(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: main Chrononauts theme)
W.E.B. Du Bois background
JM:
Good evening everyone, welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm JM and I'm here with my co-hosts, Nate and Gretchen.
Hope everybody's doing well, we've had Armageddon of Snow here in Southern Ontario for the last couple weeks and it's been pretty chaotic all around. Yeah, we're now recording this at the end of February which will be significant in a moment.
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We're continuing our discussion of apocalyptic themes today so the first story that we're going to be talking about is "The Comet" from WEB DuBois. In the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode "Far Beyond the Stars", Station Captain Benjamin Sisko, a black man from New Orleans, has a prophetic vision in which he inhabits the form of a writer of science fiction stories in the 1950s working for a particular pulp magazine. His editor, played by Rene Auberjonois, refuses to publish his picture in the magazine along with his fellow writers since he is a black man and the owner will not print his story about a black space station captain.
The writer, Benny Russell, naturally very angry and bitter at this obvious endorsement of racism in a field which he loves, protests. "What about WEB DuBois? Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright. Did you ever hear of 'Native Son'?" To which the editor replies, "that's literature for liberals and intellectuals. The average reader's not going to spend his hard-earned cash on stories written by Negroes."
And while this statement of the editor may have been somewhat true, as we've demonstrated elsewhere in the podcast, the lines of genre are more blurred than some would like to think. And indeed, you can find tonight's story, "The Comet", in the Vandermeer edited anthology, "The Big Book of Science Fiction", where it holds its place among science fiction writers in and outside of the pulps. So, I thought it was appropriate to bring up this quote here, if you'll excuse the possible frivolity of a Star Trek reference, since we have discussed the show before on the podcast, and because it ties in directly with plenty of matters discussed here and elsewhere, involving literature, genre, and racism, which will no doubt come back to not too far in the future, especially when we discuss the work of Samuel Delany, not too far in the future. And it's significant that we're doing this now, as we are broadcasting towards the end of February, and it is now Black History Month in North America, and it's a significant thing to cover.
Now, as to the pronunciation of his name, he actually did prefer the pronunciation Du Bois. He did prefer this, and his biographer doesn't really specify why, I don't know if it was because he was somewhat refudiating a part of his French ancestry or not, but it's definitely going to be a bit of a struggle for me to not say 'Du Bois', but I'll do my best being French decided myself and Canadian and so on to not say DuBois, so we'll see how it goes, because I'm going to be saying it a lot.
This is a lot to get into here, and we've never really covered somebody like this on the podcast before. I'm going to do my best to try and represent everything, but it's a very complex topic, and I don't fully intend to understand all the dramatic political ins and outs that were going on in the beginning of the 20th century, especially in the US, but especially in this man's life. It's quite a complex picture, and there's a lot of nuance to it that I'm not sure that a science fiction literature podcast, or at least my own perspective, is quite adequate to cover, but in any case, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868 in the town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The Burghardt were descended from Dutch, English, and African stock, and Du Bois' grandmother owned land in Massachusetts that had been in the family possibly for years. Tom Burghardt was a slave who was inducted into the army during the American Revolution, and perhaps burned his freedom there.
His paternal great-grandfather was William Du Bois, a French Huguenot who fathered several children to black slaves, and I kind of wonder if that's sort of why he looked away from this part of his ancestry, maybe? I don't know. Maybe I'm looking too much into it. Maybe he just liked to say it the American way, but it just kind of...
Nate:
No, I think it was a deliberate rejection of the French colonialism and French culture and all that.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah. That does seem to make sense, given his awareness of that.
JM:
Yeah. It might be up to something. I mean, it's an issue that's sort of stuck in my mind that I couldn't really explain, but William's father Alfred left Mary Silvina when William was only two. She worked to support the family until declining health and a stroke led her death in 1880. Du Bois and his mother were very close, and she depended on him during her final years. His father long since being absent, and Du Bois was a studious child and got a job after school early on to help take care of Mary.
As a young person, he adopted many of her morals, such as abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, though in his university days in Europe, he would begin indulging more. Great Barrington is supposed to have been largely a community of European immigrants. Du Bois said he was treated well and public school was integrated. But things were not easy for him being a fatherless child and then were still racist incidents.
Du Bois recalled with some melancholy, an incident that occurred which when he was 12 years old, the students in class had obtained cards that they perhaps wrote their names and contact information on to exchange with one another. And one girl refused Du Bois' card outright with a disdainful glance. "Then it dawned upon me, with a certain suddenness, but I was different from the others, or like mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast well."
This seems to have been a turning point in his young life, perhaps his first understanding of the looming presence of racism and racial hatred in his American society. He did well in his academic studies and started to believe that he could use his knowledge to help the cause of African Americans and fight racism.
He had his first run-in with the law during his high school years when he was arrested for stealing some neighbor's grapes. And the judge was going to sentence him to labor, but his school principal, knowing his academic and intellectual potential, argued for leniency. William Du Bois' first published work was an article in the New York Globe in 1883. He was 15 at that time, and this was a paper that was aimed at an African American audience, and Du Bois would publish over two dozen articles there in the next several years. These pieces were not the radical voice of the future, for the most part, mostly dealing with life in Great Barrington, but occasionally a stronger, more insistent voice would appear.
In September 1883, he described in one of his articles a summer trip that he had taken to visit several cities, including New Bedford, Albany, and Providence. In this article, he voiced his pleasure at "the industry and wealth of many of our race", but lamented the complete absence of any literary societies, saying, "it seems to me as if this of all things ought not to be neglected."
This seemed to reflect Du Bois' consistent mindset of valuing intellectual development over commercial enterprise, and this is the main thing he seemed to get into it with over Booker T. Washington, more on that later.
Another early article also reflected his growing feelings about politics. He attended a debate over whether Native Americans should be admitted to the Hampton Institute, a college in Virginia, I believe, and the affirmatives won out, and Du Bois went on to say about the upcoming local election in the town, "the colored people hold the balance of power. If they will only act in concert, they may become a power not to be despised."
So he was well liked in the town, and after graduating high school in 1884, his church raised the money to pay his tuition to college. This was Fisk University, a black institution based in Nashville, Tennessee, and largely funded by the Methodist Church and Northern philanthropists. Du Bois was the editor of the school newspaper before long, and used it to increasingly voice some controversial views. For example, he called upon the African-American community itself to generate funds for the university, as well as arguing for extending some of its programs like physical and music education. He taught black students in the South to continue raising money for his tuition after his first year, and it was here that he experienced the intense racism of the South.
In 1890, he returned to New England, and it's here he was able to get to Harvard. He studied under philosopher William James. It was difficult to make the tuition, but Du Bois managed it through working summer jobs, borrowing from friends and neighbors, and earning scholarships. He delivered a paper to the American Historical Association in Washington D.C. in 1891 on the African slave trade, and this was also to be the subject of his later dissertation, which was published in 1895 in book form, the suppression of the African slave trade to the United States of America, 1830 to 1870. And this was the first part of the Harvard Historical Series, a prestigious achievement for Du Bois, and the book is still considered worth reading today.
He says, "if slave labor was an economic god, then the slave trade was its strong right arm. And with southern planters recognizing this and northern capital unfettered by conscience, it was almost like legislating against the economic laws to attempt to abolish the slave trade by statute."
The paper was judged a work of high scholarship, and Du Bois was awarded the status of Master of Arts in June 1892. Although the era was officially, "reconstruction", and slavery had been abolished, the state of things at home and abroad for black people wasn't exactly ideal. States like Mississippi were instituting draconian laws that effectively barred black people from the vote, and meanwhile Europe was signing treaties and making agreements that carved up Africa among the colonial powers.
Du Bois experienced intense racism in the South, and it wasn't exactly easy at Harvard either, where discrimination based on ethnicity and class snobbery was extremely prevalent. All these things contributed toward what was described as a "aloofness in his character." At Harvard, his routine was extremely rigorous, disciplined and self-imposed. Everything had its proper time and place and all seemed to be designed to bolster his physical, mental, and intellectual health. After getting his bachelors in history, he got a scholarship to attend Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and in its sociology department. There he studied under some of the leading German academics of time, and got to know people like Max Weber.
He had previously been somewhat fascinated by Germany's consolidation and rise in the late 1800s, delivering a paper on Otto von Bismarck at Fisk, and here began Du Bois' real propensity for travel and exploration, which would continue throughout his life. Du Bois' German was apparently flawless, which did give him an advantage over many international students.
On his birthday in 1893, Du Bois wrote succinctly, "these are my plans to make a name in science, to make a name in literature, and thus to raise my race." While traveling Europe, Du Bois observed and learned about discrimination as it applied to many minorities, especially Jewish people, which helped him to contextualize the Black American experience as something beyond, something "not peculiar", but shared. One of those who had also studied at the University of Berlin, though not contemporaneous with Du Bois, was Karl Marx. In 1893, Du Bois started attending local German socialist movement meetings, and Du Bois had planned to attain a doctorate from the University of Berlin, but after two years, his funding/scholarship was terminated, and he didn't have the money to continue. So he returned to the USA, and he "settled" for the doctoral degree from Harvard instead, and was able to use his Berlin experience to help him attain this.
He set about his goal of teaching Black students at various Negro colleges, like Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1894, where he taught Greek, Latin, German, English, and history, which was an extremely intense load that didn't allow for much of the writing work he wanted to be doing. Wilberforce was a bit of a backwater with a library that Du Bois found to be woefully inadequate to his needs compared with what he'd been used to. However, he didn't meet the woman here who would become his first wife, Nina Gomer, one of his students.
Jim Crow laws were in full swing at this point, and they severely limited the opportunities for Black Americans, including Du Bois, who was at this time struggling under an oppressive workload in an academic environment he did find a bit stifling. Fortunately, he was offered a position by the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, not as a professor, but as an investigator who would essentially observe, study, and write about the status and situation of African Americans, this thriving and teeming city.
In 1896, Philadelphia had the largest population of African Americans in the country. It was the birthplace of the Quaker Society, as well as the African Episcopal Methodist Church. Here, he interviewed over 2,500 households by canvassing in the urban areas where the city's 40,000 Black inhabitants lived, and this was to become the basis for his influential study, "The Philadelphia Negro".
Loaded with facts and statistics, this was a devastating indictment of the conditions of poverty and squalor and bad work the population had to endure. From Philadelphia, Du Bois and his wife Nina moved back to the South, Atlanta, in 1897, where Du Bois accepted a new post at a Black college of Atlanta University. He spent 12 long years there in this deep Southern bastion of Jim Crow, where lynchings of Black Americans weren't uncommon, keeping himself extremely busy with writing, academics, and speaking engagements.
1898 was a year of personal tragedy for Du Bois, not to mention a bad one for local Black people and those in America at large. It marked the death of his infant son and the growing distance and separation in his marriage. He witnessed the lynching of a Black man by a mob after the man had gotten into an altercation and killed a local White man. Later on, he saw the man's mangled knuckles on display in a butcher shop window and broke down into tears.
It was also, he believed, because racism that his infant son died since he was unable to find an African-American physician to treat him in time and no White ones would. From this point on, really began Du Bois the activist, and it all kind of started with his feud with Booker T. Washington, the "wizard of Tuskegee", but Booker had pushed for compromise so that Black people could get a foothold in land-owning and commercial industries. Washington may have been personally responsible for some setbacks in Du Bois' career at this point.
Biographer Gerald Horne is pretty scathing toward Washington, which I understand is not a universal negativity, but it could be that conservatives respect him more than lefties do, and it seems kind of, "sort of accommodating" the separate but equal doctrine of Jim Crow, an idea at which is absolutely disastrous when operating in a country barely a generation removed from slavery. It's like class difference doesn't exist, and even today there's a tendency, even among mainstream American Democrats, for example, to sweep that under the rug.
Du Bois was becoming a socialist, and this didn't sit well with Washington or his backers. Washington was distrustful of Black intellectuals. There was talk about Du Bois being an elitist, but Du Bois demonstrated through cold facts and statistics the inadequacy of the Separate but Equal doctrine by studying African American communities and how they lived, not only formerly in Philadelphia, but all over Georgia as well.
It seems that Washington did support some progressive and anti-racist causes, but did so covertly and surreptitiously while maintaining a public face of acceptance of Jim Crow policies. This kind of double-think wasn't something Du Bois wanted to endorse, so a confrontation was inevitable. The two of them basically sniped at each other for years. Washington was a powerful man, and Du Bois was a member of an intellectual elite rather than a commercial one, and Washington himself seemed to score this. Meanwhile, the Atlanta Public Library was moving toward making itself for whites only, something which Du Bois naturally led a protest against, while Washington was telling Black people to, "keeps their heads down and work hard."
Washington, along with others like the Reverend T. Nelson Baker, represented the face of, "respectable Black America," which tended to endorse separation and Jim Crow, and even at times demonize their own people, something which shocked and outraged Du Bois very much. Still, in 1900, Du Bois traveled to Europe again and spent time in England and France as secretary of the first Pan-African Congress in London, and also as organizer of the "Negroes in America" exhibit at the World Fair in Paris.
At the conference, Du Bois, in his opening address, bluntly declared, "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line, the question of how far differences of race, which show themselves cheaply, in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair, are going to be made, hereafter, the basis to over half the world, the right of sharing to their utmost ability, the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization."
Du Bois and others here urged those in Africa and African descent all over the world to unite in a single cause against apartheid and labor exploitation, and to work toward maintaining what should be the rights and the privileges of all civilized peoples. In 1905, he helped found the Niagara movement, and they were opposed to Jim Crow and fought for equal rights, of course. Du Bois was a proponent of advanced education and believed that it was the only way Black Americans could attain full civil rights and political representation.
Thus, the Niagara movement was founded on three principles, the right to vote, opposing Jim Crow, and furthering education. They called upon Theodore Roosevelt, specifically, to curb the effect and influence of Jim Crow. Incidentally, Niagara, in this case, refers to Ontario, Canada, which is where the meeting took place. They had wanted to meet in Buffalo originally, but conditions were deemed to be unfavorable, and it was thought that somewhere perceived to be traditionally more friendly/anti-U.S. government like Canada made sense.
The successor to the Niagara movement in 1909 was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which Du Bois helped to found. This was an important milestone, and the organization continues to exist today. Du Bois quit the organization in the 30s over ideological differences, but rejoined again in the 40s, only to be ousted of first, again after the Second World War. More on that in a little bit.
He edited the NAACP journal "The Crisis", and wrote many pieces and articles there, often detailing lynchings and other acts of brutal racism complete with photographic evidence. In 1911, he published his first novel, "The Quest for the Silver Fleece". Du Bois was not a prolific fiction writer, necessarily, but it was definitely a part of his repertoire, as tonight's story also demonstrates. "The Quest for the Silver Fleece" is often compared with the work of Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris, and it's a realistic account of the impact of peonage and debt slavery and racism as it's connected with the cotton industry in the early 20th century. This work is supposed to prefigure the Harlem Renaissance of literature that would take stride by the 1920s.
Du Bois himself was enthusiastic about this Harlem literary renaissance, but cautioned that, "a black artist is first and foremost a black artist." He also said, "I would not care a damn for any art that was not used for propaganda." An interesting note related to the podcast, but in 1911 Du Bois was back in London to attend the first Universal Race Congress, and this is where he met H. G. Wells, who was a strong anti-colonialist proponent, particularly as it pertained to the Congo.
Du Bois continued to publish, producing the important work, "The Negro, a complete history of the black peoples of Africa and all over the world." In 1915 he argued in the Atlantic Monthly that the roots of the now and full swing Great War were, in fact, the struggle to possess Africa and its wealth. He presented the contentious argument, backed up by his experience with unions and labor disputes, that wealthy capitalists had pacified the white working class by giving them just enough wealth to stay docile and non-revolutionary while threatening them with the low-cost labor that would be accepted by disenfranchised black workers.
He got a commission in the army during the war as an officer, but it was summarily withdrawn due to objections from southern officers and enlistees who would not serve under him. It was also a feeling among some of his own colleagues that he had reversed his formerly anti-war stance to curry favor, which was probably unfair, but he would maintain an anti-war stance through pretty much every other point in his life.
After World War I he became a professor at Atlantic University, and he was a socialist at this point, so he was traveling often in Asia and Africa, and despite this he did not believe in Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement, calling him fraudulent and reckless, believing the Jamaican activist was undoing a lot of the work Du Bois and others were striving to achieve in America with the NAACP. After all, if "Africa for the Africans was true, black nationalism, then racial separation was justified. Many racist whites would gladly support the idea of sending them all back to Africa."
So there was a lot of political infighting among activist circles, and it's almost comical that the US government and its agents failed to keep abreast of the situation, though Du Bois considered himself a socialist. He was a pragmatist first and foremost. He and the NAACP got into a political press war with the Communist Party in the 1930s. After there was accusation that Du Bois was in particular, and the leaders of the NAACP were elitist and not really in touch with the working class and its needs, in turn Du Bois was uncertain about the communists real devotion to race struggle. He had visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and while he was impressed by the work of officials and the attention paid to labor and respect for workers, he was appalled by the poverty conditions he saw in the land.
In the 30s too, things started to change in Du Bois' beliefs. He somewhat reversed his stance on segregation, believing that "separate but equal" might actually be a desirable outcome for African Americans, though not in the Jim Crow sense. He was certainly into Karl Marx at this time, though his attitude toward labor unions had apparently hardened someone by this time. He appreciated Marx's scientific approach to societal problems and even endorsed his atheism, believing that the churches in particular did much work to bring about increased acceptance of racism among African Americans.
His work on Black Reconstruction in the 1930s is now considered seminal, but was virtually ignored by historians at the time. The encyclopedia Britannica cut out all referenced reconstruction from his proposed article, "The History of the American Negro", and Du Bois subsequently withdrew his article entirely in protest. However, it was at this time that some U.S. scholars projected the idea of "The Encyclopedia of the Negro", which Du Bois had already been thinking about for decades. Though the project didn't come to fruition in the 30s, and the board of directors thought Du Bois was too biased to be objective about any of this, it was a project that would eventually come to fruition, and is part of the reason for Du Bois eventually moving to Ghana in his 90s during the last few years of his life, where a similar thing was actually published, though sadly not until after Du Bois' death in 1963.
Du Bois visited Germany and Japan in 1936. He was somewhat ambivalent about the Nazis at this time, but already was comparing their treatment of Jews to the Spanish inquisition and the African slave trade. Japan, however, impressed him very much, and he viewed the growing imperial power there as an effective counter to the Western imperial ambitions. Japan had segregated schools in their Manchurian colony, but Du Bois maintained this was only because the natives spoke Chinese and not for any insidious reason, believing that the Chinese and Japanese were always destined to "quarrel with each other as relatives." He seems to have been oblivious of the depredations imposed by the Japanese at this time, or perhaps blind to it. His trip was organized by the Japanese embassy. He thought America and the UK's stance against Japan was racially motivated and did not support the US entry into World War II.
Meanwhile, the restrictions against Black enlistees was virtually the same as it had been in World War I, something that was another source of great disappointment to Du Bois, who would arguably increasingly distance himself from the US during his final years. It was perhaps because of his increasing opposition to the US mainstream that he was unceremoniously fired from his teaching post at Atlanta in 1943, though given a lifelong pension and honorary title. He turned down teaching positions offered by Black colleges, and instead rejoined the NAACP as head of the Special Research Department, a job he took up with great vigor.
Du Bois was part of a three-person delegation from the NAACP that attended the International Conference in 1945 that marked the founding of the United Nations. They had a proposal to push the UN in the direction of ending colonialism. China, India, and the USSR supported them, but otherwise they were pretty much completely ignored by every other power.
But trouble was brewing in the NAACP, again, this time because of the Cold War. The organization collectively decided it didn't want to have anything to do with communists. There was an article published in Life in 1947 that claimed the communist influence in the organization was large, and basically they panicked, and they did whatever was deemed necessary to dispute and disprove these claims. Du Bois, however, would not play ball and continue to associate with communists and sympathizers. "I am not a communist, but on the other hand, I believe Karl Marx put his finger squarely on our difficulties."
By the 50s, he was aware of the crimes of the dictatorship of the USSR, and of course did not support that, but blamed capitalism for racism, essentially. But the FBI was getting very aggressive about trying to root out communists, and he actually agreed himself to resign from the NAACP in 1948.
Du Bois' anti-war stance only grew during the 50s, and he wrote for the leftist paper National Guardian. The Federal Bureau of Investigations' efforts to prove Du Bois was some kind of national traitor actually went back a long way, just after the First World War, in fact. But he was attacked full-scale by McCarthyism. Thus, things came to a head when he became chairman of an organization that worked to ban nuclear weapons all over the world. The United States believed that his Peace Information Center was acting at the behest of a foreign power, and thus the organization with Du Bois at its head was put on trial. And at this point, Du Bois was well in his 80s. Du Bois was ultimately not convicted, although the NAACP refused to support him. Leftists like Langton Hughes did, and Dr. Albert Einstein himself offered to appear in court as a character witness.
After the trial, he spent his remaining American years in Manhattan. He was disappointed with many of his former colleagues, but continued to champion peace and leftist causes. Du Bois ran for senator in New York at age 82 on the short-lived Labor Party ticket, but ultimately lost. Despite ambivalence toward communism, he actually did join the party in 1961 at the age of 91, partially as a mark of protest against the US governments which had upheld in the Supreme Court a mandate for communists to register themselves.
So Du Bois did spend the last couple of years of his life in Ghana in West Africa. He was invited there by the former president of the country, and he was to participate in the writing of the composition of the encyclopedia he'd always dreamed about. Unfortunately, he did not get to see its fruition. He'd married a second time by then, and yeah, his last couple of years were spent away from the USA where he had lived most the rest of his life.
But here we have a man who is a real, I guess you could say, globetrotter and had a lot of experience, and definitely changed his views on certain things during the course of his life, but was always a staunch advocate for his race and very outspoken. Certainly, it's a little difficult for me to understand the complex nuances of a lot of the political infighting and so on that was going on between a lot of these organizations and such at the time. There's a whole lot there to get into, and yeah, entire books have been written about the subject.
Nate:
Yeah, we talked about that a bit in the episode we did on Schuyler. He also talks about being disillusioned with Marcus Garvey and all that. So I'm sure they probably crossed pass at some point during their lives.
JM:
Yeah, and it seems like over the course of things, as things in the country and so on and over the world change, Du Bois altered his views to kind of fit the new principles and his observations there. So this seems to be maybe some inconsistency and his philosophy and so on is probably just because of the changing times and his own personal struggles and so on.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So in August 1897, just prior to the birth of his first child, Du Bois had published an article in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Strivings of the Negro People." In this, he wrote, "The Negro is a sort of seven son born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconsiled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
This article became the basis for the first chapter in the seminal 1903 work of his, "The Souls of Black Folk". He would never use the term double consciousness after this, but some scholars maintain it continued to influence his writing, even amid his changing perspectives. The increasing influence, the adoption of pan-Africanism as an identity, for instance.
As he was later somewhat known as a radical himself, perhaps his priorities changed even if the basic tenet remained. He viewed this double consciousness as a problematic and psychically dangerous thing. Later on in "The Souls of Black Folk", he writes about this phenomenon more clearly. "From the double life every American Negro must live as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the 19th while yet struggling in the eddies of the 15th century. From this must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality, and a moral hesitancy, which is fatal self-confidence. The words within and without the veil of color are changing and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way, and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, the double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pre-tempts or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism."
Nevertheless, I think we can see some of the reflections of this double consciousness in the uncoming text and how it pertains to the principal character, Jim.
(music: bubbling electronics)
"The Comet" non-spoiler discussion
JM:
As for our story, "The Comet". So it was originally to be found in "Darkwater, Voices From Within the Veil," and autobiographical work, and it was later reprinted in an anthology, "Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African diaspora", and from there it's made its way into "The Big Book of Science Fiction" so that more, I guess, people who might not necessarily consider Du Bois a writer of speculative fiction would come across his name, and indeed, that's where I first came across his name, to be honest with you all.
So yeah, it's really interesting to go through his life and some of the things that he explored, and it's quite a lot, and I know I've only scratched the surface, but why don't we talk about the work?
So this was an interesting story I thought to feature in the anthology, and it kind of shows the ongoing efforts of science fiction writers and historians and fans to sort of broaden the scope, I guess, and rake in things from other spheres that aren't necessarily related to the mainstream of genre fiction, and although I think that some people are a little skeptical of this, I think it's probably a good thing.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I always liked this intersection with non-genre writers and genre, especially really interesting cases like this of black writing from W.E. Du Bois, and when we talked about George Schuyler, several episodes back, this and the Schuyler work "Black No More", which we didn't cover in that episode, but I would like to cover in the future, both directly deal with the topic of race in a way that relates to speculative and science fiction, even though I'm not sure how much they were marketed as such at the time.
JM:
Yeah, I definitely agree with that, and the Vandermeers speculate that probably most people in the SF pulp community would not have been aware of this. Now, it actually does seem to be fair that this is a pretty obscure work by Du Bois.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, it was in the anthology, which I believe is in book form, right? That was the first publication of this?
JM:
Yeah, the Dark Matter anthology.
Nate:
But yeah, those can fall out of print.
Gretchen:
It wasn't published in any like newspaper or journal, it was first in the book?
JM:
Yeah, there's also a book, the short writings of W.E. Du Bois or something, and it's there.
Gretchen:
Okay, interesting.
JM:
So basically they state that, and it doesn't really show up in his biographies, but it seemed that he actually did write a few other speculative pieces, and his body of writing work is quite large. And that seemed like, even now, some of it may still be unpublished, or barely published.
Nate:
Yeah, that's the sense I got from the Vandermeer introduction, that there's like still texts floating around out there, that may just be in manuscript form still. So it'd be interesting to see if anything else surfaces.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, he is such a prolific writer that I'm sure there is just a lot of other texts that we still don't know about, or archived, but just haven't been published.
JM:
Yeah, they mention at least one other story. I don't know where that one can be found, but it would certainly be one to look into in the future, maybe for personal reading, if not for the podcast.
Gretchen:
Yeah, similar to when we did the two Forster stories, perhaps if we could find the Du Bois one somewhere.
Nate:
Yeah, that'd be cool.
Gretchen:
It would be interesting.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. And I mean, Forster is another good example of these non-genre writers coming at the genre from a very, very interesting angle in both the stories that we covered.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So that's a very short and quite simple story, but it's very, very well written, and it's powerful. And I found this story really, really sad. I don't know. I mean, it's kind of hopeful, but ultimately quite sad.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I think what's really interesting is, this is the second time I've read Du Bois' fiction. Before reading this, I have read sections of "The Souls of Black Folk", including the chapter that you quoted J.M. about double consciousness. And I also read the one fiction piece that is in "The Souls of Black Folk". I think that that is also very well written. What I really liked about "The Comet" is that it seems that it will end on a very melancholic note, but it does leave kind of this room at the end for a bit of joy, which I just really appreciated there. And I think that that's something that I think Du Bois had to include that is like there is still like community in that.
Nate:
Yeah, it's definitely a very powerful piece. And I think opening up with the Star Trek episode was apt because they feel very much kind of getting at the same thing, even though they approach it from totally, totally different places.
JM:
Kind of was wondering whether that would be something too frivolous to do, so I'm glad that you did.
Nate:
No, I mean, it did remind me of other things, too, that are well recognized within media. I mean, "Night of the Living Dead" is another obvious one. But I mean, as commentary on race in "Night of the Living Dead" is like all subtext, even though it's incredibly obvious subtext, it doesn't really explicitly ever talk about it or have it being a plot of the film in the way that this or the Star Trek episode did. And I think the fact that the Star Trek episode, when it aired was controversial due to its tackling of those issues head on, airing on TV 70 years after this story was written, shows that these issues are still very much prevalent in today's society. And I think if this story was published today, it would still be controversial for the themes that it brings out and what it's saying.
Gretchen:
Yeah, what I definitely thought of when reading it is the film, "The World, the Flesh and the Devil," which is also kind of this story where there is a black man and a white woman and they're the only ones left. And of course, in that film, there is no kind of, well, there is a twist in "The Comet" that doesn't come in that film. I feel like Du Bois' story works more or has, I think, a more nuanced meaning because of the twist that comes at the end.
JM:
Yeah, the story put me in a weird position of actually, I mean, I'm glad, like I'm not saying I wanted the story to be different, but the so the idea of the world ending, right, and a man and a woman being the only survivors and having to repopulate the Earth, like it's a huge cliche, right? And it's kind of like, at this point, it might be even perceived as annoying. But the story actually made me wish that it had been that way, like, that's the way it actually gone, which is a weird position to be put in because I guess, like, it was very dreamlike to me. And it kind of felt like, you know, when you, I don't know if this has ever happened to you guys, but when you have a dream, right? And it's like, things go a certain way in the dream. And it's a good feeling dream, ultimately. You know, it feels like this is a good thing. But then you wake up at the end. And things are like, actually, no, it's just normal the way things always have been. And it's kind of bittersweet. It's like, you feel kind of like, well, I just had this really lovely dream. But, you know, at the same time, the world's not really that way. And that's why I think the ending is really sad.
I actually forgot something at the end that is actually, I guess, quite positive. Like, I had read the story before, and I completely forgot about, well, I won't say when we talk about it. But there is something at the end, I guess that's like the very, very, very last paragraph. That's like, uplifting. And it's like, okay, you know, that's not really as bleak as it maybe it seems. But at the same time, it's like this moment of hope. And I'll read a bit near the end where it really, I think the poetic side of Du Bois really comes through. And he did write poetry as well. You see some of the lyrical writing on display here. It's definitely quite awe inspiring, like the feeling that he conveys with it. The feeling of, I guess, finding unity in the apocalypse.
Nate:
Yeah, well, I certainly definitely really enjoyed this one. And as you said, J.M., this is in "The Big Book of Science Fiction." So it's not too difficult to track down if you want to read this for yourself. And we highly recommend that you do.
Gretchen:
Yes. I also, as we've been mentioning, it is in "The Big Book of Science Fiction". But I also did read it in "Dark Matter", because I wanted to see what the other stories in that anthology were. I would be really interested to look more into those stories as well.
Nate:
Yeah, I'm assuming they were all written more or less around the same time?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely be interesting to take a look at, especially if there's anything that leans on the more weird, speculative angle. But cool. Yeah, why don't we see what happens in this one then?
JM:
Yeah, it's a short one. You can read it in probably a few minutes. And yeah, you should definitely do that. And if you haven't yet, pause the podcast now and read the story and come back.
(music: discordant stabs)
spoiler summary and discussion
JM:
Jim, a black man, works as a messenger at a bank in New York City's Broadway. It's a special day, there's a new comet in the sky, a stranger whose tail is soon to pass over the earth, and everyone is oddly keyed up. The manager asks him to go down to the somewhat flooded vault to look for some records as they need to clear all the stuff out. There's some token regret as it's a bit nasty down there. And it indeed is musty and dark and full of scummy standing water, everyone's favorite thing.
Here, after some groping around, he stumbled upon a cache of sorts and unveils a secret vault within the vault. Here are not only the lost records but a chest containing a whole lot of gold. And it's while looking at this that the big door swings shut with a bang. He manages to get it open after somehow or other finding another cache on the inside, but the door is stopped by the body of the clerk. How'd he get there? Was he following Jim? Did he try to lock him in there? Maybe as a prank? I don't know, it's never really said. But anyway, it's horrible and as he works his way upstairs, he comes across the seemingly frozen dead bodies of the bank people.
His first thought is murder and then, what if they find him here alone with all this money and dead people? What would his life be worth?
"The stillness of death lay everywhere."
It's not so peaceful there seems to have been a mad rush to get inside buildings and lots of people are twisted and crushed. Outside, it's no different. Everyone has stopped in their tracks, keeled over, it seems stone dead.
He walks the streets. It's as though people have stopped in mid-motion, frozen where they stood or fallen. A news boy has a last edition paper. Danger! Deadly gas is expected. People have been warned to seek cellars, but it seems too late. This is obviously somehow Jim is unaffected and he gets food in a restaurant where he reflects they would never have served him previously. He wonders if everyone in the world is dead and knows he must search.
He takes a car and starts driving the streets. Wandering a residential neighborhood, he sees a girl in an upper window. She's alive and she's pretty distraught as everyone around seems incapacitated. But they find solace in each other, seemingly the only living folk in New York, black and white. Maybe yesterday, she wouldn't even have looked at Jim. A man like him wouldn't even be a part of her world. She'd been in the dark room, developing pictures of the comet, which she'd taken the previous night.
The head off in the car, first to Harlem. She's a little trepidation about this, but quickly accepts it. And we don't get details, but it's clear all Jim's people are lost. He brings back a souvenir and says he's been selfish. Again, we don't get details at this point.
Now to the Metropolitan Tower, where her father works. Supposedly he went for a drive and now she wants to find him. And they go all over and things start to get oppressive, but he quickly takes charge. They must reach out to other places, get as far away as possible, find other life. And he inspires confidence. She tries to use the central telephone switchboard. It's silent and, "sarcastic, like a big black mouth." She begins to fear and want to escape from him, but then she sees him waiting for her in the alley. She's alone in the world. She returns to him timidly, seems to implore him, not to molest her, but no actual thought is spoken.
And there's a lot of that in this story where there's incomplete sentences where you kind of have to fill in the gap. And since he's doing that deliberately, obviously, not speaking the thought aloud or not finishing the sentence, we're left to finish it for ourselves and draw what conclusions we make.
So they go into a different world far from the prosperity of Broadway. And she finds it frightful. And he sets off rockets. And the two of them have a moment of intense togetherness along there. They barely need to speak. I'm going to read this part because it's probably the most beautiful part of the story and it's the end of the dream, I guess you could say.
"In fascinated silence the man gazed at the heavens and dropped his rockets to the floor. Memories of memories stirred to life in the dead recesses of his mind. The shackles seemed to rattle and fall from his soul. Up from the crass and crushing and cringing of his caste leaped the lone majesty of kings long dead. He arose within the shadows, tall, straight, and stern, with power in his eyes and ghostly scepters hovering to his grasp. It was as though some mighty Pharaoh lived again, or curled Assyrian lord. He turned and looked upon the lady, and found her gazing straight at him.
"Silently, immovably, they saw each other face to face—eye to eye. Their souls lay naked to the night. It was not lust; it was not love—it was some vaster, mightier thing that needed neither touch of body nor thrill of soul. It was a thought divine, splendid.
"Slowly, noiselessly, they moved toward each other—the heavens above, the seas around, the city grim and dead below. He loomed from out the velvet shadows vast and dark. Pearl-white and slender, she shone beneath the stars. She stretched her jeweled hands abroad. He lifted up his mighty arms, and they cried each to the other, almost with one voice, 'The world is dead.'"
But alas, we almost wish the world really were dead because of that moment. And it's beautiful and restful, but then it turns out that it's only New York that's been affected. And there's been search parties sent out or something, and people start rushing around, and all these people are now rushing in. And we find out the woman's name is Julia, and her father, and I guess her fiance, or boyfriend, or whatever, are alive. And Fred, the boyfriend, is a real dick. And the father hands Jim money and says, "I always liked your people, if you ever want a job, call on me." And that's it. And Jim fills himself shrinking.
And then at the end, we get a final positive note that I completely forgot happens in the story, because I was just overwhelmed by the sadness, I guess, that he sees his own lady friend, and the baby is dead, but somehow she is alive, and they have a tearful reunion. Which is nice, I guess, but somehow it doesn't...
Yeah, it's still, the ending is sort of crushing, I think, and I mean the baby's dead, which also reflects what happened to Du Bois himself, right, as his own child died in infancy. I don't really know how the wife ended up surviving, I guess she, for some reason, wasn't in Harlem where he expected her to be. But that really powerful story, and again, really reflected of the concerns that Du Bois had, and the personality that we see, I guess reflected in his biography and so on, really comes before in the story in a lot of ways.
So as well as the sadness of the story, I think that interesting ways in which he has a lot of adjectives to describe Jim's personality, all throughout the story, and I've written them all, well not all of them, maybe I missed some, but I wrote a lot of them down.
So we get words like bitter, moody, stolid, cold, nervous, methodical, resigned, and he looks death in the face with a sigh. And yeah, that seems like almost like an extreme version of this sort of aloofness that is described by others who sometimes observed Du Bois as a young person, sort of keeping his distance from people a lot and being a sort of difficult to approach, which perhaps also fed the accusations some of his critics gave that he was an elitist, overly intellectual and not really in touch with the working class and so on, which I think is probably not true, but it's just his natural reticence and I guess maybe somewhat unwillingness to get too close to people. And here we have Jim having a powerful moment with this lone white woman who's the only other person left in New York, apparently. That last passage before the dream gets shattered, it almost makes you wish the apocalypse were really what it happens.
Nate:
Yeah, the imagery in the story is really fantastic and he's a great writer and it definitely is the racial tension between the two of them that I guess drives a lot of this unsettling, uncomfortable feeling that you get throughout most of the story.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And you get that crushing ending where they basically want to kill him because he's black and the idea that he would be carting around this white woman throughout the entire story is just, to them, awful, but she pleas for his life.
JM:
Yeah. And the first time it's like he comes out of the bank and he's thinking, oh, I gotta get out of here fast because what if they find me here with all these dead people and all this money, right? And then at the end it's like all these people show up and he's with this girl and right away people are saying, let's lynch him, right? And then they use the racial slur and the fiance isn't even slightly grateful. He's just like, did he touch you?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And again, this also reflects some of the things that he was seeing in the early 1900s in Atlanta. The fact that lynchings were still happening as late as the 1900s. There were various accounts of white women being molested by black men and of course this would inflame the populace and there were riots and stuff like that. And it later turned out that the claims that were made by at least one of these famous cases, the claims of a so-called victim, she later confessed that nothing had actually happened.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean the Emmett Till case is very, very well documented.
Gretchen:
Yes, Emmett Till.
JM:
Yeah. And then you have what you consider that actually people died because of this, right? Because there's like riots and stuff and like in one incident 40 black people were killed. And it's just like, you know, that's just so living on a powder keg. Like I think so many things could just set it off, right?
Nate:
Yeah, there's well documented massacres like in Tulsa, but it's not like it's an extreme minority viewpoint at the time. It was very much mainstream culture. Look at the film "Birth of a Nation", which is basically a four hour ode to the KKK.
JM:
Oh yeah.
Nate:
That heavily uses these themes of the predatory black man preying upon the innocent white woman as a form of propaganda to instill racial hatred and incite people to violence.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Right. Yeah, "Birth of a Nation" and all that, right? Which was only five years before this story was published. Du Bois, he and others tried to get the film banned.
Gretchen:
Yeah. You can see how that legacy lives on by the fact that like for so long, "Birth of a Nation" was still considered this significant film that is one of the best films in spite of all the horrible stereotypes that it relies upon.
Nate:
It was definitely regularly shown in various film classes when I was an undergrad.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
I mean, it is historically important as far as the American film industry goes and was a driving factor in launching Hollywood. But in addition to it being morally reprehensible, Griffith also had a fraction of the talent that other early filmmakers like Méliès or Fritz Lang did, I think.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Now in 2025, we can say, well, it's good that it's not bad because it reminds us when things were actually like in 1915. And that's why we need stuff like that. We need things like that to be out in the open and not to use a particularly appropriate double entendre, whitewashed, right?
Nate:
Right, yeah.
JM:
You know, I mean, we just try to pretend it's not there. Then nobody will remember that it was there and nothing will be there to prevent future mistakes from happening.
Nate:
Yeah. And I think we can take that approach to doing these historical science fiction stories as well as that. We don't want to whitewash the text or the history. We want to present them warts and all as there was definitely a lot of racism in these early stories, even going up to the 1950s, 60s, and 70s in some cases. Unfortunately, as we're taking a look at international science fiction, I just read this one story that was published in an Argentinian magazine that I'm probably not going to translate because it was just so racist and might not even be by an Argentinian author. We'll talk more about that one when we talk about those stories.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
But yeah, it's disappointing to see, but I think that some people have a tendency to perhaps portray or want to portray the genre as being more progressive and inclusive than it was. And, you know, it's a little bit more nuanced than that, but certainly anti-black racism in particular was very, very much a part of the mainstream culture throughout the entirety of the United States history.
Gretchen:
As we even saw from some of the stories that we read in our last section, like, I mean, it was still with the references to like the colonialist references to Africa. That was something that isn't even just limited to the US, obviously, but something that we see in other European and colonialist works.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
No, that's absolutely very true. And it's interesting to see all the racial barriers and hatreds break down when the entirety of society collapses.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
We get that moment of, I guess, reconciliation, if you will, between the woman and Jim. In that paragraph that JM read, but then when society comes back online, all those prejudices and old orders of oppression are instantly back in play.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. And I think that's the story had to go this way because that's the way the world is.
Gretchen:
It's one of those, where it's for the in that moment, of course, this racial tension can break down because yeah, there are the material conditions allow for that. And then as soon as society is back in play, it doesn't matter really like the individual is still going to be swayed by that.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like the alternative, it would have probably been hopeless if they were the two only remaining humans trying to repopulate the earth. Like what kind of life is that, right? But on the other hand, we're back to the status quo, which is pretty hateful, right? And this time 1920 when there's both the upper class white elites and to an extent, the working class, even if the latter is like being manipulated, right? The white working class. Because that was what Du Bois said that in 1915. He said, you guys are being manipulated. Do you have just enough wealth that you're not going to be revolutionary and you're not going to try to rock the boat?
Gretchen:
And that still holds true today.
JM:
Yeah. And it comes to the fact that like you got your labor unions, which at first Du Bois was inclined to support, but which later on he sort of repudiated because he said black labor has nothing in common with white labor. That's what he said later in the thirties. And this was during the Great Depression. And he must no doubt said that because the unions were also exclusionary and the elites when the unions would enforce strikes and so on that were probably justified. The business owners would turn to the disenfranchised black population to do the work that nobody else would do. And I think that's where we got this like this kind of weird thing that is really makes me uncomfortable when actually it seems like unknowingly, like perhaps ignorant, more center leaning people say things like, oh, you know, well, they do the kind of work that Americans aren't willing to do and stuff like that. Right. And it's just like, that's a really uncomfortable thing to say. Like it seems to come from this stratum of resentment, I guess, even though it's not meant that way. I mean, I heard that in that movie, which coincidentally Avery Brooks is in, American History X. They use that argument to say, well, why are you against immigration? Why are you against black people and so on? They do all this work to keep your society running that you won't do. And there's something insidious about that. Like there's something dishonest, I think, in people saying that.
And Du Bois certainly would not have approved of that. He seemed to be someone who is very conscious of slights. And the Gerald Hornebiography comments a lot on the fact that like a lot of supposedly while meeting white people would slight against Du Bois without even realizing that that's what they were doing. And, you know, who else is going to be a sewer worker but a black man, right? And he really resented that kind of talk. A lot.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
They take those jobs and they are doing those jobs because what else are you going to offer these people? You know, it's that kind of circular logic of like, well, they do the jobs because we're giving them those jobs because we're not giving them something else because they do those jobs.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And I think you can even see that in the story with the father of Julia where it's like, oh, well, you know, I like your people. So I'll give you a job. Thank you for like keeping my daughter safe.
JM:
Yeah. And, you know, he's like, he thinks he's a philanthropist, right? And he's giving him all this money.
Gretchen:
Yeah. He thinks he's doing him a favor for, you know, I'm going to give you a job. And he's at the end of the story. He's like holding this money in his hand. He doesn't know what to do with it. He's like, I have all this money now. Like great.
Nate:
Yeah, it reminded me of that one scene in the beginning of "Invisible Man" where the philanthropist visits the historically black college and kind of makes a mess out of everything.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, it's definitely a common trope of people who think they're doing good, but just act condescendingly and kind of enforce the status quo in the process.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Kind of this idea of doing it for your own conscience and saying you did it more out of a feeling of guilt.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, the white man's burden to be the white savior.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like aloof from this whole situation just because of you guys are Americans. I'm Canadian, but I shouldn't be. So, I mean, it's not like our past is untainted as well. So we have a lot of business that we're still trying to do. It's like our past is untainted as well. So we have a lot of business that we're still trying to come to terms with over native disenfranchisement, like, you know, ill treatment and stuff like that. And even though, yeah, like the Niagara movement happened in Canada because traditionally, like that's where a lot of people escaped to from the U.S. And during the slavery times, and I was supposedly more friendly and receptive and stuff like that, there's certainly a lot of racism in this country as well.
So, you know, you can still see it around. And I have family members and stuff who definitely don't see things in a very progressive way when it comes to race. There were times when I kind of realized maybe some of my own behavior was a little unconsciously insensitive and not very aware, I guess. So trying to be just more self aware and being conscious of these things is good. And definitely 10 years ago, I would not have read a biography of W.E.B. Du Bois. So podcast has been good for me.
Nate:
Well, it's definitely a very good story to talk about these issues and especially in a very concise amount of time, as this is a very, very short story. It does pack a lot in there for its length. And I think a lot of these really do.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
That's something that's always impressive about the genre, I think.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And I definitely think that that is just a skill of Du Bois as well. Even in the story that's in "The Souls of Black Folk", "The Coming of John", which is also a relatively short story and yet really covers a lot of the topics that he discusses in the other chapters of that work.
JM:
Yeah. Interesting. So yeah, I mean, we'll be just a bit of a, not really a spoiler. We'll mention it soon in a couple of broadcasts time, but our next block of stories will include Samuel Delany. And we'll be talking about his own experiences trying to get into the science fiction writing community. And although I think it's not really direct comparison, and I'm not going to say like the Benny Russell character is based on him because he's, from what I can tell, he's not at all like Samuel Delany as a person. But it seems like the kind of experiences he had, not too far removed from the time when the fictional Benny Russell character was a writer, say like late fifties, early sixties are very close.
Nate:
I watched the episode recently a couple days ago before we did this because I knew we're going to mention it on the show. And it has been like a really, really long time. I want to say almost since the original airdate since I've seen it. So it was nice to revisit that episode, but it would definitely felt like late fifties for what they were going for. They do show an issue of Galaxy on screen and I didn't identify what month and year it was, but that would give you an exact date on when it was supposed to be set. But reading interviews with Delany from previous things we've done on the podcast. He does consider himself to be the first black science fiction author, and he does mention the possibility that there might have been black authors and some of the pulps using pseudonyms that would be impossible to figure out their identity. And we've also talked about genre adjacent precursors like Schuyler in a previous episode. The one we did was basically just a hard boiled detective story with a little bit of science fiction elements at the end. But "Black No More" that he wrote does sound really, really interesting.
JM:
Yeah, there's also the Empire one. What was it? I can't remember the name of it. Yeah, I can't remember. Not "Black No More", but the...
Nate:
"Black Empire", yeah.
JM:
"Black Empire." Okay, yeah, yeah. I knew Empire was in the title somewhere.
Gretchen:
I was also, I couldn't remember what it was called. I forgot that it was just "Black Empire".
Nate:
Yeah, and as we mentioned in the Schuyler episode, definitely check out the book "Black Pulp, Genre Fiction and the Shadow of Jim Crow" by Brooks E. Hefner, which is a great resource for this time period. And there's one curiosity from earlier, namely "Of One Blood," which was published serially from 1902 to 1903.
JM:
I've watched a video and listened to a podcast episode about that book. And although I still think it would be a cool thing to cover because we do, like, adjacent stuff and, you know, I'm thinking about, like, Jack Vance's Dying Earth and stuff like that. That's maybe more fantastical and all that. I don't know that "Of One Blood" can really be counted as science fiction. Like, it feels more, maybe more, like, fantastical and, like, perhaps adjacent. Something like H. Rider Haggard's "She" or something like that.
Nate:
Exactly, yeah. That's just, since I got that, it was a kind of reaction to "She" and those other types of Lost World novels.
JM:
Yeah, yeah.
Nate:
It is from 1902, 1903. So it is earlier than the Du Bois and the Schuyler and certainly far earlier than Delany. But yeah, it is interesting to note those early precursors there. And I would like to cover them all on the podcast at some point because they do approach the genre and writing and thought in general from a really interesting angle.
JM:
Right, right.
Nate:
It'll be cool to talk about Delany next month when we talk about him, definitely an author that I've been wanting to get into for quite some time now.
Gretchen:
Yes, especially. I won't spoil which one it is, even though we're going to mention it in a bit, but I did read the novel we'll be reading by Delany. And I have read another one by him. And I mean, both of them have been really great. So I'm really excited to cover him as well.
JM:
We have a specific theme coming up where a specific Delany novel will be discussed, but there's certainly a lot of other works by him that I have considered that we could cover that are really good.
Nate:
Yeah, he's another one of those guys that are basically a lifelong science fiction author. So plenty of stuff to choose from.
JM:
Well, guys, this has been quite a heavy discussion for Chrononauts. We don't normally get into this kind of territory, but I'm glad that we had it. And we won't be leaving this entirely behind because we're going to be relating some similar things in a few weeks when we get into "Babel-17", which we'll be talking about. For now, that background segment was very heavy, and I'll happily talk about my favorite author from when I was a kid, Isaac Asimov. So let's break and we'll come back and talk about "Nightfall".
Bibliography:
Horne, Gerald - "W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography" (2009)
VanderMeer, Jeff and Ann (eds.) - "The Big Book of Science Fiction" (2016)
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