ABSTRACT
Race is a key concern of a great deal of contemporary SF, and I think the reason for this is that twentieth-century science fiction has been mostly (although clearly not exclusively) an American phenomenon-produced and consumed in America, or, if not, then at least heavily influenced by American SF-and race has been one of the most important cultural and social debates in postwar American life. It is not surprising that SF, a genre devoted to the encounter with difference, should have so often dramatised the various encounters of racial difference that have done so much to shape contemporary American culture, from the civil rights movements of the 1960s and the explosion of black cultural expression of the 1960s and 1970s, through the racial tension of the 1980s.
