James Nicoll Reviews

2021 Amazon’s Black Star series offers six short science fiction pieces by six different Black authors. To quote:

The sky is not the limit. From an alley in New York to an interstellar wormhole, the path to the future looks different for everyone. These cosmic short stories from some of today’s most influential Black authors reveal a universe of possibilities. 

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Nnedi Okorafor’s 2021 Noor is a stand-alone near-future Africanfuturist novel.

Ultimate Corp transformed Africa, lavishing Africans with a bounty of modern luxuries in return for which it asks only … lots and lots of money. Oh yes, and for Africans to abandon any beliefs or customs that might prevent them from accepting Ultimate’s terms and conditions.

In AO Oju’s case, Ultimate transformed AO’s deformed and injured body into a cybernetic marvel. Unexpected consequence: this marked her as a demon to her Nigerian neighbours. Her new capabilities allowed AO to kill five over-confident would-be vigilantes. 

Suspecting, with good reason, that self-defence will be seen as murder, AO flees north towards the Red Eye, a nigh-Jovian-scale¹ permanent windstorm. 

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Nnedi Okorafor’s 2021 Remote Control is an upcoming science fiction novella. Unless you’re reading this after January 2021, in which case strike ​“upcoming.”

Sankofa wanders Ghana in the company of a fox, visiting community after community. The people she encounters fall over themselves providing her with food and clothing. In part, this is because Sankofa provides a useful service. In large part, it is because she can burn people down to their bones merely by willing it. 

Her story begins in the rural town of Wulugu, when she was just a sickly girl named Fatima.

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Nnedi Okorafor’s LaGuardia is a near-future/alternate-future comic. Art is by Tana Ford and lettering by Sal Cipriano; the colourist is James Devlin.

In 2010 the first extra-terrestrials arrived in Nigeria. Nigeria, or at least its national government, welcomed the aliens and benefited from imported technology. Other nations, like the United States, took a very different view. Let Nigeria have its aliens, only let them have their aliens far from America. 

Unsurprising since, as returning Nigerian-America doctor Future Nwafor Chukwuebuka knows all too well, this is more or less the position the US takes on people like her. 

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2016’s Binti is the first volume in Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti series.

Early one morning, young Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka packs her things and leaves her home. None of her family is awake. None of them would approve if they knew she was leaving. And why she was leaving. Binti is abandoning her Himba community to accept a scholarship at university.

And not just any university. Oomza Uni is on another world. Binti is not just leaving her homeland of Namib behind. She is leaving Earth.

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2018’s Binti: The Night Masquerade is the third and possibly final instalment in Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti series. 

Still digesting the lessons learned in Binti: Home, young Binti is woken by a dreadful vision: her family trapped in the basement of their burning dwelling. She rushes home. She finds charred ruins and no visible survivors.

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2017’s Binti: Home is the sequel to Nnedi Okorafor’s Nebula and Hugo-winning Binti.

Binti has been a student at Oomza University for a year. It’s a year that has transformed her, both physically and mentally. Some of those changes were beneficial. Others, like her post-traumatic stress disorder, are not. Seeking an end to the nightmares, Binti returns to her home on Earth, in Africa, to participate in a healing pilgrimage. 

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You might be expecting a review of the 1993 Tiptree winner but since I reviewed that book, Ammonite, last year, that’s not going to happen. Or alternatively, already happened last year. Instead, have one of the more notable books from the 2014 Tiptree Honor List.

2014’s Lagoon puts a familiar situation — first contact with aliens — in a setting that is likely unfamiliar to most readers of the book. Having (presumably) given the Earth a good lookover, the aliens in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon pass over such standard venues for first contact as the UN building in New York City, the National Mall in Washington, or even a particularly large front yard in America’s Midwest.

Instead, their ship sets down off the African coast, near Nigeria’s sprawling metropolis, Lagos. 

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