Cosmic Quilombos and Digital Orishas: Hacking History with Candomblé and Code

It starts in the ruins.

A post-slavery dystopia that looks a lot like today. A favela that disappears into an interdimensional portal. An AI that prays to Ogun before launching its virus. An archive that bleeds, remembers, and won’t forgive.

Welcome to ficção científica afrocentrada brasileira, Brazil’s homegrown Black sci-fi rebellion. It doesn’t just imagine new worlds—it tears down the old ones with a machete in one hand and ancestral code in the other.

Forget white astronauts saving the galaxy or sleek dystopias where everyone’s a clone of Elon Musk. These stories are messier. Louder. Rooted in quilombos and samba, Candomblé and algorithms, funk parties and police violence. They are less about the future and more about refusing to be erased from it.

Colonial Time Machines Are Broken—Here’s the Hack

To get what this movement is doing, you first need to understand the clock it’s breaking. Brazil has always lived in a split timeline: the fantasy of racial democracy vs. the brutal reality of structural racism. From textbooks that skip over slavery’s horrors to media that pretends Brazil is just beach bodies and football, Black people are systematically pushed into a historical footnote.

Afro-Brazilian sci-fi isn’t just genre fiction. It’s a jailbreak from the linearity of colonial time. These authors don’t believe in progress as defined by Europe. Instead, they remix time like a DJ sampling ancestral rhythms. The future is circular. Time loops back on itself. The dead whisper instructions in code. A drone in 2050 still speaks in Yoruba.

In the words of writer Lu Ain-Zaila, one of the OGs of the scene:

“A ficção científica negra é o retorno dos nossos que nunca partiram.”
(Black science fiction is the return of those who never left.)

Meet the Writers Who Are Making It Cosmic

Lu Ain-Zaila isn’t just a writer—she’s a literary hacker. Her 2017 book Inquebrável (Unbreakable) delivers a post-apocalyptic Brazil where a Black teenage girl leads a psychic-tech rebellion. Think Octavia Butler with Rio slang and survival instincts honed by navigating urban racism.

Then there’s Fábio Kabral, whose novels O Caçador Cibernético da Rua 13 and Ritos de Passagem mash up Afro-Brazilian mythology, Blade Runner aesthetics, and favela slang. Kabral coined the term “afropresentismo”—Afro-presentism—as a direct clapback to the idea that Black futures are always distant dreams. “We’re already in the future,” he says. “We just don’t get credit for it.”

Also worth tracking is Ale Santos, a digital griot and Twitter thread master who brings Black Brazilian history to the masses—then twists it with speculative fire. His novel O Último Ancestral injects AI, genetic memory, and diaspora survival into Brazil’s official forgetting machine.

These are not stories being workshopped at MFA programs in Rio. These are firebombs aimed at a system that still wants to kill Black joy and call it progress.

Quilombos in Orbit: What Makes It Afro-Brazilian

Let’s be clear: this isn’t just Afrofuturism with a Brazilian flag slapped on top. It’s something gnarlier, more tangled. Brazilian Blackness has its own ghosts—slavery lasted longer here than almost anywhere else, and its aftershocks are in every favela raid, every underfunded school, every unmarked grave.

That’s why the “sci” in this sci-fi often stands for spiritual tech. You’ll see orishas reprogramming fate, sacred rhythms used to disable surveillance systems, and ancestors who literally pilot ships made from recycled dreams. These aren’t metaphors. They’re operating systems.

And the setting? Forget sleek megacities. This is cyberquilombo. Makeshift satellites patched together in the periphery. Cosmic ships built from funk samples and broken data. “We build tech the way our people always survived,” said one zine from the now-defunct São Paulo collective AfroTekno. “With improvisation, community, and spite.”

From the Favelas to the Festivals: Where the Movement Lives

Afro sci-fi in Brazil doesn’t just live in books. It spills into slam poetry, zines, DJ sets, indie video games, and even VR art installations. It’s in the parties thrown by AfroFuturismoBR, the digital resistance tutorials coming out of Recife’s underground scene, and the voice modulations used by trans Black artists to shift reality in real-time.

There are collectives like Pretaria.org, publishers like Malê, and university programs like UFRJ’s Afro-Diasporic Media Studies now teaching this stuff seriously. But the real energy lives in the informal networks—in Instagram DMs, Telegram groups, community centers, and WhatsApp chains that remix reality before it hits the mainstream.

Remember: in a country where libraries are burned, sometimes the cloud is the safest place for revolution.

This Is Not Entertainment. This Is Retaliation.

Let’s get one thing straight: this isn’t Marvel’s Afrofuturism. This isn’t about putting a Black face on a white franchise and calling it revolutionary. Brazilian Black sci-fi doesn’t want to be palatable, exportable, or sanitized for a global audience. It doesn’t want your applause. It wants your discomfort.

Because here, sci-fi isn’t a genre—it’s a weapon. A coded message passed from the margins. A spell. A refusal.

At its core, ficção científica afrocentrada brasileira is retaliating against centuries of erasure, not with rifles or riots, but with narratives that rupture colonial logic. It’s an insurgency against the enforced silence of state archives. Against the myth of “racial democracy” that Brazil sold to itself while police helicopters sprayed bullets over Complexo do Alemão. Against a literary canon that still treats Machado de Assis like an honorary white man and forgets Abdias do Nascimento on purpose.

This is revenge writing. Page by page, line by line, these stories avenge what Brazil tries to forget: the 4.9 million Africans dragged across the Atlantic; the Black mothers whose sons disappear nightly into carceral oblivion; the land stolen, the gods demonized, the languages extinctified.

In these futures, those ghosts come back. But not as victims.

They return as hackers, warlocks, shapeshifters, insurgents, guerrilla historians.
They don’t just haunt the nation—they reprogram it.

And that retaliation isn’t metaphorical. It’s happening right now.

In Ritos de Passagem, Fábio Kabral writes of a re-urbanized Brazil where AI built by Black engineers and orisha priests monitor the psychic wellbeing of formerly enslaved populations. In O Último Ancestral, Ale Santos imagines memory as a biological weapon—ancestral trauma encoded in DNA and triggered as a defensive tech against state violence.

These stories don’t want to entertain you. They want to deprogram you.

In other words, this literature isn’t just speculative—it’s militant. It’s not asking to be taught in schools. It’s demanding that schools be rebuilt from the ground up. With new curricula. New timelines. New cosmologies.

And if Brazil isn’t ready for that? Too bad. The upload has already begun.

The Risks of Being Seen

With visibility comes capitalism. The same cultural industry that once ignored these stories now wants a piece—without necessarily respecting the roots. Editors ask writers to tone down the Yoruba. Art galleries tokenize cyberquilombos. Streaming platforms want the look, but not the fight.

Kabral warns of this often: “They want our style, but not our struggle.” There’s already concern that Afrofuturism in Brazil is becoming another aesthetic trend—Afro on the surface, colonial underneath.

That’s why collectives are building their own spaces, their own publishing models, their own distribution pipelines. Because the future—real future—is not something you wait for. You code it. You write it. You dream it out loud in a language the state never learned to suppress.

The Future Is Black, Brazilian, and Bootlegged

Whether it’s a comic zine hand-distributed in Bahia or a hacked VR ritual in a community center in Rio, ficção científica afrocentrada brasileira is not asking for permission.

It’s asking better questions.

What happens when a favela becomes a spaceport?
When ancestral spirits are encrypted in microchips?
When time is no longer colonized?

These stories are the new archives. They’re rewriting national memory in the cloud. They’re smuggling truth through fiction. They’re imagining justice that doesn’t need to ask the courts for a verdict.

And if you think sci-fi is just lasers and aliens, you’re not ready.

Because here, the revolution already happened.

And it looked nothing like Star Wars.