Cyberfunk
Cyberfunk
Walter Mosley Takes Black to the Future
This chapter examines Walter Mosley’s Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent Future (2001). It argues that while Futureland does borrow from conventions associated with both dystopia and the more recent phenomenon of “cyberpunk” science fiction, it also contains a vision of a future in which racially and economically marginalized individuals might find a space (or, perhaps, a cyberspace) in which to live their own lives. Mosley not only “foreground[s] racial and socioeconomic politics much more explicitly, thus creating a level of social allegory that is rarely present in cyberpunk as a whole” but also transcends classical dystopia because, “[u]nlike Zamyatin’s D-503, or John the Savage in Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), or Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) ... most, if not all, of Mosley’s protagonists in Futureland achieve a meaningful, albeit unconventional, degree of freedom from the metaphorical shackles of the system.”
Keywords: Walter Mosley, African American literature, Futureland, dystopia, science fiction
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