In Darieck Scott’s novel Dream-Slaves, our universe is dead. But everything each of us have ever experienced and knew for all the years of recorded human history lives on, preserved under the care of massive, unimaginably powerful artificial intelligences built to ferry our memories to a new universe so that we might live again. These AI aim to replay human history exactly as it happened before. But the powers indigenous to the new world are fighting back. In the center of this war between old and new powers is Aleixo, who discovers the role he will play in this new world—as a Dream-Slave. Aleixo will lead the struggle for emancipation as he deals with his own quandary: Is he human, or just a dream?
About the Author
Darieck Scott is a professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Scott is the author of Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics (NYU Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Studies and was also a Finalist for the 2023 Locus Award for Nonfiction, as well as for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize. His previous book, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (NYU Press 2010), was awarded the 2011 Alan Bray Memorial Prize for Queer Studies by the Modern Language Association. Scott is also the author of the novels Hex: A Novel of Love Spells (Da Capo, 2007) and Traitor to the Race (Dutton, 1995), and the editor of Best Black Gay Erotica (Cleis, 2004). His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Freedom in This Village (Carroll & Graf, 2005), Black Like Us (Cleis, 2002), Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (Harper Perennial, 2000), Shade: An Anthology of Fiction by Gay Men of Afridan Descent (Harper Perennial, 1996), and Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in The Americas and Europe (1995), as well as in the erotica collections Flesh and the Word 4 (Plume, 1997) and Inside Him: New Gay Erotica (Running Press, 2006). He has published essays in Callaloo, GLQ, The Americas Review, and American Literary History, and is co-editor with Ramzi Fawaz of the American Literature special issue “Queer About Comics,” winner of the 2018 Best Special Issue from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.