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careful consideration of the ethics of power, assimilation, survival, and
change when alien colonizers claim humanity itself, even beyond taking
the world, as its ground for colonization. But this isn’t Clinton’s strategy.
Clinton seeks to step over the traps of the American black-white
paradigm. What comes out of the spaceship in its ermine-coated, silver
shining audacity, “looking,” as one commentator put it, “like a cross
between Star Trek and Sanford and Son” (Peck, 13 E), is a remarkably
generous outpouring of abundance: a rich, loud, layered music, an
imaginative, colorful, expensive stage-show and a remarkable
forgiveness. Instead of reacting to oppression and taking what seems a
necessarily oppositional position, Clinton claims a higher space and
comes back to our world to save it from itself. As Walter Mosley notes
about the lack of black sf writers in America:
If black writers want . . . to branch out past the realism
of racism and race, they [are] . . . curtailed by their own
desire to document the crimes of America. A further
deterrent [is]. . . the white literary establishment’s desire
for blacks to write about being black in a white world, a
limitation imposed upon a limitation. (406)
Clinton moves past this by inventing a b