Black History Month 2026: Afrofuturism

This timely and gorgeously illustrated companion book to an upcoming Smithsonian exhibition explores the power of Afrofuturism to reclaim the past and reimagine Black futures.

An anthology of both classic and new stories exploring the theme of Afrofuturism and Black identity in the future.

Originally published in the Pittsburgh Courier, 1936-1938, this work was a serialized story about a Black scientist whose goal is to take back Africa from the colonial forces that have asserted their control and put those forces on trial for their crimes.

The story follows Xandria Brown, an archivist in near-future Los Angeles, who becomes the target of a violent plot and relies on her AI assistive technologies for help. The novel weaves together personal and political elements, including the fate of a separatist underwater city.

Esperance plumbs the depths of a seemingly impossible crime rooted in racism, intergenerational trauma, and an inhuman concept of justice.

Legendary science fiction writer and Afrofuturist pioneer Octavia Butler wrote the essay ‘A Few Rules for Predicting the Future’ in the year 2000 for publication in Essence magazine. More than two decades later, her honest and wise advice is just as timely and prescient, offering guideposts for anyone who wants to shape our future into something good.

An anthology of poetry featuring Black superheroes and other Afrofuturistic themes.

Fen’s world is crumbling. Newearth, a once-promising planet gifted by the all-powerful alien Makers, now suffers from failed terraforming, leaving its people on the brink of collapse. Fen has spent her life working as a mercenary bodyguard for a cunning magistrate, entangled in the politics of the empire that shattered her family. But then her fathers–her last remaining tether to hope–are executed by the ruthless Sovereign, who marks Fen for the same fate. With nothing left to lose, Fen escapes with a single map and an old quarterstaff, embarking on a dangerous quest to seek out the last remnants of her parents’ rebellion.

A futuristic update of the classic story, this Count of Monte Cristo is set in a future where climate catastrophe is a reality and told from the perspective of a sailor who is betrayed by his shipmates and seeks revenge.

An anthology of eighteen new stories featuring people of color in many imagined futures, fantasy worlds, and alternate realities.

In 2025 California, an eighteen-year-old African American woman, suffering from a hereditary trait that causes her to feel others’ pain as well as her own, flees northward from her small community and its desperate savages.

The story of how a jazz musician who said he was from Saturn brought Afrofuturism into improvisational, poetic, and visionary compositions played by an “Arkestra” that became their own mythology.

An intimate glimpse into the life of a teenager whose coming of age will herald a new age for her world. Set in the universe Africanfuturist luminary Nnedi Okorafor first introduced in the World Fantasy Award-winning Who Fears Death, this is the first in the She Who Knows trilogy.

When authorities claim her brother, who was presumed dead, is alive — and the main suspect in the murder of the Chief Executive of Northwestern Hemisphere, Candace, a young invisible woman, must find him before it’s too late in a world where no one and nothing is ever as it seems.

A drug-fueled evening causes Nelah to commit a desperate crime and the ghost of her victim stalks the people she loves. Now she is tasked with finding out what conspiracy the murdered person was about to expose.