Stephen Curry Book Club Picks Tim Fielder’s ‘Matty's Rocket’

Underrated, NBA basketball champion Stephen Curry's book club with Literati, has chosen Tim Fielder’s self-published graphic novel Matty’s Rocket as its February 2022 reading selection.

Fielder will be interviewed online about the book and its selection by Ytasha L. Womack (author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture) on February 20 at 4pm EST. The interview will be part of the Carniegie Hall Afrofuturism Festival, a city-wide Afrofuturism Festival set for February-March 2022.

In a statement released for Literati book club members, Curry said Matty’s Rocket “represents a reclamation of new and classic storylines for Black folks. And this story is straight-up fun!” The book has also been praised by novelist Junot Diaz and cartoonist Jeff Smith.

Matty’s Rocket is an alternate-history Afrofuturist sci-fi adventure tale set in a 1930s-1940s Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon version of the future but with such historic realities as Jim Crow segregation and the Harlem Renaissance intact and key to its plot. It is the fictional story of Matty Watty, a young Black girl growing up in the Mississippi delta in the early 1900s, and her determination to get a space pilots license and eventually command her own rocket ship—despite the racist restrictions and barriers set in her path. The book was first self-published by Fielder's Dieselfunk Studios as a series and then collected into a trade paperback in 2019.

Fielder said of the book club selection, "I’m so proud and honored to bring back Matty’s Rocket to a larger audience and to spread my love of action adventure, science fiction, strong women, and Afrofuturism."

Tim Fielder is a New York City-based graphic novel artist, animation artist and illustrator. He is the author of Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale, an epic sci-fi graphic novel published in 2021 by Amistad. He has been interviewed on the More to Come Podcast. Fielder will also be the subject of Black Metropolis: 30 years of Afrofuturism, Comics, Music, Animation, Decapitated Chickens, Heroes, Villains, and Negroes, a retrospective exhibition of his works in animation, cartooning, illustration and design over the last 30 years. The Black Metropolis exhibition will be mounted at the Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem and will also be a part of Carniegie Hall’s upcoming city-wide Afrofuturism Festival set for February-March 2022.