That, Pat, is because I don't do a whole lot else. I am home most of the time with the cats. I don't socialize much except for my sisters and George, and I am comfortable with that.
At any rate, the last four books I picked up from the library went back without being finished, including Afrofuturism.... I don't think I was in the mood for that one just yet, and I disagreed with one of her premises (assuming I interpreted her correctly) that the few blacks in SciFi were treated as villains; she pointed to some old SciFi movies as examples. Meanwhile, what I discovered is that even with some of the older SciFi books, that Blacks did place some major supporting roles, if not the lead, in quite a few books. This going back to at least the 80's (and don't forget Star Trek from the mid-60's on, where Blacks were major players). Most of the books described characters with black hair and eyes with various shades of colors such as mahogany, mocha, dark-skin, though, rather than just come out and say Black. Of course, much of my SciFi reading involves military so I think the books reflect that there are a lot of Blacks in the military. I don't recall reading any books where Blacks were portrayed as villains. I think if she was using the old movies as an example, then she should look to the casting crew rather than the intent of the writer. Many writers simply decline to describe any of their characters as white, black or pink with purple stripes and yellow polka-dots, leaving the reader wide-open to imagine the characters any way they want. You can bet any of the old SciFi stories I read now, I will be on the lookout for such discrimination. Maybe she is looking for SciFi where blackness is writ large; she may have a point there. At any rate, I plan on going back to the book and giving it another chance in the future. Like many books, I just didn't read far enough into it for it to "catch" me.
Right now, I am reading the first three of Raymond Weil's Galactic Empire Wars series. The story is interesting, but there are a lot of "holes" where the science and technology is just "there" without any description of how they managed it all. Like, how do they manage to manufacture things or build things when the earth is no longer a support source. Other than taking sending crews to scavenge what they can from an Earth in the throes of a nuclear winter/deep ice age, there is no (or so very little) mention of how they manage to develop/manufacture what they need to build ships, building materials, and everything else in what appears to be a very short time to make room for refugees from the planet. Oh, and then there is the English. I thought i would scream if I say just one more "lucrative" which was very frequent in the first half of the first chapter. And from then on, the author seemed to be in love with "upon" instead of "on" no matter what. My I am getting so picky. Nevertheless, the human interest and basic story-line is good.
It looks like Pierce Brown's Red Rising and James Corey's Pandora's Star will be a while in the hold cue.
