Power Disruptions: Delany's and Okorafor's Lyric Energies

Analyzing Samuel R. Delany's "We, in Some Power's Strange Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" (1968) and Nnedi Okorafor's "Spider the Artist" (2011), this article argues that both science fiction stories respond to forms of energy extraction and their effects on both the environment and the people who live with and in it, as well as the sociocultural forms extraction generates. Engaging Afrofuturist discourse, in Delany's case, and africanfuturist approaches, in Okorafor's, the stories likewise also use different lyric forms to disrupt the narratives of the dominant energy regimes presented, offering instead new modes of social and cultural being beyond the linear stories of extraction.