George S. Schuyler (1895–1977)

George S. Schuyler's Black Empire may have been a genre-buster when it was originally published in the Pittsburgh Courier as a serial in the mid-1930s, an Afrofuturist epic before Afrofuturism was a word. A satirical take on the Back to Africa movement and black nationalism, Black Empire is the saga of genius/mad scientist Dr. Henry Belsidus, as told by his secretary Carl Slater, as Belsidus recruits the world’s Black excellence to build a Black Empire in Africa by whatever means necessary, mainly by eliminating white people. Part sci-fi, part melodrama, the story unfolds rapid-fire, and includes prophetic technological innovations (helicopters, solar energy and hydropower, to name a few) and even describes the creation of the Black Empire as the “Second World War” several years before a war to be so named began.

The book is entertaining, the pace is quick, but the satire has faded a little. It’s worth reading, particularly if there is a more recent edition available. It seems as if this Mint edition was scanned from original publications and no one proofread the output. The errors and typos in the book were distracting at best. It made for some annoying reading.
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I know I agreed to read this novel published by Mint Editions, but Mint Editions obviously didn't read their book before sending it to me. Not only did no one bother to proofread this error-strewn scan (to correct scannos such as "close" for "dose" and fix all the periods that should be commas), no one even bothered to run it through spellcheck. Page 30 has "lorgery" and "endirely dillerem" which at least I could translate to "forgery" and "entirely different" in context. But what could page 34's "tinle green light" possibly be? I'm glad I didn't spend too much time trying to guess and Googled it instead because the answer is "little green light," and the other answer is now I know Penguin has published their own edition of this book in 2023, and their version is actually a pleasure to read.… (mehr)