Tuesday, September 14, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Anthology: This Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021) edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

 

Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained from the editor in advance of the book's release on September 28, 2021 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

This Year's Best African Speculative Fiction is another SciFi/Fantasy anthology which is obviously exactly what it claims to be - a collection of short stories from African writers that were published in 2020.  The collection features twenty nine stories published in 2020, all short story or flash fiction-esque in length, and as such features a ton of small bites for readers to enjoy and think about (rather than featuring any longer more in-depth stories).  Interestingly, unlike other collections, this collection has no hesitation including multiple stories from the same authors - so the book features two stories from Tlotlo Tsamaase, three stories from Sheree Renée Thomas, and two from Tobi Ogundiran. 

It's a solid and often very interesting collection, hitting a number of themes and topics throughout, featuring a number of writers who readers may be familiar with from recent highly praised novels (T.L. Huchu, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, C.L. Clark) and others from writers who are less well known.  I'd actually read a number of these stories before in both other anthologies (Dominion, Black Sci-Fi Short Stories) or just online (there's a couple from the FIYAH-Tor Flash Fiction collection that I distinctly remembered), and I was not displeased to see them collected again here.  All in all its a solid collection, whose biggest issue is mainly that it just seems not organized in any particular fashion, such that similar stories in the collection are kind of scattered throughout, rather than collected together.  

Some more specifics after the jump:

Trigger Warnings: Murder, Suicide, Child-Harm, and more in various stories.


As I sort of mentioned, the only common factor of the stories included in this collection is that the stories come from writers either from Africa or who are part of the African diaspora.  The collection features stories taking place in present or future (and past) Africa, but also includes stories set elsewhere in the world.  It includes stories set in futures and different worlds based upon African culture, and ones barely so influenced at all.  It includes stories dealing directly with the pains and injustices faced by Africans and the descendants of Africans, and those dealing indirectly or pretty much not at all with the topic.  The 29 stories feature a wide scope of material*, and as I mentioned above the jump, my biggest issue with the anthology (other than my general preference for longer stories) is that the stories don't seem to be organized in any clear way, which makes it harder to talk about and really compare and examine the stories that deal with similar topics and themes - a few times similar stories do show up in consecutive order, but it doesn't always happen and there's no guide or explanation to how stories are grouped.

*One nice improvement of this anthology from the Dominion anthology, which was also edited by Ekpeki, is that the stories included this time include queer characters, themes, and ideas, whereas that past anthology was pretty much strictly heteronormative except by implication.*    

And there are a bunch of such stories.  So for example, Are We Ourselves by Michelle Mellon, The Part That Make Us Monsters by Sheree Renée Thomas, A Master of German by Marian Denise Moore - and some others - deal with the past atrocities committed against those taken from Africa against their will and then oppressed in the New World and elsewhere (Are We Ourselves and A Master of German deals with repeats of such acts through technology and governance).  There are a number of fantastical stories dealing with spirits, magic and beings out of African myth (A Love Song for Herkinal, A Curse at Midnight, The Goatkeeper's Harvest, The Many Lives of an Abiku, etc.); two stories dealing with robots; two dealing with vampires, etc.  

Perhaps some of the highlights of the collection deal with people struggling with depression, their sexuality, or their bodies in worlds that aren't so accepting of being different.  There are at least two stories dealing strongly through fantasy with depression - for example, Disassembly by Makena Onjerika deals with it through a woman who can literally take her body apart, while The River of Night deals with it via imaginary pets and friends who wish to eat the depressed protagonist.  A couple of stories deal with at least in part the idea of being queer in worlds that aren't accepting of such (And This is How to Stay Alive - which earns the Suicide trigger warning - and Dessicant by Craig Laurance Gidney) and are fairly well done, while others deal with struggles of individuals to find their own purpose despite their difficulties.  

Other highlights are the aforementioned stories that deal with African culture, magic, and spirits - as well as a few that deal quite fascinatingly with views by those with some respect for those past practices but don't simply get left behind as the future comes creeping towards them (Egoli by T.L. Huchu deals with a grandmother and a smart phone in a way that is just really well done, for instance).  There's a lot here, and I'm going to make this review too long if I go too far in depth listing every story of interest.  

 Is this my favorite anthology or collection of the year?  Probably not - again I prefer longer stories, and more cohesive anthologies than this.  But it's a very solid collection with a lot of interesting stories, and well worth the time of any reader of scifi or fantasy.  

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