Discover Northwest sci-fi authors with a book from this vending machine

Neighborhood Reads

On June 19, thousands of Seattleites visited the Northwest African American Museum for a daylong Juneteenth celebration spilling across Judkins Park with live music, a skateboarding party and a festival spotlighting Black-owned businesses. As part of the festivities, NAAM waived its admission, throwing open its doors to visitors.

Just inside the museum is the Community Living Room, a space for anyone to gather, browse shelves of books celebrating Black excellence and engage in conversations. Juneteenth celebrants who wandered into the space almost immediately stopped in their tracks to take in NAAM’s newest attraction.

All day, visitors crowded around a shiny purple-and-turquoise box fashioned from steel and glass, a little larger than a two-door refrigerator. Emblazoned with stars, strips of LED light and the motto “Claim your magic/Create your future,” the box is labeled at the bottom in cool, futuristic font: “Sistah Scifi Book Vending Machine.” There’s a slot to insert cash and credit cards, but instead of candy bars and bags of chips, the machine distributes science fiction and fantasy books and comics written by Black Northwest authors including Octavia E. Butler, Nisi Shawl, Somaiya Daud and David F. Walker.

The vending machine is a collaboration between NAAM and Isis Asare, who founded an online bookstore called Sistah Scifi in 2019 that builds community around science fiction and fantasy written by Black and Indigenous authors. Each book in the vending machine has a QR code on it that shoppers can scan with their phones to view more information and recommendations.

“I’ve been familiar with Sistah Scifi from social media,” NAAM operations director Ashanti Davis explained, “and Isis reached out to us in the beginning of this year to see about us putting the vending machine in the museum.”

Asare had previously launched two vending machines — one in downtown Oakland, Calif., and the other at Mixed coffee shop in Mill Creek — and was looking to expand. They agreed to launch the device as part of NAAM’s Juneteenth celebration, and NAAM requested that its machine spotlight “specifically authors who were from the Pacific Northwest — people who were born and raised here, or people who came to this region and called it home, much like Octavia Butler did,” Davis explained.

LaNesha DeBardelaben, the president and CEO of NAAM, said literature is an essential part of the museum’s mission.

“We are trying to center Black authors that speak to the entire Black experience, to all our triumphs and our tragedies, because there are lessons in all of that,” she said.

In addition to transforming the stodgy idea of a museum gift shop into a community-centric gathering space, DeBardelaben and NAAM launched the Knowledge is Power giveaway program, which she said has thus far “distributed over 20,000 free, new beautifully illustrated African American children’s books” to local youth.

“This vending machine aligns with our advocation of Black literature and cultural literacy,” DeBardelaben said, noting with pride that throughout the Juneteenth celebrations, “children stood all around the Sistah Scifi vending machine, and their eyes were beaming with excitement and enthusiasm.”

Sales have been brisk. Davis said the museum is already awaiting a fresh box of books to restock the machine, and DeBardelaben confirmed that NAAM is very happy with the project so far. “This partnership with Isis means so much to our mission and to our community, and we don’t see it ending anytime soon,” she said.

During a phone call, Asare is quick to point out that she didn’t invent the idea of selling books in vending machines. The first such device sold books to commuters in London’s Tube over a century ago. And the company that manufactures the Sistah Scifi machine “has thousands of book vending machines across the country, most of which are in schools,” Asare said, adding that “Sistah Scifi’s is one of the only commercial uses that I know of.”

Asare, who divides her time between Oakland and Seattle, founded Sistah Scifi because “some friends and I had just finished discussing ‘Octavia’s Brood,’ and someone said, ‘Of course you know about Nnedi Okorafor,’” and Asare admitted that she’d never heard of, let alone read, any books by the beloved Black sci-fi author. “I felt like I missed out. First, I love science fiction. Two, I spent most of my life reading and focusing on Black literature,” but she’d somehow never been exposed to the deeper universe of Black science fiction and fantasy.

In the years since, Asare has hosted book clubs, book fairs and “Wine Down Wednesdays” conversation groups, both virtually and in physical locations around Seattle and Oakland. She gets asked a lot about the possibility of opening a physical bookstore, but the vending machines will be Sistah Scifi’s sole physical presence for the foreseeable future.

“There are no plans to open a brick-and-mortar bookstore. I love focusing exclusively on sci-fi and highlighting Black and Indigenous women, nonbinary and transgender authors, and I think it would be hard for me to focus exclusively on them and have the overhead of a traditional bookstore,” she said.

Instead, on Instagram and her own website, Asare is focused on promoting Black sci-fi to an international audience.

“I want readers to come on the site and, even if you have read extensively of sci-fi and fantasy or Black and Indigenous literature, you’ll find somebody you never heard of,” she said. More than that, “I want all the books to be high-quality, award-winning titles.”

Asare has found eager partners at NAAM. “I’m a big sci-fi and fantasy nerd,” Davis laughed. “I was definitely a ‘Star Trek’ kid. I would run amok around my house with my headband over my eyes, like LeVar Burton [as Geordi La Forge in ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation.’]”

Science fiction’s tendencies toward universality, empathy and inclusiveness have always appealed to broad audiences, and non-Black audiences are eagerly responding to Sistah Scifi’s message and mission.

“The subject matter and topics and themes of these books are for everyone,” Davis said. “And so we welcome everyone to visit the Northwest African American Museum to check out our exhibitions, but also to find a new title that they can absolutely love — and geek out on.”

What are Sistah Scifi customers reading?

Isis Asare, the founder and CEO of Sistah Scifi, is always discovering and talking about books, both in her regular stream of book clubs and on social media. One of her latest favorites is “Sorrowland,” a novel by Rivers Solomon, who Asare calls “a very talented writer who is the personification of what I want Sistah Scifi to represent: Gender nonconforming, queer, Black — and their books are so massively well written.” The genre-twisting gothic novel about a pregnant woman seeking refuge from a strict religious community explores “ideas of identity in terms of Blackness, gender and sexuality.”

“Black Candle Women” by Diane Marie Brown “follows three generations of women who live in one household and they each practice some form of hoodoo/voodoo in their own different ways,” Asare explained. “It’s a great story about mother/daughter relationships and navigating love, loss, grief and intergenerational trauma.”

The Sistah Scifi vending machine at NAAM carries several comics written and co-written by Oregon writer David F. Walker. Asare recommends “Naomi,” his all-ages graphic novel from DC Comics that centers on a young Black woman living in the fictional Pacific Northwest town of Port Oswego who discovers that she has superpowers rivaling those of Superman and Wonder Woman.

Moses Ose Utomi’s debut novella “The Lies of the Ajungo” is set in a desert world in which children are forced to be mutilated at age 13 in order to keep receiving water from a merciless empire. Asare says the book examines how power and technology “can be used as a tool for liberation and how can it be used as a tool of oppression,” which is a common theme among many books on Sistah Scifi’s virtual shelves.

Correction: An earlier version of this story included a photo caption that referred to Seattle’s Northwest African American Museum as the National African American Museum. The National Museum of African American History and Culture is in Washington, D.C.