What still needs to be accomplished can be summed up by the lovely album released on my birthday last year by Solange—A Seat at the Table. How much s… - Sheree Thomas

I never quite know how to answer this question. I started working on Dark Matter in 1998, sold it in 1999, and it was published in 2000. We’re still having the same conversations about the paucity of diversity in the publishing industry that we were having then—except then, people could identify only a handful of black writers actively writing and publishing in the genre. Samuel R. Delany and Nalo Hopkinson spoke about waiting to see that “critical mass” and the inevitable backlash from that.

She went back and collected folklore that so many people had forgotten. So many people don't even tell their children anymore. Don't even know that we used to tell the stories. The tongue can barely even sing the songs anymore. She brought it back and she brought it back for children. That, coupled with the wonderful art that always went with her work . . .When I think back on my childhood book collection, there were very few books that reflected me. Very few with black children, or black anyone. And the few that I had were by Virginia Hamilton . . . and I feel that she touched many lives and did it so beautifully. Such a brilliant storyteller and writer. I mean, it's one thing to retell someone's story, but to tell it in such a way that was uniquely hers. She's such an amazing writer and that's just the folklore. You go into her novels. The House of Dies Drear. The Planet of Junior Brown. Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush. Just really amazing. And who knew that she wrote a traditional science fiction trilogy?

Dark matter as a metaphor offers us an interesting way of examining blacks and science fiction. The metaphor can be applied to a discussion of the individual writers as black artists in society and how that identity affects their work. It can also be applied to a discussion of their influence and impact on the sf genre in general. While the "black sf as dark matter" metaphor is novel, the concept behind it is not. The metaphor is neither farfetched nor uncommon if one considers popular themes within the black literary tradition. An excellent example is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1945), a novel that introduced the idea of black invisibility.