Book Review: Will This Be a Problem? The Anthology: Issue V

A unique collection of hauntingly engaging and imaginative stories

 

In addition to being entertaining, speculative fiction short stories can be an excellent way to process real life personal and societal issues through the prism of the fantastic. Will This Be a Problem? The Anthology: Issue V is an anthology of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror short stories, all by African writers. The collection, edited by Somto Ihezue and Olivia Kidula, varies from historical to contemporary, and includes a range of subtle nods or harshly direct commentary on society, religion, and politics. There are also thoughtful philosophical explorations, as well as straight, terrifying, wild adventures. All of stories are imaginative but also beautifully written and hauntingly engaging, incorporating elements of African culture, history, and spirituality.

At times, some of the selections raise an intriguing concept but then end abruptly, leaving the resolution to the reader’s imagination. Other stories dig deeply into complex situations offering interesting answers to philosophical questions. A standout in the collection is Kevin Rigathi’s twisty “If Memory Serves,” a story of science gone wrong in the commoditization of memory and culture. In this tale, a well-meaning scientist creates a way to extract traumatic memories from people but the result is not what he or society expects. In the vibe of the tv show Severance, the story explores the way good and bad memories shape our authentic selves and our defensive instincts. And it explores the way personal experiences can be exploited and cultures appropriated for dangerous purposes. “If Memory Serves” is an ideal companion piece to another story in the collection, the similarly haunting “The Market of Memories” by Azara Tswanya. “The Market of Memories” is the personal tale of a financially struggling woman who sells her memory of a beloved friend in exchange for money to feed her family. While wealthy people gorge on fetishized memories, the poor in her community lose more and more of themselves and their culture. 

That story is one of several that explore larger themes of colonization and cultural exploitation. “The Clans” by Tonny Ogwa is a tale of ancient clans blessed with superpowers from a powerful deity, however the arrival and ongoing influence of a European priest interferes with their powers and leads to unrest. For a more modern take on a similar theme, there is the uncomfortably relatable story “The Language We Have Learned to Carry in Our Skin” by Shingai Kagund. In this haunting story a young girl learns a disturbing secret about those in power and ponders this truth as she grows up to be a journalist and becomes exhausted by reporting on the never-ending violence and exploitation in our society. 

Some stories are more nihilistic such as Yvette Lisa Ndlovu’s “Dinosaurs Once Lived Here” which offers a sharp, cynical overview of the end of Earth. Among the more hopeful stories is one of my favorites in the collection, “Ash Baby” by Andrew Dkalira which offers a clever reimagining of the Biblical story of Job but, in this version, things are not as they seem. Another tragic but hopeful tale is Rutendo Chidzodzo’s “I’m Home,” a brief, second person narrative of a girl stolen by water spirits and the mother who grieves silently and prays for her return. 

The opening story in the anthology is “The Sirangori Fey Market” by Ephraim N. Orji. The story follows a woman who enters a forbidden marketplace filled with dangerous magical creatures as she seeks both answers and revenge for the death of a child. In another of my favorite tales, "Something Cruel" by Gabrielle Emem Harry, a trio of cynical but professional spiritual enforcers compete with each other to exact punishments on humans and each other as part of their obligations. The prose in this tale is smooth and inviting although the ending of this magical story is, more or less, left to the readers imagination. 

On the philosophical side, “Mr. Original Swag” by Victor Forna is told in the form of an interview that we can only hear one side of. Through the conversations we have a parable on the seductive nature of evil and in particular, the way it preys on the poor and vulnerable. At the other end of the spectrum is the very metaphysical “Commensalism, or the Labyrinth’s Vessels” by Albert Nkereuwem. As people look around at the many bad things in our world, some question why an all-powerful deity wouldn’t just stop humans from hurting each other and stop death, exploitation, environmental toxins and diseases. Wouldn’t it be better to just control humanity’s toxic behavior so that the earth and everyone in it is safe? This story offers a thoughtful vision of what it might look like if human beings no longer had free will to make bad choices and were instead controlled in a Borg-style hive mind. The effect is clever, poignant, and full of irony. The collection also includes Alex Tamei’s post-apocalyptic “A Song of Ruin,” Lucille Sambo’s alien adventure “Scales and Arabesques,” Matseliso Motsoane’s quirky “Baby Potion,” and Khaya Maseko’s time-distortion tale, “Acceptance.”

The final story in the collection, “Why Donkeys Have 44 Teeth” by Peter Nena, is an example of intriguing narrative pacing. The tale starts out creepily and slowly as a little boy ponders an odd dream about a talking donkey. But the story picks up speed as a horrific murder mystery and more dreams accelerate the tale. Then, like wheels on a rollercoaster, the story soon descend into horrific mayhem. This is another tale that leaves the ultimate ending to the reader’s imagination but the accelerating pace will leave you breathless and terrified with its old fashioned horror intensity. 

Despite some tales with abrupt endings, the solid prose and strong African cultural influence makes the book a highly enjoyable read. “Will This Be a Problem” is a uniquely satisfying anthology of fantastical stories. The collection has a strong range of tales, each with gorgeous writing and twisted adventures that will leave you intrigued or terrified, or both. In the end, the collection is less of an escape, and more of a truly unique exploration.

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Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights:

• Solid writing across a range of stories
• Some abrupt endings
• Mind bending exploration of philosophical and social issues

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Book Review: Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions

Imaginative fiction, Jamaican vibes, and random musings on life create a quirky anthology of speculative fiction

In her latest science fiction anthology, Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions, Nalo Hopkinson delivers a collection of short stories from various parts of her prolific writing career. One of the stories - Jamaica Ginger - is also co-written by Nisi Shawl. The narratives range from lengthy and thoughtful social commentary to short, quirky, fever-dream musings. Each tale includes a brief opening comment from the author, giving readers a bit of context for her writing process at the time of the story’s creation. Without a clear central theme to connect the tales, we have an assemblage that is chaotic, in a good way. The collection has a range of everything from steampunk robots and cybernetics gone wrong to monster babies and world-ending plagues. The result is an eclectic rambling of Caribbean-futuristic speculative fiction served in bite-sized pieces to fit a range of moods.

Many of the stories share themes of environmental abuse, particularly as it relates to water, which becomes a recurring symbolic element across the collection. In the tales, water manifests as lethal, nurturing, mysterious, familiar, victimized, powerful, comforting, and punitive. Many of the tales are specifically or impliedly set in Jamaica. Jamaica (Xaymaca) is known as “the land of wood and water” or “the land of rivers and springs,” so the essential presence of water is a natural element of the culture and the stories. The other recurring element is the language of Jamaica. Bits of Jamaican-inspired dialect, vernacular, and slang are woven into stories of dystopian futures or mystical creatures. Despite the Jamaica focus, several of the tales are distinctly not Jamaican, including “Child Moon” and, ironically, “Jamaica Ginger.” As is the case with most anthologies, some stories stand out as particularly engaging and thought-provoking.

“Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story” is set in a dystopian era where humanity is scattered across dense, stressful cities or complex floating water communities. In this future Earth, the ocean is no longer grand and beautiful but is an obstacle of dirty water caused by decades of misuse, climate change, and pollution; hence the story’s title. Jacquee is a member of a close-knit water community, but she is piloting her water vessel alone and is soon faced with unexpected danger. It’s a classic journey story with a few twists. She’s just recently undergone surgery for cybernetic implants to help her better pilot her watercraft. But her impulsive decision to leave the medical facility before fully healing leads to problems for her psyche once she’s back on the water. Jacquee’s own tragic backstory of the loss of her family parallels the Earth’s own environmental losses. Like many of the other tales, the story is threaded with references to Jamaican and Caribbean culture, particularly in the use of language. Despite its tragic elements and dystopian setting, the story is surprisingly positive and ultimately empowering, with found family and community themes that resonate.

“Inselberg” is a creepy, dark humor tale also set in a decimated future version of Jamaica. The use of a second-person narrative immediately pulls the reader in for an immersive adventure with a naïve group of tourists and their cynical local tour guide. The story migrates from humorous to disturbing as terrible occurrences befall the travelers in their degenerating journey to a destination that is not what it seems. The story ends a bit abruptly but the set-up is intriguing and the writing style is addictive.

“Child Moon” give us an eerie narrative of Amy, a mother struggling to care for her beast-like changeling infant who would rather drink blood than milk. Despite the strangeness of the creature, she and her husband are bonded to the child. However, the community avoids the family and the child in particular, fearing that the child is unnatural. Amy soon decides to take a dangerous trek into the forest to find a solution. In the preface to the story, Hopkinson describes a vision she had while flying and watching the moon hovering in a deep forested valley. The result is a gorgeously descriptive narrative in a lush, dark setting. The journey is both immersive and symbolic and the solution is unexpected.

“Jamaica Ginger” is set in a steampunk-style New Orleans where Plaquette, a Black female engineer, works for a strict employer creating robots designed to replace the Black porters who serve on the train cars. Plaquette’s own father was a porter until an ailment left him unable to work. As a result, she and her mother must come up with creative ways to keep the family going.

My favorite story in the collection is “Clap Back.” In this tale, a wealthy, popular designer creates a fabric designed to erase guilt over racism and exploitation by building in audible forgiveness messages from the low-income workers who assembled the wildly expensive clothing. The words sink into the wearer’s skin like nanites and cause the person to audibly share the implanted phrases of coerced forgiveness from the oppressed workers. Meanwhile, artist Wenda does her own manipulation of inanimate objects and uses a horrifying figurine collection of old and offensive depictions of Black people to enact her own countermessage.

In addition to the strong central stories, the anthology has several shorter pieces, many of which end in unexpected ways and don’t necessarily have a moral point or character arc. Instead, they are small explorations of imagination and emotion that feel a bit open-ended. With a range of tales from a range of time periods, Jamaica Ginger acknowledges society’s challenges and ailments and provides a provocative remedy.

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Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Twisty, eclectic, dystopian tales
• A range of narrative intensities
• Jamaican cultural references

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Review: The Principle of Moments, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

A joyous, enthusiastic time-travelling galactic-sized saga that is just not very good

Have you ever been to a 6-year-old’s dance recital? A 10-year-old’s orchestra concert? A 16-year-old’s theater show? Young artists in the making tend to lack skills but not enthusiasm, and they throw themselves into their performances with a wholehearted earnestness that can be incredibly endearing. But for all that, they are not (yet) good dancers, violinists, or actors, and it shows.

This book is that. The author describes in her author’s notes how she started writing it as a 16-year-old, and that alone explains so, so much about this book. It explains the sprawling, ambitious plot, in which tropes are evoked with such an ardent embrace that they almost feel fresh and new. A Chosen One? Yes, please—in fact, how about three Chosen Ones? No—wait—make it nine! And reincarnation! And cyclical prophecies, and the fate of the galaxy and an evil empire and time travel and found family and teleportation and secret libraries and queer love and coming of age and fighting back against oppression and and and and and and...! I don’t want to say that only a teenager could be responsible for such a bursting profusion of familiar tropes played so fervently straight, but the fact that a teenager was originally responsible for this bursting profusion explains a lot.

It explains the odd technical details, like robots which apparently have retinas, because they need to get past retinal scans. It explains the writing style, in which a teenage Chosen One who has only ever known a life of oppression laments never having an opportunity to feel ‘normal’—as if she can know any meaning of normality that is different from her entire life hitherto. It explains why characters from 1812 talk about being each other’s ‘boyfriends’—a word whose usage to mean ‘male lover’ was not attested until 1906. (A more accurate term would have been sweeting, or paramour, or lovemate, or honeybird, or sprunny. Yes, you read that right, sprunny.) It explains the extremely odd understanding of history, in which an ailing King George III laments the loss of the American colonies as evidence of the decline of the British Empire, when in 1812 it was only just getting started. Although perhaps we’re in an alternative timeline, since there’s another George—George V??—floating around the joint, son of the regent George IV; and this George, as far as I can tell, never existed. And speaking of monarchy, it explains an odd conversation, in which a king, hearing of unrest among his people, muses that perhaps this is simply the moment when the people rise up and decide to govern themselves, and is that really so bad a thing? This king would not be so blithe, I imagine, if he had heard of what typically happens to monarchs when the people decide they’re ready to rise up and govern themselves. But because he’s a Good Guy he must necessarily despise all things monarchical and be willing to see it go away, because Monarchy Is Bad and 16-year-olds struggle with complexity.

Here’s the plot. In the future, the year 6066, a teenage girl, Asha, has lived her whole life on a planet that is crushed under the rule of an evil galactic emperor. Through cleverness and persistence she works out a plan to steal a spaceship and escape the planet. This plan is put into action when a mysterious visitor arrives, tells her that she is a Chosen One, and that she must find her sister, who was also kind of a Chosen One, but maybe not. It’s all very cryptic for reasons that are never explained except that you can’t explain everything on page 25.

Narratively meanwhile, in 1812 London, Obi is a time traveller who has fallen in love with Prince George. We know that they are in love with each other because they have a very long, tedious conversation about that fact, which serves no purpose beyond establishing their fraught relationship. Oh, and also that George doesn’t like being a prince, because Monarchy is Bad and George is a Good Guy and therefore cannot possibly think otherwise. Then Obi, who has difficulties controlling his time travel, accidentally time travels to the future, landing in the midst of Asha’s escape attempt, where he helps her avoid capture, and they fly away together.

(Oh, and speaking of the spaceships! If the galactic empire is so huge that your spaceships need to be hyperspace-capable to get anywhere, then I have difficulty imagining someone ‘gently steering’ the ship in normal space. Steering around what? A stray hydrogen atom? And why does the hyperspace-capable spaceship need wings?)

An incredible amount of not-terribly-functional plot occurs afterwards. Daring, cinematic escapes, betrayals, chases, rescues. We eventually learn the whole story of the various Chosen Ones—including a kind of cool moment when one previous Chosen One decides he’s not okay with having a role forced upon him, and decides to make trouble. This could be an outstanding opportunity to engage with the Chosen One trope and explore the effect of cosmic determinism on the psychology of the pawns of fate, but remember that 16-year-olds don’t do well with complexity, so instead we get a pretty dull antagonist. We learn through document fragments that the whole story of various Chosen Ones is bound up in a kind of reincarnation thing, so that legends of the previous instantiations of the Chosen Ones portray versions of the same adventures that Obi and Asha experience in the pages of the book. This is rather neat, until eventually it gets repetitive and tedious, and finally culminates in a huge revelation scene, in which Asha discovers how it all works and marvels at something that we, the reader, have known for a few hundred pages already.

Now, to be fair, there were some excellent touches in this book, hints of the kind of writer that Jikiemi-Pearson might become. The resentful Chosen One and the reincarnation of story events I’ve mentioned, but there was also a lovely moment between Obi and Asha, in which they have been rescued from some Bad Guys and have a quiet moment together. Obi braids Asha’s hair for her, in a way that she can’t quite manage herself, and explains that this hairstyle is not meant to be done by oneself. The expectation is that you have someone to help you. I was very touched by this scene—a reaction immediately undone by Obi going off to the bathroom to give himself a face mask, leaving me wondering at what point he managed to find himself travel-sized spa kits in the midst of escaping from prison ships.

There’s a truism floating around SFF writer circles that you have to be a bad writer before you can become a good one. Brandon Sanderson describes on his Writing Excuses podcast that he had to write 7 or 11 or some very large number of novels before he managed to sell his first published one, Elantris. You have to write a million bad words before the good ones start flowing, he says.

I can see the good words getting ready to flow in Jikiemi-Pearson’s writing. But I think there’s still a few hundred thousand bad ones that have to be flushed out first. And fortunately, given her eager, sincere, wildly ambitious approach, she’s well on her way there. But this book is not there yet.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10, problematic, but has redeeming qualities.

Highlights:

•     Tropes played earnestly straight
•     Black teenagers saving the world
•     Many, many Chosen Ones

Reference: Jikiemi-Pearson, Esmie. The Principle of Moments [Gollancz, 2024].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

TV Review: Supacell

The Black Heroes remake you didn’t know you needed—a bingeable adventure amidst larger social issues

Superhero movies and television series have saturated theaters and streaming services lately, often making a once magical concept feel ordinary and repetitive. Many viewers still enjoy superhero adventures as a way to provide an escape from the monotony of everyday life. But with the non-stop changes, chaos, and stressors in the ‘real world,’ ironically it is ‘real life’ that seems extraordinary, while superhero tropes may seem cliché. Some may crave something different—something that reflects the reality of the stressors of life rather than providing a traditional, escapist view. Occasionally, we have seen different approaches to the superhero genre, with stories that show a more cynical side of superpowers. Netflix’s Supacell takes a nontraditional approach to the concept of having superpowers by juxtaposing the fantastic into a world filled with real-life stress and chaos. The series follows five unconnected Black Londoners who each suddenly develop a different superhuman power but still have to deal with both the mundane and the overwhelming stressors of their daily lives.

Before we meet the lead characters, the first episode provides a cryptic glimpse of a sinister scheme lurking in the shadows of the city. The series opens in a menagerie-like prison designed with a long hallway of brightly lit rooms, all comfortably furnished with beds, videogames, books, and even piano keyboards. Inside each glass cell is an ordinary-looking person: women, men, mostly young, but all Black. Despite the comfortable-looking interior, it is clear they are distressed and they are prisoners. In contrast to the inmates, we see white people dressed in suits or military gear. Each cell has a glass wall that allows the white captors and the Black captives to see each other. When one of the captives tries to escape, we get a dramatic visual summary of the situation. The symbolism and references to commoditization of human life, as well as the symbolism of external manipulation, are quite overt.

Blissfully unaware of the hidden drama are the five initially unconnected lead characters: Michael, Sabrina, Andre, Rodney, and Tazer. Michael is a busy, working class, package delivery driver who is ready to propose to his social worker girlfriend, Dionne. They are a sweet, hardworking couple, so you know fate is coming for them. Sabrina is a dedicated and overworked young hospital nurse living with her streetwise sister, Sharleen. Andre is a good-hearted but struggling ex-felon and single father trying to keep a steady job and build a relationship with his teenaged son. Rodney is an unapologetic, energetic drug dealer. He is biracial and has a tragic backstory that explains why he is struggling to survive financially. Tazer is a street criminal engaged in various forms of extortion and drug dealing. Tazer is being raised by his beloved grandmother after the disappearance of his mother. At some point, each person’s unique power manifests unexpectedly. Michael can suddenly teleport, time travel, and rewind time; Tazer can become invisible; Sabrina has telekinesis; Andre has superstrength; and Rodney has superspeed and super healing powers. As in the television show Heroes, the lead characters are flawed and struggling and are (for the most part) more annoyed and stressed by the appearance of superpowers than they are excited and motivated. This bit of realism and cynicism is a refreshing change of pace despite the attendant bleakness.

This first season of the show is an origin story of the people who will become a team. Initially, the five main characters are living separate, unconnected, ordinary lives (for better or for worse) when a sudden physical change manifests and each person realizes that something dramatic has occurred. The manifestation of the superpowers is treated as a fearful or amusing aberration which does not immediately change the character’s day to day lives. Supacell is also clearly different from other superhero series because all the superpowered humans are Black. That basic demographic shift already makes the story unique. It is hard to think of another superhero team where all or even most of the characters are Black or people of color. As the story progresses, we discover that the ethnic connection is not an accident. The superpowers are tied to a real-life genetic trait specifically connected to Black people.

The Netflix series has many nostalgic similarities to some classic favorites in the superhero genre. Supacell is most like the first season of Heroes, with its ordinary, flawed, unsuspecting, and unconnected characters. The show also has the gritty edginess of Luke Cage. A primary plotline is Michael’s attempt to change the past to protect Dionne after his future self warns him. The concept is similar to storylines in The Flash. And, in true superhero fashion, each lead character has a loved one who gives them both a motivation and a vulnerability.

In contrast to the thoughtfully created main characters, the ultimate villains and antagonists in the series are, thus far, somewhat two-dimensional. Instead, the focus remains on the five main characters who encompass a range of troubling to morally gray to earnestly good. Michael is the pure heart center, Sabrina is the caretaker, Andre is the strong supporter, Rodney is the quirky comic relief, and Tazer is the violent wild card.

Beyond the journey of the five heroes, the show addresses a range of social issues including predatory healthcare, racism and racial exploitation, sexism and racial stereotyping, economic disparity, and flawed justice systems. None of it is presented as a problem to be solved. Instead, it is a backdrop for the adventures in this brief series. With only six episodes, Supacell is bingeably easy to finish. However, since the season is primarily an origin story (the tale of how the five heroes connected and found their motivation), the overarching plot does not get resolved, and the motivations of the antagonists remain unclear. There is no pressure to find the big answers—at least not yet, and the final episode makes it clear that season one is only the beginning of the journey.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

· Refreshingly cynical approach to the superhero genre
· Vague, two-dimensional villains
· Bingeable adventure amidst larger social issues

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Review: The Book of Clarence

A unique, irreverent, genre-mixing dark comedy wrapped around deep messages on race and class

The theatrical trailer for The Book of Clarence left me feeling confused and a little uneasy about seeing the film. Was it an alternate history, a comedy, a parody, a tragic epic drama? Was it an allegorical Black social commentary, fantasy/sci-fi, religious, anti-religious? After seeing the film, the answer to all of these questions is: yes. There was so much going on in this story. The quirky presentation style is so unique that it’s hard to know who the target audience is. But sometimes weird is good.

The story is set during the last year of the life of Jesus. Yes, the Jesus. Jesus is a popular local celebrity in the area (due to his legendary miracles) but initially he remains mostly offscreen and is barricaded by an entourage of disciples. Clarence is a local hustler, but with a good heart. He gambles, sells drugs, drag-races chariots, and takes care of his ailing/aging mother. When his ill-gotten debts catch up to him and the local mobster threatens to kill him, Clarence hatches a scheme to make money by taking advantage of Jesus’s popularity as the Messiah. At first he tries to join the disciples but is immediately rejected by them, including his twin brother Thomas (yes, the famous doubting Thomas) so Clarence is prevented from any access to Jesus. Then he gets a better idea. He decides to con people into believing he is a miracle worker to get money.  Clarence enlists his best friend Elijah and recently freed fighter Barabbas to help with the scheme. But things take a turn when the occupying Roman military catches up with Clarence leading to an unexpected encounter with the real Jesus. The additional twist in this film is that, other than the occupying Romans, every character is Black.

The film is initially a parody of classic Bible epics such as Ben Hur or The Ten Commandments, using ironically epic background music, dramatic chariot races, and even 1960s-style gold-framed title pages in between the major acts of the story. On the other hand, it is also fantastical. The drugs Clarence smokes with his friends cause them to temporarily float in the air with their bodies turning and spinning, gravity-free. When Clarence gets an idea, it materializes as an actual light above his head. The fantastical special effects are a surreal juxtaposition against the retro epic vibe.

At first, the feel of the film is epic and historical but also slightly comical/absurd. However, the film eventually dives into the true nature of belief, loyalty, and morality. Although the people in his community have a range of spiritual beliefs, particularly as it relates to the Messiah, Clarence seems to be the only one who doesn’t believe in any form of God or spirituality. However, he is willing to use the existing belief systems to achieve his goals by being a con artist and pretending to be an alternate Messiah. In a dual role, LaKeith Stanfield plays both Clarence and Clarence’s twin brother, Thomas the apostle, who has abandoned everything, including their ailing mother, to follow Jesus. Thomas despises Clarence’s petty criminal behavior, even as Clarence has devoted himself to caring for their mother. Thus we have the set-up of religious piety versus cynical pragmatism that permeates the film.

The best character in the film is Clarence’s best friend/sidekick Elijah. Elijah is open-minded about his beliefs, but also comfortable running scams and being loyal to Clarence and their bestie, chariot racer Mary Magdalene. In a pivotal scene, Mary Magdalene has been accused of adultery and chained to a wall to be brutally stoned to death. Elijah intervenes to protect her, risking his own death, but he cannot free her from the chain. Clarence is nowhere around and death seems imminent for Mary and Elijah until the real-deal Messiah shows up in a quietly jaw-dropping, Marvel-worthy scene.

The set design and costumes of the film are outstanding, making you feel transported to the ancient Jerusalem setting that has been reimagined for the story. The film also benefits from a strong cast reinterpreting classic characters, including Mary, the Mother of Jesus (hilariously played by Alfre Woodard), John the Baptist (David Oyelowo), and an irritable Pontius Pilate (James McAvoy). We also get quirky new characters played by Babs Olusanmokun from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Caleb McLaughlin from Stranger Things, and an almost unrecognizable Benedict Cumberbatch who takes the film to new irreverence as an accidentally mistaken version of Jesus.

All these strange, quirky characters revolve around Clarence as he tries to make a better life for himself and prove himself worthy of his ill-fated love interest Varinia (Anna Diop). LaKeith Stanfield leans into the cynical, skeptical, onscreen personality he has used effectively in prior fantastical films like Sorry to Bother You, Haunted Mansion, and even Get Out. Despite his cynicism, Clarence has enough cliched character growth to make some positive societal choices for others, even as he still scams those around him. Clarence continues to pursue his fake Messiah miracles with growing success until he finds out the true cost of the path he has chosen. Then the film takes a serious and dramatic turn into a violent exploration of racism and classism. We think we know what is going to happen, but the final crucifixion scenes subvert both traditional narratives and cynical new viewer expectations.

The Book of Clarence throws many important social justice themes and philosophical questions at viewers who may ultimately feel overwhelmed and disoriented by the irreverent and quirky delivery style. The trope of the lovable rascal with the heart of gold is quickly subverted into an ultimate theme of “mess around and find out.” It’s been a long time since a film completely bewildered me in such a good way. This movie is not for everyone. But, if you have an appetite for quirkiness and a tolerance for explorations of hard truths wrapped in an allegory, The Book of Clarence will give you a great deal to think about.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Weird and provocative. Not for everyone.
• Quirky subversive messaging.
• Strong performances by the lead actors.

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Review: Out There Screaming

A clever take on the greatest horror of all: reality

As coldness creeps into the air and night arrives earlier, the days are perfect for ghost stories, monsters, and things out of the ordinary. Out There Screaming, An Anthology of New Black Horror is a collection of short stories edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams. The nineteen tales are penned by a selection of talented storytellers, including Hugo Award winning and popular favorites N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, and Nalo Hopkinson. Each of the stories offers a clever take on the greatest horror of all: reality.

Out There Screaming opens with an introduction from Jordan Peele discussing a medieval torture device designed to make people feel forgotten and degraded. Centuries later, the real horror is the way society still does this to us. As expected from a story collection associated with Jordan Peele, the tales in Out There Screaming have abundant and clever social commentary, as well as thoughtful insights into the human condition in general.

As several of the narratives remind us, reality can be particularly horrific when you are a person of color—even without the fantastical elements. This is a recurring theme in many of the stories, but not in the way we are used to seeing such narratives play out in our media. From a Reconstruction era Black town to a modern-day motorist police stop, we see real-life horror entangled with supernatural forces. But the anthology also includes stories dealing, in a twisted way, with other topics such as grief, jealousy, addiction, self-identity, and belonging. In every adventure, it is clear that we have crossed over into an existence where things are more than they seem, with storytelling in the style of The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, and, of course, Get Out.

This is an anthology where every story delivers—some better than others, but all are memorable and powerful. A standout story in the collection is Eye & Tooth, about a pair of brother and sister monster hunters who meet their match during a job in Texas. The story hits many appealing elements, including sibling bonding, dramatic fight scenes, and even a bit of found family. A poignant entry is The Aesthete, a science fiction story that follows a day in the life of an artificially created young man who is constantly scrutinized on social media as a condition of his existence. It is a timely allegory for the constant pressure that young people face, in particular young Black men, and it is a story readers will think about long after finishing the collection. The book ends with a discussion in the form of a play that uses the script format to come full circle on the themes that started the collection.

Out There Screaming benefits from both the provocative style of storytelling and the fact that most of the tales have a very satisfying ending. Although some of the endings are also poignant, sad, or fully tragic, they all avoid traditional tropes of the martyred Black person or racism winning. The stories are primarily mind-bending and insightful rather than overtly slash and gore, although there is some slashing and gore, especially in The Norwood Trouble and A Grief of the Dead.

The anthology includes the following tales:

Reckless Eyeballing by N. K. Jemisin – A racist cop sees car headlights as eyes watching him.

Eye & Tooth by Rebecca Roanhorse – Monster-hunting brother and sister meet their match.

Wandering Devil by Cadwell Turnbull – A man with abandonment issues tries to avoid commitment.

Invasion of the Baby Snatchers by Lesley Nneka Arimah – A government agent fights against shapeshifting aliens who use humans to breed destructive creatures.

The Other One by Violet Allen – Things take a macabre turn after a couple breaks up.

Lasirèn by Erin E. Adams – The hunt for her lost sister leads a girl to a confrontation with a water creature.

The Rider by Tananarive Due – In the 1960s, a pair of confident female freedom riders cross paths with a different kind of monster on their bus.

The Aesthete by Justin C. Key – An artificial human tries to find peace in a world of constant online observation and prejudice.

Pressure by Ezra Claytan Daniels – A man deals with the pressure of returning home to his family as another kind of pressure grows around them.

Dark Home by Nnedi Okorafor – After burying her father in his home country of Nigeria, a grieving daughter brings back more than she expects to her quiet New Mexico neighborhood.

Flicker by L. D. Lewis – A young woman watching the world collapse around her has a startling revelation.

The Most Strongest Obeah Woman in the World by Nalo Hopkinson – A Jamaican girl’s encounter with a monster leaves her changed.

The Norwood Trouble by Maurice Broaddus – When a peaceful thriving Black town is attacked by violent racists, the town leaders come up with a solution.

A Grief of the Dead by Rion Amilcar Scott – A man struggles with grief after the death of his twin brother.

A Bird Sings by the Etching Tree by Nicole D. Sconiers – Two dead young women from different decades haunt a dangerous stretch of highway.

An American Fable by Chesya Burke – A Black WWII soldier returning to his racist hometown encounters a strange little girl on the train.

Your Happy Place by Terence Taylor – A prison worker investigates the disappearances of inmates who are part of a special reprogramming project.

Hide & Seek by P. Djèlí Clark – Two brothers in a family of magic wielders try to survive the backlash of their mother’s erratic behavior.

Origin Story by Tochi Onyebuchi – A play about children understanding the role of race unfolds through the characters’ voices.

Despite the description of Out There Screaming as A New Anthology of Black Horror, the stories will appeal to non-horror fans who want twisty, clever analyses of our bizarre existence as humans in the current era. It is sometimes said that art will save the world. These stories might not save the world, but they might help you see it through a new lens, and hopefully feel more empowered.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights

· Clever social commentary

· Memorable stories

· Moderate, but present, horror violence

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Nanoreview: They Cloned Tyrone isn't too far from how things are in real life

You'll laugh about it, then think it over, then realize with a shudder that it wasn't joking

The pitch-perfect Blaxploitation homage in the new Netflix film They Cloned Tyrone is so hilariously over the top, so absurdly far-fetched, that you may miss the realism just beneath the surface. It's not science fiction to say that US government agencies have repeatedly treated Black people as disposable and interchangeable. It's not science fiction to say that the US has had a murky relationship with medical ethics, especially with Black patients. It's not science fiction to say that a segment of WASP leaders sincerely believe that they have already built the common ground for interracial peace and the only step needed is for Black people to agree to it. When you consider all those details, They Cloned Tyrone proceeds almost like a documentary.

The best satire is that which shows us exactly what the problem looks like, maybe through a funhouse lens, but still recognizable. The film's trio of lead characters are comical exaggerations of overused stereotypes, but it is their distorted irrealism that frees the story to make its points more openly, to engage in the Black cultural practice known as real talk. A serious documentary about the benefits that WASP society derives from enforcing the status quo in depressed neighborhoods would barely be noticed. But a speculative farce with world-class actors, sharp dialogues, unafraid hyperviolence, expert direction, and an aesthetic sense heightened all the way to the top of Jamie Foxx's afro? Now that's how you get audiences to pay attention.

Partly due to the references to Blaxploitation cinema, the look and feel of this movie exists in a curious limbo where audio casettes and funk music coexist with smartphones and Bitcoin scams. Set aside the props, and the story might as well be happening in the 1970s or tomorrow, cleverly signaling how little has truly changed. This effect is achieved with loving attention to detail in costume design, set design, and cinematography. Of particular note is the protagonist played by John Boyega, a meticulously crafted performance that makes you forget that the actor's natural accent is British.

Lies that tell a truth, as Alan Moore called the narrative art. The movie's ridiculously freakish premise is part of the point: even in such unbelievable circumstances, the message still rings true, and it does because it comes from a place of honesty, from deep familiarity with the damage that the American Way of Life™ does to Black communities. It may be about fake people, but They Cloned Tyrone is the type of art that can't be faked.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

'Kindred' demonstrates the power of stories to generate empathy

To focus on the entertainment value of this story would be to miss the point of why it's being told

Roger Ebert famously described the audiovisual medium as an empathy machine. New Hulu series Kindred, adapted from Octavia Butler's 1979 novel, is a good demonstration of how accurate those words were. In this story, Dana James, a modern, independent woman from the 21st century, is mysteriously dragged across time into the Antebellum plantation where her ancestors lived, and the past horrors of American history become lived reality for her, and much less directly, for the viewer.

There's only so much that a story can tell you about the human condition, and yet our most effective way to express it is precisely via storytelling. This tension was in Butler's mind at the time of writing Kindred. One important lesson from social justice movements is the idea that some experiences can't be fully communicated. You'd have to have been there. Butler herself cited such a gap in perspective as one of the motivations for her novel: the facts of American slavery that you can find in a textbook weren't just a history lesson for the people who had to live through it. From our vantage point in this century, it's too easy to feel detached from a monstrous social order that happened to people who are now dead. It's too tempting to develop for the enslaved populations of yesteryear the same indifference one might feel for the ancient Sumerians. Kindred seems to be saying to American audiences: this isn't just a tale of times past. This is your tale, your life. You exist because of these horrors. You don't get to form a concept of yourself that doesn't include the evil that happened here.

The merit of a work like Kindred is that it helps make these truths accessible even to those of us who have no ties to that history. That's the effect of the empathy machine: someone like me, a complete outsider, gets something as close as possible to bearing witness. I still have no idea of what it's like to live under race-based slavery, and I cannot pretend to have any standing to speak on American racial relations; I'm not American, not Black, and not descended from slaves. My identity is Latino, which comes with a historical baggage of its own. I cannot say what Kindred means for Black American viewers. Black critics have already commented on Kindred's representation of slavery far more competently and acutely than I ever could. What I can say is that, for an outsider like me, the series succeeds at touching the crucial emotions of curiosity and empathy that are the base minimum for solidarity.

A while ago, when I reviewed the TV adaptation of The Underground Railroad, I said that slavery narratives don't exist to entertain you. They tell violent events, but the violence isn't supposed to be exciting. They tell of pain and betrayal and injustice, but not so that you can get vicarious satisfaction through the victory of the good guys. In Kindred, Dana comes to believe that her role in the story is that of a heroine whose quest is to preserve her lineage. But she's not thrown into the past because she's destined to save the day. She's there because those events made her, as they made the country. She's there because those events are in her and all around her, as is true of every American.

Butler published her novel in 1979, at a particularly fluid moment in both the civil rights struggle and the speculative genres. The inexplicable phenomenon of being transported to the lives of Dana's ancestors hits very differently now, for a generation of viewers who grew up with Back to the Future or The Butterfly Effect. Dana (and the screenwriting team) spends too much of the runtime trying to figure out the rules of time travel, as if this were the kind of story that gets resolved by a stroke of genius. But Kindred is not a technical mystery in the vein of Asimov or Clarke. Dana starts her journey with the wrong impression of what kind of story she's in. To be fair, this may be intentional on the writers' part: the character of Dana is a writer herself, so it's understandable that her first impulse upon meeting the unknown would be to analyze it as a story, to pull it apart and try to make sense of the plot logic. And that's the mistake that Kindred warns against. To treat history as a story is to blur its facticity. Stories have a resolution; history simply goes on. And the history of American slavery has very much gone on.

The irony of this message about the value of true history is that Kindred is, of course, just a story. When the novel was first published, it was viewed by some critics as a feminist response to Roots, which does claim to be true history. Whereas Roots narrates the effort to reconstruct events from second-hand testimonies, Kindred suggests that nothing less than direct, personal experience will do. If you weren't there, you're not going to understand. And if you don't understand, it's not your fault, but you shouldn't use that as an excuse either; it's still your responsibility to make an effort toward empathy.

Despite the emotional effectiveness of this adaptation, sometimes it steers too far in the direction of a cerebral time travel puzzle, which is the wrong approach for this story. The use of a break in the rules of reality in a seemingly ordinary way to express a painful history is a narrative technique that doesn't match the Anglo-speaking tradition of hard science fiction and is closer to the Latin American tradition of magical realism. Kindred expresses a unique relationship that Black Americans have with time, one in which years' worth of suffering seem to pass while the majority doesn't notice, and the one sentiment capable of linking those incompatible perspectives is the universal human experience of mortal dread. It would have been more satisfying if, instead of the technicalities of time travel, the writers had given closer attention to the human side of the story.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer

The story of Dirty Computer continues in five richly plotted scenarios set in a dystopian future

Taken as a whole, Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer art project consists of a music album (nominated for the Grammys in two categories), a short film (nominated for a Hugo), and now, from Harper Voyager, a collection of short stories written in collaboration with other authors of color. This production is not connected to Monáe's previous Metropolis storyline, centered on the android Cindi Mayweather. Both the album and the film of Dirty Computer follow a different character, Jane 57821, as she escapes an oppressive future in the company of her lovers. This book serves as a window into exactly what horrific world Jane is escaping.

The introduction to the collection is a quick summary of the rise of a totalitarian regime, New Dawn, whose control over society was possible because "we accepted their offer that an eye in the sky might protect us from… ourselves." With the assurance of total visibility, an immediate problem emerged regarding privacy and deviancy, and the regime decided that "what they struggled to see, they began to deem not worthy of being seen—inconsistent, off standard. Began calling it dirty—unfit to be swallowed by their eyes."

In the backstory that this introduction presents, the new social category of the dirty started being applied to modes of thought and identity that did not fit the rigid standards of the regime. The stories that compose this collection explore various characters' struggle to reclaim, preserve, and even celebrate the dirty.

The titular story, The Memory Librarian, cowritten with Alaya Dawn Johnson, follows Seshet, a government employee whose job is to gather, catalog, inspect and, if necessary, redact memories routinely collected from the citizens of New Dawn. What she thought she knew about her position in society is challenged by an unexpected romance with Alethia, an underground dissident whose thirst for independence of mind forces her to face thorny questions of power and intimacy. How can you learn to respect your partner as an equal when you have the legal authority to manage their mind? Is full access to your partner's every thought enough for you to say you know them? Why is it so difficult to be vulnerable in front of someone you don't control? And what does it do to you when you're given the power to edit how people—even you—remember you?

In the story that follows, Nevermind, cowritten with Danny Lore, we meet our main heroine, Jane 57821, in hiding after having survived New Dawn's attempt to remove her most precious memories (as seen in the Dirty Computer short film), and now turned into the unofficial leader of an intentional community that inhabits a hotel in the desert where women can experiment with alternative forms of social organization. Free from New Dawn's monopoly on memory, the members of this breakaway community find comfort in a storytelling ritual where each participant contributes the bits that the other struggles to articulate. Against this joyful act of sharing stand the hunters of the regime, mutated humans for whom sharing feelings is physically painful. While New Dawn weaponizes memory as an assault on reason, the dissidents paradoxically wield emotional openness as a protective deterrent. This story draws from ongoing discussions in contemporary activism about the need for an ever-expanding scope of inclusiveness.

Then comes Timebox, cowritten with Eve L. Ewing, about Raven, a newly independent young woman with barely any time for all her daily obligations, who discovers that her apartment has a paranormal room where the flow of time is suspended relative to the outer world. Her chronic sense of deprivation clashes with her girlfriend's shallow performance of generosity when they set out to decide what to do with an infinite resource.

We are next treated to Save Changes, cowritten with Yohanca Delgado. This is a brilliantly multilayered exploration of the fantasy of fixing the past. On the surface, this story is about the social difficulties experienced by the family of a political prisoner, whose shaky mental state after being sentenced to memory revision is placed in symbolic parallel with her daughter's project of repairing clocks dating from before New Dawn. But on a deeper level, this story is about the heart-rending sacrifices people are willing to make for their loved ones under unbearable oppression. In a regime that lays claim to all facts, a blatant lie can be the most unpredictable tool of resistance.

The last story is Timebox Altar(ed), cowritten with Sheree Renée Thomas, an uplifting metaphor about the social power of media representation (and therefore, a metafictional statement of purpose for the book itself). In a plot of overgrown land with disused rail tracks and rusty fairground equipment, a small child whose mother was taken away by New Dawn reshapes the abandoned objects into something new, following an inborn urge toward the raw potential of artistic creation. In doing so, they produce a miracle. This event establishes a correspondence between the fictional artists inside the story and the real artists writing the story, as well as between the characters who are shown a vision of a brighter future and the readers who might feel similarly inspired by seeing themselves in that future. The link between memory and time—namely the metaphor of reclaiming memory as a form of time travel—extends further to Monáe's role as a musician. As the protagonist of this story wisely proclaims, music is fundamentally made of time. This notion invests the musical record (and, by extension, any work of art) with the properties of a time machine. To make art is to reclaim memory is to exert power over time. This theme brings the book full circle back to the Dirty Computer album as a ritual whose performance is meant to effect change in the material world, as a cry for a liberation whose realization is contained in its utterance.

In each of these stories, but most notably in the introduction, which Monáe wrote by herself, her talent as a songwriter shines. Her prose vibrates with the telltale cadences that tell you this was written by an artist intimately familiar with the music of language. It takes an experienced lyricist to produce sentences with such rich sonority that they all but demand to be sung, like "She missed the music of the hotel the moment she exited, even as the wind hit her face, just cool enough to mimic the feeling of misting water," and "So they stared at the gray obelisk in the distance, shuddered and turned away, running in the opposite direction, racing down a path, not caring where it would go."

This collection adds important details to the otherwise barebones worldbuilding Monáe had laid out in her album and film. The characters she and her collaborators have created for these stories feel profoundly, compellingly human, even as the conditions they have to endure threaten to rob them of their most human qualities. That's the most remarkable trait that these stories have in common: even in the absolute worst of circumstances, the characters we meet here are not broken. They abound in hope and kindness, and meet each new day with the bold refusal to become jaded. In the nightmarish future of Dirty Computer, marginalized communities still fight to create spaces for solidarity, safety, and pure joy.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +2 for the intricate work of worldbuilding and characterization.

Penalties: −1 for sometimes relying on overused turns of phrase.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Monáe, Janelle. The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer [Harper Voyager, 2022].

On the surreal horror of The Underground Railroad

How can evil be told so beautifully? How can depravity look so mesmerizing?

Viet Thanh Nguyen once said, "One of the unspoken silences of the Great American Novel is the assumption that it can only be written by white men." Maybe this is the reason why the literary scene still hasn't found this elusive Holy Grail; critics and academics keep waiting for it in the wrong places. Similarly, David Vann said the Great American Novel could only be anti-American, by which he meant it should focus on the country's greatest shames. Without a doubt, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead fits the description. As one character in the television adaptation just released by Amazon Studios declares toward the end, "America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. [...] This nation shouldn't exist if there's any justice in the world."

The book on which this production is based is not a historical novel; it is more, but the literary scene still seems not to understand how uchronia works. To summarize: in real life, the Underground Railroad is the metaphorical name for the secret network of allies who helped enslaved people escape into free soil. This was the rare kind of conspiracy formed for the cause of good, estimated to have saved one hundred thousand people before the Civil War. In fiction, The Underground Railroad takes place in an alternate world where the metaphor is reimagined as a literal railroad that goes literally underground. In the realm of the symbolic and the dreamlike, represented by the impossible feat of tunnels that go beneath and across the country, protagonist Cora Randall embarks on an allegorical journey through the history of American racial relations.

The first couple of episodes provide us with the key to interpret this story, which is Gulliver's Travels. Each location the protagonist visits is meant to stand in for a political reality. In the case of The Underground Railroad, the fact that one character speaks of vitamins, even though the word wasn't coined until 1912, gives the rest of the key: the tracks are a form of time travel. This can be read in two ways. One is as a collapsing of time: even if there had really been a magical fantasy train to take Black people out of the plantations, the states (and epochs) without slavery were not morally advanced enough to welcome them. The other way is as a more conventional time travel narrative. When Cora visits a fictional version of South Carolina where Black population is kept in check under the guise of benevolent uplift, we are visiting the era of eugenics, unethical medical research and forced sterilizations. When she stops by fictional North Carolina, where the mere presence of Black people is forbidden, we are in the era of segregation and of exclusion laws like the ones enshrined in the foundational documents of Oregon. When she marches through this story's version of Tennessee, it is a barren land consumed by unending fire, a reminder of the lingering pain that violence continues to inflict on the country. And when she reaches an agrarian utopia in Indiana, where Black people can live in freedom, we are given a skewed look at the purportedly equal 20th century and the ideological division between the strategy of respectability and the movement for Black separatism. All of these are revealed to be, as Cora declares, "no places to escape to, only places to run from." Episode 8 shows us a house located at the end of the railroad, and for a few seconds the camera lingers on the wooden lid of a tunnel. The beams of wood and the positions of the nails on it are arranged in a way that resembles the Confederate flag. This is stated to be a house that dates back to the Revolutionary War, which implies that America's rottenness has been hidden there all along.

Our villain is slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway, introduced with his own origin story that leaves us with no satisfying explanations, because evil is never so simple (take note, Disney). The son of a blacksmith with hippie leanings (Ridgeway Sr. both looks and speaks like a very high Walt Whitman), he is given an establishing moment of resounding significance when he is shown to be unskilled at forging chains. His lifelong insecurity belies the myth of Manifest Destiny, expounded only in later scenes when he's drunk and rambling incoherently, because such a perverse doctrine does not deserve a more dignified expression.

Ridgeway is an individual, because stories need characters in whom ideas can be embodied to put them in opposition, but defeating Ridgeway is not the point. The evil of racism goes beyond individual actions, and sometimes, when evil has developed an entire system, it has so much blame to spread around that it can fall on an innocent head. It's easy for viewers of The Underground Railroad to hate the character of Homer, to watch each of his choices and despise the little traitor. But such sentiment is misdirected. He's not morally responsible for having been turned into a tool by Ridgeway. One should instead hate Ridgeway, a hundred times more, for what he did to Homer. This kind of confusion in the task of assigning responsibility mirrors real-life situations where Black people are unfairly blamed for the few choices they have available. When the runaway Jasper chooses to die via hunger strike, Cora accuses him of giving up, but in his circumstances that's the only freedom he can still choose.

The Underground Railroad devotes much attention to the importance of leaving testimony at each stage of the journey. The railroad administration values those records highly, because the price of riding the train, which symbolically is the price of moving forward, is to share the truth. And that truth burns. I had to pause the episodes several times to take a breath, and at one point I had to ask myself why I was pausing, why I was letting my discomfort get in the way of the story. It is fictional, but it tells a truth that calls out for our attention, and on the face of which my and your discomfort matters not one bit. Just as Cora feels guilty for the slaves she couldn't bring with her, this story invites us to consider all the people who lived and died under injustice and who will now remain there forever. As much progress as we're making right now, we can do nothing for the millions who were enslaved. They are in the past, beyond our help, but this story makes the case that that doesn't absolve our generation.

Episode 9 features the traumatic sight of white men assaulting a Black church. As it was then, it is today, like the events of myth, which exist in eternity and are therefore always in the process of happening. The scars of this evil will never vanish, and that is the point. It would be unfair to expect them to vanish, or to actively make them vanish. It is a truth that demands to be told and retold. Like the stuff of myth, The Underground Railroad is told in symbols, with an impeccable use of sound and lighting and shot composition and atmospheric music that enthralls at the same time it horrifies. Director and showrunner Barry Jenkins has crafted a lasting testimony where the characters frequently stare at the viewer, saying nothing, because words are too small and cannot carry this message. Many of these shots have the sun directly behind the characters, obscuring their features to the point it's not clear whether we're seeing them from behind or face to face. We'd like to believe we're watching the show, but it points its gaze firmly at us.

The Underground Railroad is fully aware of the dual nature of this gaze. In episode 2, Black people are employed in a museum where they perform their exploitation for the entertainment of visitors, a metaphor for the show itself. The responsibility inherent to the telling of this type of story is best expressed in episode 8, when a character asks a poet, "If I gave you my sorrows, would you make them sound pretty?" The importance of dramatizations of American racism does not rest on its entertainment value. In fact, online discussion about this show cites its brutality as the main explanation for why Amazon subscribers are choosing to skip it. This is not a fun story. It contains no excitement, no catharsis, no moral validation of America. It will not amuse you. It will not make you feel better about yourself. But that does not diminish its narrative accomplishments. The Underground Railroad is a supremely beautiful piece of art, even while portraying supremely ugly truths, and you need to ask yourself what it says about you when the ugliness of truth is the reason you refuse to look.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: The Dominion Anthology

Ours is a time of ever-increasing visibility for African SFF—now it has its first anthology

Our editor Adri mentioned this book already last August, but it bears revisiting at greater length. This is, according to the publisher, "the first anthology of speculative fiction and poetry by Africans and the African Diaspora," so it deserves every chance of visibility it can get. Edited by Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and with a foreword by Tananarive Due, the Dominion anthology collects twelve stories and one poem about imagined futures and reimagined pasts told with deep sincerity and robustness of worldbuilding. This is certainly an exciting time for diversity in speculative fiction.

Trickin' by Nicole Givens Kurtz, from the United States, is an odd choice to open the book with, as it is not a very strong story, with little impact on the reader. In the ruins of a city devastated by biological warfare, a mysterious wanderer wakes up on Halloween and starts terrorizing the survivors, demanding a blood tribute. There are the vaguest indications that the protagonist might be some sort of superhuman, most likely a vampire, but the story itself is scarce in information. One has to flip back to the book's introductory pages to learn from the editorial synopsis that this character is supposed to be a god. Not the most impressive of starts, but don't worry: the rest of the anthology more than makes up.

Red_Bati by Dilman Dila, from Uganda, is the deeply moving rebellion story of a former pet robot now working for an asteroid mining company that finds it cheaper to repurpose discarded pets than to buy actual miner robots. Unbeknownst to its new owners, Red_Bati had a software upgrade with human-like intelligence so it could better serve as a companion to humans, so when it suffers an accident and is put in storage as damaged junk, he devises a risky escape plan.

The most effective artistic choice in this story is its gradual dosing of information: we start in the middle of a conversation with minimal context, then we are pulled back so we can see some of the scenery (we are on a spaceship), and later we learn the protagonist's immediate predicament, and only when it becomes relevant to the plot are we given the rest of the backstory. This technique of withholding crucial facts until they are needed is very hard to do successfully, but this time it's managed with a flawless expertise that never loses hold of the reader's attention. The interaction between the robotic protagonist and its internal simulation of its dead owner is as funny as it is heartbreaking, and it subtly grows in weirdness until the ending comes and devastates the reader.

There are, however, a few missteps, which would not matter in any other kind of story, but are too noticeable in one that presents itself as science fiction grounded in physics. One aside comment mentions a sentient robotic crew on another spaceship that panics and refuses to keep working upon estimating only a 99.9% chance of a safe landing (which is not how any superintelligent being would respond to probabilities), while another part refers to a system of thermal insulation so good it can resist −400 °C (a temperature that is physically impossible in this universe). These details are brief and do not affect in the least the emotional punch of the story, but they do distract enough to prevent full suspension of disbelief.

A Maji Maji Chronicle by Eugen Bacon, from Australia, is a time travel story that revisits the Maji Maji Rebellion, an uprising that erupted against forced labor in the German East Africa colony (today's Tanzania). A wizard and his apprentice jump from the future to 1905 Earth and explore the ramifications of an alternate outcome to the rebellion. In our timeline, villagers used folk charms that were believed to stop bullets, and were brutally suppressed by the German colonial officers. In this version of events, we watch with dread the insidious darkness that could have taken over the human heart if the rebels had had access to real magic.

This tale appears to have a simple structure at first sight, but it contains material for extended discussions on the allure of power, the difficulty of maintaining control, and the didactic usefulness of history. The reader will marvel at how the author managed to speak of a horribly painful episode while having the two viewpoint protagonists banter with Quixotic irony.

The Unclean by Nuzo Onoh, from Nigeria, is a haunting story about the horror of loss worsened by the horror of patriarchy. In the years leading to Nigeria's independence, a young Igbo woman separated from her home by arranged marriage endures first the cruel pressure to conceive and then the despair of her child's death. When she starts receiving nightly visitations from the child's ghost, she tries desperately to help him be born into his next life. We experience in parallel narratives the journey that brought her to her present misfortune and the trial by ordeal she's going through for practicing forbidden sorcery.

This story abounds in cultural specifics that construct a solid image of the setting in the reader's mind. We're presented with an array of malevolent spirits, magical rituals and secret Nsibidi symbols that anchor the story firmly in its corner of the world.

But beyond the care for authenticity, it is amazing that a terrifying tale of horrific events can be so filled, from start to end, with beautiful sentences that jump out at the reader, demanding to be reread for the pure enjoyment of their rhythm, their choice of words, their evocative poetry. A select few are "As I walked through the low metal gate of our compound, my feet grew sudden wings as I raced the last few yards to our front door" and "My reddened eyes remained puffed with unfinished tears, ready to shed my agony at the slightest excuse" and "The unnatural stillness in my room was heavy with a waiting quality that made the darkness a solid malignant mass" and "Gathered in a silent, waiting crowd, hollowed eyes dripping blood as black as tar, each posed in the manner of their demise, they impaled me to the ground by their appalling visage" and "God is thundering, roaring, helpless as He's always been in the face of mankind's tragedy."

This is a powerful piece of horror and one of the highlights of the entire collection.

A Mastery of German by Marian Denise Moore, from the United States, is a short but effective exploration of the anxieties brought by the current genetic ancestry testing fad. In a not very tightly regulated pharmaceutical company, a project to turn generational memory into a product is discussed in the context of larger questions about privacy, identity, heredity, and erased history. If a company can make money from your memories, but you are your memories, is the company selling you? This question would be piercing enough in any story, but in one told from the perspective of African American history, and coinciding with the still-ongoing discussion about who gets to own and tell a people's experience, it carries an extra edge.

The anthology also features Emily, Moore's heartfelt poem about the many characters lost to history and the things we wish we could have told them.

Convergence in Chorus Architecture by Dare Segun Falowo, from Nigeria, is a survival story with the symbolic scope and weight of an epic. In a richly detailed Yoruba setting, sustained by powerful descriptions like "Lightning flashed and for a moment, everything seemed made from white stone," a community of war escapees who founded a secret village have to decipher a vision from the heavens. For a long stretch, the plot is less about material events and more about the effort to decipher the omens. This is a nice way to tell a story about stories: to make it hinge on an act of interpretation. Characters spend whole days in mystical trance and their perception of the waking world is effortlessly blended with the signs of the dream.

The narration relies heavily on the divinatory practices of the Ifa religion, and large portions are devoted to painting intricate dreamscapes that hold the secrets to the story. These sections employ surreal imagery that both detaches the reader from the conventional meanings of words and creates a very concrete, very unique world with its own system of meaning. This is what makes it possible for the author to put so much force into wonderful sentences like "A scream was cut short by a blaze of violet fire, as the screaming body exploded into the air, burning a trail thin as thread from the distant plain into the gut of the boneship" and "Up in the sky where he looked, he saw as in the shared dream, a blackness staining the night, the emergence of a void in the flesh of reality" and "Her motions set off melodies which the air sings to itself."

The author's mastery of description holds together two parallel plots that explore both the depths of the earth and the void of outer space. Thieves from another star system have come to the village, in a stylized metaphor for the arrival of the slave trade, while a man navigates the underworld to seek the divine power that may save his people. Both below the earth and up among the stars, the events have to be read with multiple meanings, with the lasting resonance of myth. This story, my favorite in the book, is absolutely breathtaking, crafted in a tactile language that makes the stuff of dreams feel real.

To Say Nothing of Lost Figurines by Rafeeat Aliyu, from Nigeria, is a fun portal fantasy where a bored half-alien bureaucrat assigned to a boring uneventful town is suddenly ordered to watch over a human wizard searching for a staff he needs to participate in a magical competition. The frustrations of cultural misunderstandings and the absurdities of transdimensional legislation carry the tale in a breeze, but it's worth noting briefly the series of clever allegories inserted here: barriers to immigration, theft of cultural treasures, the discrimination suffered by people of mixed ethnicity, and the power of heritage to literally make a territory.

Sleep Papa, Sleep by Suyi Davies Okungbowa, from Nigeria, is a gritty undead story where an organ trafficker is haunted by his father's corpse after inadvertently selling parts of him. We follow the protagonist in a deadly quest through the criminal underbelly of Lagos to unburden himself from his guilt.

Clanfall: Death of Kings by Odida Nyabundi, from Kenya, is a complex political drama with plenty of throat slashing and gut ripping. In a far future Earth without humans, a territory known only as the Cracked Realm is ruled by feuding cyborg dynasties. The clan of the Fisi has just overthrown the clan of the Simba for control of the country, but a spy drone sent by the reclusive clan of the Chui has discovered a secret that could strengthen their position under the new regime. The plot is slow to reveal itself, and folds back into the past several times to revisit events from another perspective. The multiple alternating viewpoints tax the reader's working memory, and the abrupt ending comes frustratingly soon after the author has spent so much effort on building a fascinating world that cries out to be explored more. It reads as the first chapter of a much longer epic, and one can only hope it is.

The Satellite Charmer by Mame Bougouma Diene, from the United States, zooms the controversy on Chinese acquisition of African raw materials to cosmic proportions: in a future empire spanning the territories between Chad and Senegal, Chinese corporations have acquired a license to shoot gigantic beams of red light from orbit to pull minerals from the ground. A young man with prophetic powers has spent his life captivated by the strange seductive power of the red beam, obsessed with becoming one with it, while his country tries to survive amid massive environmental devastation.

The prose is written efficiently, but has time for strong description when it matters. The reader is regaled with sentences like "He could taste the dampness in the air, his eyes watering with the wind" and "Entire swathes of the continent seared and bleeding with lava, like open arteries on a suicidal forearm" and "The Mandrill's eyes opened onto the universe, folded it into the shape of Ibou's heart and took a bite." Likewise, the protagonist holds on to scarce moments of beauty as an escape from the bleakness of the world. Through slices of his life, we watch him adapt to the pressures of extractive economy until it takes everything from him and more.

This story gradually rises from a mundane plot to metaphysical musings without letting go of its threads of logical continuity. It's one thing for you to repeat the mantra that everything is connected, and another thing to be yourself the pathway through which it happens.

Thresher of Men by Michael Boatman, from the United States, is a quick succesion of shocking episodes about an avenging goddess who has lived for centuries watching over the African people and their descendants, and now has returned to the world in the era of police brutality.

Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, from Nigeria, concludes this anthology with mixed results. In a future Ife, a refuge for the dwindling survivors of a nuclear war, the tribal leader makes unauthorized contact with the outside world, offering his people's supernatural talents in exchange for a dubious promise of rescue, and sets in motion an explosive confrontation and a social revolution in his suffocatingly patriarchal community.

The dialogues are excessive, explaining too much in a theatrical voice that makes the characters sound separated from their own feelings. In the manner of didactic tales, which themselves feature as central elements of the story, the author chooses to tell rather than show, to a degree that strains the reader's investment. The characters come off more as archetypes than as concrete persons. Every time a fact about this society needs to be told to the reader, characters say it to each other, in classic "As you know" manner. Strangely, in a pivotal early scene where two prophets pronounce world-shattering revelations, the dialogue is simple, almost business-like, incongruous with the events it is describing.

The action scenes, in contrast, are written with better skill. This is not entirely to be celebrated, as this is not a story of war, but a story of cultural change told with the trappings of war. When it returns to its central topics, however, it adopts a preachy tone that does its message no favors. Only its mythical ending saves this story, which by that point has grown rather ponderous.

This last part may sound like an indictment of the book, but it's far from that. There is material here for every taste, and you may notice that in Adri's review last August, she enjoyed stories I didn't. This anthology is worth your immediate attention, and the most exciting bit is that it is labeled as "Volume One," so we remain eager for the rest of the series.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +2 for beautiful prose.

Penalties: −2 for numerous typesetting errors that are even more numerous in the Kindle version. It is unfair that an anthology capable of such literary heights should be stained by clumsy paragraph indentation and careless kerning.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Knight, Zelda and Ekpeki, Oghenechovwe Donald [editors]. Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora (Volume One) [Aurelia Leo, 2020].

Microreview [Book]: King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender

A story that expertly tackles a number of topical issues and adds a dash of magical realism to create something sublime.

In many ways, humanity is similar – made from the same fabric – yet the times have found ways to knot our fabric up into warring sects. Our nuances override the potential kinship of our shared fundamentals. Some cultures have been raised more so than others to perpetuate racism, homophobia and stoicism, setting up a sort of dam that blocks opportunities for acceptance or cathartic tears. King and the Dragonflies is centered around that fabric, and through a story of love and understanding, tries to unknot our shared cloth, and should make some readers a little more well-rounded than they were before opening the book. It’s marketed as middle grade, but like some of the most special works in the genre, has the potency and perceptiveness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with any novel.

King and the Dragonflies follows King, a boy whose older brother Khalid recently passed away. At Khalid’s funeral, King sees a dragonfly, and becomes convinced that his brother has taken the form of said insect. Meanwhile, Sandy, one of his best friends came out as gay to him, and he’s been ostracizing Sandy for fear of going down with him in homophobic humiliation. But there’s something more to the situation – both in terms of his brother’s involvement, and King’s personal feelings to the matter, which I will not spoil.

King is Black, which is vital to the story, as both racism against his people, as well as homophobia carried by a portion of the Black community is explored. The novel presses the paradox that the racism Black people experience and fight against is comparable to the level of hate and narrow-mindedness exhibited by homophobes, and yet Queer and anti-racist movements aren’t always interwoven. That contradictory dichotomy is heightened when Sandy, who is white, meets head-on with the traditionalist Black teachings of King’s family. And it’s heightened even more when Sandy’s family – including the father who is the sheriff of the town - has a besmirched reputation of being blatantly racist.

There’s so much emotional suppression in King and the Dragonflies, in which what characters say often oppose what they think. But the novel takes King and some of the supporting characters on a transformative journey, in which they become comfortable with what they keep hidden, until they no longer feel a need for suppression. If the novel starts out with a obstruction that blocks out translating thoughts into action, each page turned in the book moves the characters progress a little bit forward and gnaws on that obstruction, until a close approximation of liberty is granted.

For those who enter the book with the expectation of a lot of speculative fiction elements, you will be disappointed. The book is very loosely magical realism, with Khalid’s alleged transformation into a dragonfly being the most prominent fantastical element. The story later builds on the premise of time and space being fluid, and without spoiling anything, it ends up eclipsing the dragonfly as the most salient fantastical element and the greatest symbol of King’s grief and development.

The fabric of our world could be so smooth, in which prejudices are flattened out into indistinct fallacies. But instead, our world is a patchwork, with threads frayed off and inaccessible to others. Some patches are rough to the touch and seem to have no way of mending. But there are some pieces that are detached but capable of threading into more fabric. King and the Dragonflies speaks to readers, both of the middle grade and adult age, of how to weave into areas that you were ignorant of. Even if a dragonfly doesn’t grace you with its beauty and land on your fabric, you have comfort knowing that you’re attached to even greater things.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 For covering incredibly heavy topics with full-forced depth while being accessible to a middle grade readership.
+1 For insightful and incisive observations and emotional depth.

Negatives: -1 For an ending that ends a little too conveniently and quickly.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Sean Dowie - Screenwriter, stand-up comedian, lover of all books that make him nod his head and say, "Neat!

 Callender, Kacen. King and the Dragonflies [Scholastic Press, 2020]