Science fiction has traditionally been a genre by and for white men, and as such its earliest productions tended to portray a whitewashed future free of minorities as the implied ideal, as in Fritz Lang’s international blockbuster Metropolis(1927). Many works were marked by “unthinking racism and antisemitism which were long rife in popular fiction of all kinds” (Nicholls 947). Negative attitudes toward blacks, Jews, and Asians were often openly expressed, such as with the evil Asian antagonist of the popular 1930s Flash Gordon serials, but in many others, a whitewashed future free of minorities was simply implied as the ideal, as in international blockbuster Metropolis. Few stories countered these in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and racial anxieties continued to permeate mainstream science fiction well into the contemporary age. Even into the eighties, with the cyberpunk movement, paranoia regarding Asians made frequent appearances in science fiction works, with books like Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and films like Blade Runner (1982) playing into this fear of Asian influence.

After World War II, and particularly with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s, science fiction began to emerge more frequently that promoted better racial relations. These types of stories began to become more than anomalies in the genre, and were actually produced by mainstream SF writers. By the 1970s, a number of black authors were writing science fiction, and by the 1990s, people were talking about “Afrofuturism”– science fiction that centers on issues of race and their relation to science and technology. Early pioneers of the Afrofuturist movement, such as Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, had distinct writing styles and places within other movements, yet shared a common theme in their works – they brought race into their novels as integral parts, woven into the stories and characters in ways that made these issues inseparable from the rest of the content.

In the past twenty years, science fiction dealing with racial issues has become a major subgenre. The Afrofuturist movement continues to dominate this new kind of storytelling, as works examining African-American contributions to the genre vastly outnumber those looking at other cultures. However, anthologies have been produced focusing on Latino science fiction as well as African-American, and the issue of race in general is one of interest to many contemporary science fiction scholars. While a great deal of work remains to be done in this arena, great strides have been made and are continuing to be made at introducing these issues into science fiction and exploring how they play out in the environment of extrapolated fiction.