Saltwater Futures: On Black Speculative Fiction, Hoodoo, and Gullah Geechee Memory

October is Black Speculative Fiction Month. It’s also Hoodoo Heritage Month...and Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Month. That overlap isn’t random, it’s resonance. Each celebrates the ways Black people have always looked at this world and known it wasn’t the only one. Each is about memory, conjure, and dreaming as survival.

So, what is Black speculative fiction? It’s a term that stretches wide enough to hold folktales and far futures, horror stories and hoodoo tales, magical realism and multiverses. It’s science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, magical realism, and all the spaces in between—but through Black lenses. It’s what happens when we say: our stories don’t need to fit inside somebody else’s genre box. Our stories move with the drum, with the river, with the hush-toned stories told late at night. They carry what was, what is, and what still might be.

Black speculative fiction is not just entertainment, it’s testimony. It insists that Black presence in the past, present, and future is not up for debate. It bends time. It refuses erasure. It says: we were, we are, and we will be.

Which brings me back to Hoodoo Heritage Month—and now, Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Month. Hoodoo itself is a speculative practice. It remembers across centuries, pulling on the knowledge of the ancestors to make something new in the present. The Gullah Geechee tradition carries that same lineage of spiritual and creative technology, where the boundaries between the sacred and the everyday are fluid, where land, language, and spirit all hold memory. Black speculative fiction draws from these same wells; dreaming of what the world can become, guided by what has been, sharpened by what we know right now.

So, if you want to step into this month with a book in hand, here are a few places to start:

• Tracy Deonn, Legendborn – A YA fantasy that takes on Arthurian legend and roots it in Black Southern life, grief, and ancestral power.
• Tananarive Due, The Between – A chilling and deeply Southern story that slips between dream and reality, haunted by ancestry and rooted in the rhythms of Black survival.
• Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring – Urban fantasy that blends Caribbean folklore, Hoodoo, and survival in a near-future Toronto.
• Rivers Solomon, The Unkindness of Ghosts – A stunning, layered novel set aboard a generation ship structured like a plantation, where memory, resistance, and identity all defy containment.
• Nisi Shawl, Everfair – An alternate history imagining what might have been if colonized Congo had a different fate.
• Nicole Glover, The Conductors – A historical fantasy set in Reconstruction-era Philadelphia, following a married couple who once used celestial magic to guide people to freedom along the Underground Railroad.
• Cadwell Turnbull, The Lesson – Alien arrival in the Caribbean woven with questions of kinship, power, and belonging.

This list is just the beginning. Black speculative fiction is vast. It spans centuries and continents. It’s in the folktales our grandparents told us, in the blues songs that bent reality, in the stories carved out of loss and joy alike.

This month, as we celebrate Black Speculative Fiction, Hoodoo Heritage, and Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage, I’m also reflecting on Unseen Routes: Mapping Black Albany’s Past, Present, and Possible Futures, my digital installation currently on view at Opalka Gallery Albany, NY. It’s a map of memory and imagination—exactly what Black speculative work is. The exhibition closes October 11, and if you haven’t had a chance to experience it yet, you can still visit in person or explore it here. To view all of the maps from the exhibition (included one by my amazing offspring) head to the Compass Roses: Maps By Artists site.

Unseen Routes grew from the same impulse as this month’s celebrations: to bend time, to honor what lingers beneath the surface, and to imagine what else might be possible.

So as you move through this October—reading, conjuring, remembering, and dreaming—know that you’re participating in a long lineage of Black speculative practice. The stories are still unfolding. The routes are still unseen, but they’re waiting for us to walk them.