ONYXCON celebrates the impact, contributions, and presence of The African Diaspora in the Popular Arts. Popular Arts meaning comic books/graphic novels, video games/interactive arts, TV/Film, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Action/Adventure, and all related genres.
Time: August 17, 2012 to August 18, 2012
Location: Atlanta, GA
Website: http://www.onyxcon.com
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New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley delivers two speculative tales, in one volume, of everyday people exposed to life-altering truths.
The Gift of Fire On the Head of a Pin The Gift of Fire / On the Head of a Pin: Two Short Novels from Crosstown to Oblivion by Walter Mosley |
Time: February 16, 2012 from 6:30pm to 8:30pm
Location: Clough Commons Auditorium, Georgia Tech
Organized By: Geogia Tech Science Fiction Department
Event Description:
Come join us as we discuss the state of Black Science Fiction, share our stories and perform a group reading created especially for this event. Participating in this first of its kind event are Ed Hall, L.M. Davis, Milton Davis, Alan Jones, Alicia McCalla, Wendy Raven McNair and Balogun Ojetade.
The Black Science Fiction Society
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In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.
Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuilding civilization under orders from the provisional government based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street — aka Zone One — but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety — the “malfunctioning” stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams working in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz’s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world. And then things start to go wrong. Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One brilliantly subverts the genre’s conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century. |
The bestselling science fiction featuring African American characters or by African Americans published so far in 2011.
| National bestselling author L.A. Banks’s electrifying new paranormal series is set in a sizzling world where Dark and Light are trapped in an eternal struggle for the fate of mankind. Celeste Jackson has fought all her life against a fog of hallucination and substance abuse, but it’s not until she meets her protector, Azrael, an angel who has left the safety of the Light, that she learns of the evil forces that have been trying to ruin her, and why. A fierce battle for control of the mortal realm is brewing, and only Celeste—with the help of the Remnant, her half-human, half-angel brethren—can stand in the way. Together, Celeste and Azrael must gather an army of sensitives to defeat the dark powers that have ruled humanity for centuries, but time is running out. If Azrael surrenders to his growing desire for Celeste, he risks being trapped among humanity forever. But the longer he stays, the harder she is to resist. To save the world, Celeste must draw on her own dark experiences with addiction to help Azrael overcome the one temptation that could possibly make him an eternal prisoner—his obsession with her. |
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| When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost. Now, his immortal brethren have decided David must return and leave his family in Miami. Instead, David vows to invoke a forbidden ritual to keep Jessica and his daughter with him forever. Harrowing, engrossing and skillfully rendered, My Soul to Keep traps Jessica between the desperation of immortals who want to rob her of her life and a husband who wants to rob her of her soul. With deft plotting and an unforgettable climax, this tour de force reminiscent of early Anne Rice will win Due a new legion of fans. |
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| The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are “different” must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey’s mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world as those who are “different” try to seize history and the day. |  |
| Ana is a Companion, one of the artificial people created at Head Box Industries. She is a gift to Roland, a college friend of Head Box Industries’ founder.
Ana is beautiful. She’s designed based on Roland’s fantasy of his perfect woman – his dream girl. From her soft, warm skin to her simulated breathing to the way she sighs under his caress, Ana is the perfect replication of a real woman. No one but Roland, her creator, and his closest friends know that she’s not human. Ana is programmed to obey Roland’s every command, to fulfill his every desire. She’s programmed to simulate love, if that’s what Roland commands. Ana wasn’t programmed to love on her own, and certainly not to desire love. But Ana loves Roland. She wants Roland to love her. Roland thinks there’s something wrong with Ana’s programming. Why else would she think that he would love her – a walking, talking computer? He decides that Ana needs her programming updated so that she can be fixed. Ana doesn’t want to be fixed. She wants to be loved. And when Roland tries to force her to be updated, he discovers that his dream girl could become his nightmare. |
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| Val Mitchellson and his wife Zoe are on the run. As an up and coming African American couple, who are expecting their first child they seem to have it all. However, all is not as it seems. A sparkling Z sits on the back of every Zulnilshian, giving them the energy they need to live, but when Zoe met Val at a church picnic she had no idea that he was an alien who carried, the Rainbow Z. Val was sent to earth to rescue his ruler’s daughters, who were exiled to Earth during the Xindamian war that occurred on their home planet. Xindamians had been banished to earth and they were fighting to return home, after learning that they are the cause of a major epidemic in humans. When Val learns that the American government wants to capture and do testing on his unborn child, he takes Zoe and escapes into the mountains, leaving the Princesses behind. This prompts the ruler of his planet to travel to earth in search of Val, to kill him. Val has to find a way to protect his family while helping to prevent an intergalactic war between the two planets. |
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| Sherem is brilliant. She’s travelled the world. She speaks a dozen ancient and modern languages, including Fan-Girl. And she can use—or improvise—a hundred weapons from around the globe or of her own design. Quite the list of accomplishments for a 25 year old.
Or is that 2500? When best friend/roomies Hamza and Yehat, two Gen-X brainiacs too smart for their own good, meet Sherem during the heat of summer, they take one look at her and expect sparks to fly. They just don’t expect them to come from the edges of blades. Minister Faust’s first foray into astonishing adventure, pop culture craziness and Africentric awe, The Coyote Kings, Book One: Space-Age Bachelor Pad is already a cult classic that had readers, critics and even Hollywood fluttering with excitement. |
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| For those who love the work of Philip K. Dick, Walter Mosley, Nnedi Okorafor or William S. Burroughs, Journey to Mecha–Minister Faust’s second collection of short stories–presents eights startling, bizarre, frightening and comical tales exploring inner and outer worlds of experience.
In these stories, we behold the terrifying results of planetary colonisation from the coloniser’s perspective (“The Ghosts of Carnivores”), anti-colonial liberation struggle at the cosmic level (“The Sun Dogs”), philosophical explorations of the nature of organic and artificial intelligence (“Droplets of Thought”), and the hypocrisy that afflicts human communities (“Shecky the Green Pig”), among many other tales. This is Minister Faust at some of his earliest and most remarkable leaps of imagination. |
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| For fans of Walter Mosley, Eldridge Cleaver, Nalo Hopkinson, Philip K. Dick, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tananarive Due, John Gardner, William S. Burroughs, Chuck D., Steven Barnes, and Stephen King, comes E-Force: Sixteen Stories of Pure Freaking Awesomeness, including a companion story to Minister Faust’s acclaimed novel The Alchemists of Kush.
Containing all the stories collected in A Bad Bad Beat Was Brewing and Journey to Mecha, E-Force is the definitive short fiction collection by Minister Faust, an author increasingly described as one of the best writers of his generation. E-Force presents sixteen wide-ranging stories, including the hilarious, the terrifying, the mystical and the compassionate. Behold anti-colonial liberation struggle at the cosmic level (“The Sun Dogs”), philosophical explorations of the nature of organic and artificial intelligence (“Droplets of Thought”), the hypocrisy that afflicts human communities (“Shecky the Green Pig”), a revisionist take on D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (“The Worth of a Nation”), and a Grendel-style psychohistory of ancient Egypt’s founding myth (“The Belly of the Crocodile,” a companion story to Minister Faust’s novel The Alchemists of Kush), among many others. E-Force is an astonishing journey by a visionary author. |
| Young Nathan Walker performs feats with his mind that normal humans can’t fathom, feats that drain his mind and body. His ability is vital in keeping his father, an early twentieth century civil rights activist, from harm. Tragedy strikes when Nathan’s fear of his own power causes him to turn away from it. In the wake of that tragedy, Nathan focuses his vast and frightening capabilities on revenge. He will not stop until vengeance is his, even if he must sacrifice himself to obtain it. |  |
| Fledgling, Octavia Butler’s first new novel in seven years, is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly un-human needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: she is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted—and still wants—to destroy her and those she cares for, and how she can save herself. Fledgling is a captivating novel that tests the limits of “otherness” and questions what it means to be truly human. |  |
| Sasha Carrington has grown up feeling like an outsider, and her parents are too concerned with scaling the Lincoln, Connecticut, social ladder to even notice her. They’d be really horrified to know about the supernatural abilities Sasha and her friends Krystal and Jake possess. But as part of the Mystyx, Sasha has found her place. Now her parents have suddenly taken an interest in everything she does, and their timing couldn’t be worse. Sasha’s father wants her to become BFFs with snooty Alyssa Turner, who hates Krystal for stealing her boyfriend. Then there’s Antoine Watson, the boy Sasha has liked forever, the boy her parents would never approve of. But with the dark side getting more dangerous by the day, and the Mystyx’s own powers growing in unexpected ways, Sasha is facing choices that could affect her friends, her love life—and even her destiny…. |
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The Kid With The Cubed Fro is the new all age comic book series from Graffiti On The Sun.
The Series follows the adventures of a young super genius African American boy that everyone calls the kid with the cubed fro, due to his square shaped afro. A kid that due to his high IQ causes him to often be at the epicenter of the weirdness of the world, everything from aliens invasion, monsters, bullies, secret government programs, quantum physics mishaps and that’s just a few of the things that the kid most use his smarts to deal with. “In some ways this series is an oxymoron.” Says Martin Jackson the creator of The Kid With Cubed Fro. “On one hand even though kid genius characters are nothing new we haven’t seen many of Kid with the Cubed Fro’s background or personality in the media at least not as the lead and so that something fresh and new. But on the other hand the series somewhat a throw back to old comics. Not in the retro sense of just trying to copy the surface style of things in the past but the series has a similar energy and feel and gives the reader something they won’t find much in the modern comic market.” The Kid With the Cubed Fro is on sale now in .99¢ eBook format at Amazon.com See also For more information please visited the Graffiti On The Sun website http://graffiti-on-the-sun.blogspot.com. |
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With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like “love” and “illness” now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.
Graywolf Press |
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AWAKE is book 2 of a YA fantasy trilogy told from the perspective of an African American teen girl, Adisa Summers. Adisa and Micah’s saga continues as the teen couple race against time to save Micah. However conflict interferes with their efforts as well as other forces in the super world. When Adisa tries to secretly meet the parents who abandoned her, an explosive confrontation with Micah drives the couple apart and threatens to destroy them both. Adisa must conquer her fears and take a stand now that she’s finally Awake.
Wendy Raven McNair |
Location: LAX Marriott in Los Angeles
Website: www.loscon37.org
Description: Welcome to Loscon 37, Dark Loscon.
November 26-28th 2010
at the LAX Marriott in Los Angeles
$45.00 through November 14th
Loscon is the primary Los Angeles Regional Science Fiction literary convention produced by the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society.
Held each year over Thanksgiving weekend it is our main fund raising event.
The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society is the oldest continuously meeting science fiction literary society in the world.
Our meeting are held every Thursday night at our clubhouse on Burbank Blvd in North Hollywood:
11513 Burbank Blvd North Hollywood, CA 91601
Date: November 26-28, 2010
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An award-winning literary author presents her first foray into supernatural fantasy with a novel of post-apocalyptic Africa.
In a far future, post-nuclear-holocaust Africa, genocide plagues one region. The aggressors, the Nuru, have decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate the Okeke. But when the only surviving member of a slain Okeke village is brutally raped, she manages to escape, wandering farther into the desert. She gives birth to a baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand and instinctively knows that her daughter is different. She names her daughter Onyesonwu, which means “Who Fears Death?” in an ancient African tongue. Reared under the tutelage of a mysterious and traditional shaman, Onyesonwu discovers her magical destiny-to end the genocide of her people. The journey to fulfill her destiny will force her to grapple with nature, tradition, history, true love, the spiritual mysteries of her culture-and eventually death itself. DAW Hardcover |