Bloodchild

Was an eternity of absolute ease just another name for hell? Or was that just the most sacrilegious thought she’d had so far?

“Where is this?” she asked, not really wanting to know, not wanting to be dead when she was only forty-three. “Where am I?”

“Here with me,” God said.

“Really here?” she asked. “Not at home in bed dreaming? Not locked up in a mental institution? Not … not lying dead in a morgue?”

“Here,” God said softly. “With me.”

What good is any form of literature to Black people?

What good is science fiction’s thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what “everyone” is saying, doing, thinking—whoever “everyone” happens to be this year.

And what good is all this to Black people?

“Are you looking forward to doing research?” I probed. “Do you believe you’ll be able to—”

“No.”

I blinked. The word was as cold and dead a sound as I’d ever heard.

“I don’t believe in anything,” he said.

“Why are you in such a hurry to be old?”

When I was older, I decided that getting a rejection slip was like being told your child was ugly. You got mad and didn’t believe a word of it. Besides, look at all the really ugly literary children out there in the world being published and doing fine!