have been written into skin. Thomas enters the speculative through an intimate domestic exchange rather than a spectacle of machinery.
Aunt Dissy's authority is not gentle simply because it is ancestral. Cassie has to live with the possibility that someone she loves can see what she would rather not know. The dream language introduced in this opening gathers around that tension. A dream book can turn images into numbers or signs, but those conversions never make the experience of dreaming fully controllable. In an Apex interview, Thomas described traditions of reading people and dreams as vocabularies requiring attention to details many others overlook. The opening places feeling and family truth beside signs that no clever outsider can simply crack.
The opening places Thomas's larger work in a different register. The elder has a form of knowledge that formal institutions may dismiss, while the younger woman must decide how to live with it. This is not the same task as assembling an anthology, but both concern forms of knowing that can disappear when their bearers are not listened to. These opening details arrive saturated with meaning before a stable explanation has been offered, so the reader shares Cassie's first attempt to interpret them.
Even this opening resists the assumption that speculation always travels outward from Earth. A future can enter through a palm or a family saying. Thomas connects the fantastic to Mississippi Delta conjure and other inheritances in her wider body of work, as her Macmillan biography notes. The source is not a decorative folklore bank added to a futuristic plot. It is a way of attending to how people have understood uncertainty, danger and possibility across generations.
Thomas has written poetry and hybrid collections as well as prose fiction. Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future announces a relation between music, time and story in its subtitle. The phrase “ancient future” refuses the idea that old knowledge and future invention occupy opposite ends of a straight line. In the opening of “Aunt Dissy's Policy Dream Book,” an elder's reading of the child makes this refusal concrete. The future is already spoken inside a remembered scene; the adult's task is to decide what authority to give the telling.
Thomas reads another piece, “Ancestries,” in Carnegie Hall's Afrofuturism cypher. Her reading begins with an account of ancestors honored through carved figures, food and ritual, then turns into a child's story about her twin sister and an altar. The movement from collective origin to household conflict refuses to leave ancestry as an abstract grandeur. A body has to approach the altar; a sibling's hostility changes what the ritual means. Plants seem to join the child's embarrassment. Thomas lets the sacred space remain consequential while allowing a young narrator's fear, resentment and attention to small materials to enter it. The future of this invented people begins in an unsettled relation between children and what their elders have taught them to revere.
An anthology with more than one center
In 2022, Thomas joined Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Zelda Knight to edit Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction. The publisher's page credits all three editors and describes thirty-two original stories by writers from Africa and the African diaspora. The editorial team itself crosses continents. Thomas's role should not erase the work of Ekpeki and Knight. Their collaboration allows the collection to refuse a familiar structure in which an American editor merely collects stories from elsewhere and calls the result global.
The introduction, available on the publisher's page, names magazines, presses, anthologies and comic-book communities that helped Black speculative writing grow between Dark Matter and this new book. It is a striking editorial choice. A declaration of a “new era” could make the intervening years look empty. The editors instead list labor performed by many publishers and organizers. The abundance of names may slow a reader at the opening, but it changes the book's point of departure. Africa Risen arrives in a crowded field made by others, and its editors want those others visible.
Their title also corrects a convenient publishing phrase. Africa is not about to become important only when a new book appears in a Western market. In the introduction, the editors insist that Africa is already present as a source of storytelling, art and speculative possibility. The book's thirty-two contributors work in fantasy, science fiction, horror and other forms. The title does not impose a single voice on a continent or diaspora. It argues for an encounter with multiplicity that was there before a particular buyer noticed it.
The publisher offers the opening of Dilman Dila’s “The Blue House.” Its viewpoint belongs to Cana-B70, a robot looking across a damaged landscape toward a vivid blue structure. Her visual equipment struggles, software crops and enlarges an image, and the picture grows pixelated. A machine's attempt to know a house by scanning it turns into a moment of uncertainty. The story gives the anthology a technical subject without making technology synonymous with command. The robot's perception has limits; the building may hold evidence of life that her tools cannot immediately classify.
As an opening to the anthology, this choice matters. A reader expecting a single style of Black speculation meets a Ugandan writer's technological vision, then travels through many other styles and locations. The editorial arrangement lets a question about seeing become a question about reading. What might remain beyond the range of a familiar lens? Thomas, Ekpeki and Knight do not answer by instructing contributors to share one future. They put their different works in proximity and ask the reader to adjust.
The anthology's public reception has brought awards, including World Fantasy and Locus recognition listed by its publisher. These honors register the industry's response to the collection, but the work's formal value is in the pages and the choices that connect them. A prize cannot by itself show how an editor handled variety. The introduction and the opening story can. One names a dense ecosystem of makers; the other begins in an unfamiliar vantage where the act of looking is itself unsettled.
A voice that keeps convening
Thomas also led an Afrofuturism conversation for Carnegie Hall, bringing together poets, fiction writers and musicians around Pharoah Sanders's “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” The published transcript shows her moving between a reading, musical history and questions to other artists about their own first encounters with the idea of Afrofuturism. A host's work is often less visible than a guest's answer. Here it is part of the form: Thomas sets a frame broad enough for different disciplines and generations to respond without becoming examples of a single definition.
Her route through the conversation follows the route of the anthologies. She introduces an artistic ancestor, identifies the sonic and intellectual possibilities of a work, and then asks contemporary makers to speak from their own practices. A past performance becomes an invitation rather than a standard everyone must imitate. The movement is dialogic. It acknowledges the importance of Sanders while allowing a poet or novelist to answer with a different origin story.
Thomas's career in publishing has also included editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and work with Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, as Macmillan's author biography records. These roles have different readerships and histories. Across them, the question is not merely whether Black work appears, but what conversations a publication enables and who can enter them as a maker rather than a topic.
That distinction separates representation from a durable literary field. One anthology can correct a visible omission. A lasting field needs editors, magazines, presses, readers, writers, reviewers and venues where disagreement and growth are possible. Dark Matter showed a century of work; Africa Risen points to a worldwide present full of new work. Thomas has moved between those scales as writer, editor and host, keeping attention on the conditions that let other voices be heard.
Krull's interview with Julie Dash on Daughters of the Dust and speculative fiction offers an encounter with another artist who refuses the narrow line between an inherited story and an imagined future. Dash speaks from film, where a family's voices and images can occupy time together. Thomas uses a shelf of stories, a dreamer's language and a roomful of invited speakers. In each case, the form makes a difference to whose memory can become part of a future.
The image that began Thomas's editorial work remains powerful: a reader searching for a book and finding an absence. Dark Matter did not resolve every exclusion in speculative publishing. Its successor and Thomas's continued work show how much remained to do. It changed the next search. A reader could open one volume and discover that Black speculative art had a long past, a varied present and no single authorized shape. Thomas has kept opening that house, one story and one conversation at a time.