A book-length study like Ingrid Thaler's Black Atlantic Speculative Fictions is a welcome addition to the expanding body of scholarship on the long-marginalized traditions of speculative literature by African American and African diaspora authors.

Thaler's volume is divided into four chapters that examine three established writers by offering close readings of four chronologically ordered novels: Octavia E. Butler's Wild Seed (1980), Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991), Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993), and Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber (2000). Interested in cross-cultural intertextual practices and politics, Thaler “investigates the various strategies of texts to appropriate the speculative as a site for Black Atlantic intervention” (4). She focusses on “the triangle of women protagonists, color-coded literary traditions, and time” (14) and effectively foregrounds recurring tropes like “the master–slave paradigm” (24). She adopts a variety of theoretical frameworks and critical methodologies for the discussion of these works. For instance, she analyzes Butler's Wild Seed in light of Paul de Man's notion of allegory and examines Gomez's The Gilda Stories through a rereading Henry Louis Gates's theory of “Signifyin(g).”

The four main chapters are framed by an Introduction and a Conclusion where Thaler tries to clarify her methodological approach and to broaden her discussion by situating the specific works under examination within ongoing literary-critical debates. Reflecting on her choice of three women writers, Thaler underlines that her “intention is not to present a woman-centered literary genre … rather, these texts serve as the canon for a broader understanding of what Black Atlantic Speculative Fiction is and could be” (14). While one appreciates that such a statement is, implicitly, a response to the continuing tendency to devalue women's writings as somewhat more particularistic, less “universal” than that of their male counterparts, one cannot but wish that the author had questioned such assumptions more directly, instead of deciding that “to read these texts closely without theorizing gender and sexuality explicitly (although both are omnipresent in the book)” was to be her way to express “respect for the literary achievements of black women writers” (14).

This unresolved confrontation with cultural hierarchies and with the political implications of her own critical choices becomes more problematic when Thaler addresses the vexed and complex issue of the continuing marginalization of black speculative fiction within a genre that, as she notes, has generally been “considered … white” (2). In the last few pages of the book, she asks, “The question that arises is thus, does the grouping of texts as Black Atlantic texts reintroduce a segregationist understanding of literature through the backdoor of hybridity and in-betweenness?” (137). Posing such a complex question in such basic terms and so late in the book betrays a conceptual disorientation that leads to a rather hasty and contradictory answer. After devoting a few lines to a comparison with Harlem Renaissance literary debates that would have required greater analytical depth in order to be adequately delineated, she notes that “speculative fiction as a subculture … has not been open to cultural forms of the Black Atlantic” (137). At this point the argument takes a sharp, unexpected turn, and Thaler focusses at greater length on the writers' own supposed “self-marginalization,” noting that much like “feminist science fiction … this sort of cultural positioning reinforces segregation” (137). This argumentative non sequitur, which takes the analytical shortcut of blaming the marginalized for their marginalization, leaves unexplored the crucial question whether and in what ways the increasing number and international success of works by Black Atlantic writers has been accompanied by the actual revision (i.e. desegregation) of the traditionally white canon of speculative fiction, a question that should be central in a book that is “concerned with these processes of constant (and often indirect) interaction through which tropes travel between black and white cultural contexts” (2). In other words, to what extent is contemporary speculative fiction, as a whole, “Positioned between black genres and white traditions” (128)?

If these problematic aspects of the book demand to be addressed, it should also be added that they do not undermine the overall significance of Black Atlantic Speculative Fictions. Thaler's close readings effectively establish a strong sense of the literary importance and complexity of the authors she discusses, and her analysis is informed by a wealth of critical references. Her extended bibliography testifies to the scholarly interest that surrounds the authors under examination and represents a valuable resource for future scholarship on the subject. In the Conclusion, Thaler also suggests possible new areas of critical investigation and offers interesting insight into the lively Web subculture connected with Black Atlantic speculative fiction, achieving her stated goal of advancing “a rereading of the popular genre as a cultural space” (18).