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writing by and for black people. Hope unsettles the white order of things. Hope also makes allies between the races. That’s why I greatly admire the work of Mark Bould and Lisa Yaszek on Afrofuturism, among others. 5 To paraphrase Yaszek, there are three basic goals for Afrofuturism: tell good stories, recover lost black histories and their influence on contemporary black cultures, and think on exactly how such recovered pasts “might inspire” black future “visions” (2).
    As I see it, Afrofuturism provides a set of race-inflected reading protocols designed to investigate the optimisms and anxieties framing the future imaginings of people of color. It’s the first of the alternative futurisms related to race and ethnicity to emerge and disrupt the colorblind future envisioned by white writers, but not the last by any stretch of the imagination: Indigenous Futurism and Chicanafuturism have now gathered critical masses along with Asian American futurisms that refute yellow peril science fiction and techno-orientalism. Such a rich intellectual legacy belongs to the greatest Afrofuturist of all—Samuel R. Delany.
    In truth, I have debated writing this penultimate section of my Delany encounters and re-encounters. This internal dispute centers on one question: “Who on Earth would want to hear about my favorite Delany novels?” Yet, the essay feels somehow incomplete without it. I think John Pfeiffer nailed my feeling for Delany’s fiction nearly forty years ago with this declaration:
    Delany’s work is a rich lode awaiting discovery by the socially conscious general reader. It could not exist apart from a bonefelt knowledge of the past and present Black experience. It extrapolates this history, rather, and its vision is of encounters with the racisms of a post-revolutionary age, subtle to the point of being metaphysical, presaging a future in which certain sociological problems of the present, then solved, must be met once again on the level of the individual. (37)
    If Pfeiffer didn’t do it, then Jane B. Weedman did thirty-two years ago when she declared: “Delany uses the distancing technique to approach his white audience with the realities of black culture…as the product of his double-consciousness” (11). And if the essence was not captured by Weedman’s incisive remarks, then Sandra Govan’s did so thirty-years ago when she opined, “Delany parades black characters across the spectrum of his speculative fiction not simply to attest to black survival in the future, but to punctuate his social criticism of our present” (48). If Govan didn’t, then Takayuki Tatsumi surely did articulate my feelings twenty-seven years ago when stating, “As a writer, [Delany] has certainly been concerned with genres of minority literatures, for instance, science fiction, science fiction criticism, feminist literature, sometimes pornography or gay literature, and of course black literature” (269). Or if these older pronouncements on Delany’s magnitude fail to capture my sentiments, then Jeffery A. Tucker did so a mere five years ago by testifying that “In Delany’s work, science fiction presents itself as a genre that is particularly suited to, even a necessity for, contemporary African American intellectual inquiry, with Delany as a specific and exemplary model who guides his readers through a variety of webs—epistemological and semiotic as well as electronic” (251).
    It seems I have no words of my own. Delany is a living genius, rendering identity politics in all of its manifestations and vagaries. For me, his portrayals of race and racism make all the difference in science fiction. Others treasure his representations of gay identity and alternate sexualities, his descriptions of social and political class designations, his masterful use of critical theory. My own list of favorite Delany novels follows in reverse order, in true