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As a community college faculty member, I read a lot, and I read on broad range of topics from books and articles on human sexuality, folklore, the opioid epidemic and addiction, education, social justice, poetry and literature, automation, history, civility, and race and prejudice, among other topics. My father, a retired American Studies professor from the University of Pennsylvania, recommended Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014) as the best book on American slavery he had ever read. If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it, with the caveat that it is 437 pages and it is a hard read-meaning that it brutally lays out the horrors of White Americans choosing to be enslavers ofAfricans and people of African descent, choosing to expand the territories where enslaved people could be tortured and exploited, and choosing to profit off the labor and products of enslaved people (even when they didn't own slaves themselves). Baptist makes clear that slavery was a national commitment, from North to South and from East to West.
After Baptist's book, I moved on to some lighter reading, or so I thought. Knowing that I often read and write about human sexuality, a friend had recommended N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth series (which is a trilogy made up of The Fifth Season (2015), The Obelisk Gate (2016), and The Stone Sky (2017)). And while one character in first novel, Tonkee, is described as an intersex individual, a female with a penis (Jemisin, TFS 233-234) and the need to shave her face (Jemisin TFS 241-242), what struck me most about the series was its depiction of slavery on various levels. Since slavery in science fiction had struck a cord with me, someone else recommended (Toe Me Ada Yemi) Tomi Ádeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone, and I found myself looking at the two ways these sets of stories explored slavery in the genre of science fiction/fantasy.
In a gross oversimplification of Jemisin's three novels, human beings have angered Father Earth by driving the Moon out of orbit. The result has been cataclysmic climate events, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanos, and continental realignment. The major continents are all attached as one big landmass known as The...