Is it just me, or is there more and more fantastic fiction, both SF and Fantasy (not that there is much of a practical difference here, in this case!) to come out of Africa these days? Or, maybe, it was always there, but is becoming more visible to me, has more of a platform, is more self-assured and pushing for centre stage? But either way, Luna Press, who always have published a wide range of styles and authors, are helping to boost the signal by featuring the Nigerian writer Wole Talabi in their Harvester series which brings together 'old and new stories, plus bonus material'. So here, with his first collection Incomplete Solutions, we get 18 of Wole's stories which were previously published in a variety of short story outlets, plus 3 originals first published in this collection. Wole Talabi describes himself as 'a full-time engineer, part-time writer and sometime editor' – he has won a Nommo Award (for The Regression Test, which is part of this collection), and has been nominated for a number of others, including the Caine Prize. He currently lives and works (and writes!) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The stories here cover a wide spread of styles, topics, and approaches, even for a collection. I don't know if that's because Wole is still working towards finding his own voice, approach, and place; or if this simply is because he has interests and skills which range further than your average writer's. Either way, Incomplete Solutions extends all the way from standard tropes with not much new added to very unusual and fascinating takes on stories and themes, most of which show a strong influence of his origin and societal background, making them from a western perspective unusual (still, despite the groundswell noted above) and thus, in my view of the world, interesting and sometimes alien from more than one perspective.
Besides the stories the book contains Author's notes on the individual stories, providing background, inspirations, iterations in writing them, topical points, and publication history. I did not read these in conjunction with the actual stories (I only found them at the end...), but suspect that these would provide value through additional viewpoints and topical focus whilst reading the stories if considered at the same time.
Below I'm running through the stories in the book, providing short capsule reviews on topic and my thoughts on them – read on it if you're interested in what's in the book, or stop here if you feel this would spoil your enjoyment of the book which you're about to obtain (I recommend you do obtain a copy indeed!).
Erinn L Kemper is a Canadian Horror writer living in the Carribean, with a number of published short stories to her name.
The Song is not something I would have rated as horror, but rather as desolate and dystopian; but I can see how you could arrive at that definition when coming from the other direction, so to speak. It is set on a former oil rig now serving as a whale farming and research station, and follows a change in behaviour of the whales, and associated changes to their songs.
It is, I'm sure to no surprise, not entirely cheerful, and for me had both echoes of Somtow Sucharitkul's Starship and Haiku and, to a lesser degree, of Peter Watt's Bulk Food. But judge yourself, the link is below and on the right - it's worth your time!
Norwegian-based High North Alliance claims the carbon footprint resulting from eating whale meat is substantially lower than that of beef. One serving of whale meat contains 181% of your daily intake of iron, and 55% of your daily intake of B12. It is low in fat and cholesterol. As of 2010, fluke meat cost up to two hundred dollars per kilogram, more than triple the price of belly meat.
—Dr. Suzanne Anderson, How Do You Like Your Whale?
Ken Liu is an award-winning (Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy) American writer of Science Fiction; with a sideline of translating Chinese (mostly, but not exclusively SF) into English, besides having a law degree and working as a programmer! For Invisible Planets - An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction he is not just the translator for all the stories, but also listed as Editor.
The book starts with an Introduction by Ken, titled China Dreams. It introduces the reader to some background on Chinese SF, explains his selection for this book, and some pitfalls to avoid for the reader. This mainly can be summarised as 'Chinese SF is huge and varied, don't project your own preoccupation of China onto the stories'. Fair point, I felt.
After that we get started on the 13 short stories contained in the book. These are ordered by author, each of which gets a short introduction/bio before their stories. All of those, save one (Night Journey of the Dragon Horse, by Zia Jia) have been previously published in English. This is followed by three Essays on Chinese SF.
Below is a run-through of the individual stories, with a brief capsule review for each. This contains, by its nature, spoilers; if this bothers you then stop here with my recommendation that this, as is usual for such a colleciton, very varied in scope and approach, but also fascinating and very much worth your time and money!
They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and I guess they're right, even if covers frequently are following an optical/design code indicating what's inside. Because we Do choose books by their covers; or at least I do. So, this is one I picked up for its cover, because it put me in the mental frame of things I'd read in the past, and loved. And you know what? I greatly enjoyed that one, too, after a few hard-to love initial pages.
Ben Berman Ghan is a Canadian author, editor, and MA student; with now 2 novels (and next year a non-fiction book) plus loads of short fiction and non-fiction articles to his name. His first novel, Wychman Road, is out of print, and next year's release is called Bruce Meyer: Essays on his Work. What We See in the Smoke starts in realism with a social undertone, and heads from there into the future – all parts set in Toronto, even if you wouldn't recognise it at times if it didn't declare itself to be so!
But to start at the beginning – this is not a straight up story, but what I normally would term a patchwork novel, ie a collection of short stories which, whilst independent in actual topic and story arc, tell a larger story in combination. He himself terms the book a fix-up novel, as he re-wrote the individual pieces, previously unconnected stories, to refer to each other and tie them together into some kind of single narrative (I don't think they would have created a larger picture otherwise). But terminology aside, this is a collection of short stories, in 3 larger parts of 5 or 6 chapters/stories each: These Memories of Us (2016-2026), These Violent Machines (2040-2280), and An Uncertain and Distant World (2280-3036). But if this sounds all very Accelerando to you then I have to tell you that the book at hand is a much looser collection of impressions.
Earlier this year the latest installment of the Pan-African science fiction anthology AfroSFv3, edited by Ivor W Hartmann, was released.
To whet the appetite we are given free access to the short story Njuzu by Zimbabwean author TL Huchu from it; interweaving traditionally SF vocabulary and setting about an accident on a mining colony on Ceres with Shona mythology to dazzling effect. Telling from this freebie in the Johannesburg Review of Books I reckon that we are in for a treat with the collection!
AfroSFv3 Author Spotlight: T.L. Huchu’s work has appeared in Interzone, The Apex Book of World SF 5, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, The Year's Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016, AfroSFv1, and elsewhere. He enjoys working across genres, from crime to sci-fi to literary fiction. Currently, he is working on new fantasy novel. Find him @TendaiHuchu
What, I ask you, would have been if the Tsar Nicholas would not only have had his Cossacks to harrow the provinces, and especially the Jews, but also Dragons? And if Lenin didn’t only have his Red Army to send out and spread terror, but if the Red Terror would have included Dragons, too?
Well, wonder no longer, Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple provide us with The Last Tsar’s Dragons, a revised version of their revised version of the history of the Russian Revolution, and of the days and events leading up to it, which includes Dragons. Because... - well because why not? It makes about as much sense as everything else that went on.
And so we join the last Tsar (not that he knows that he is!) sending out his black dragons to harrow the Jews – to absolutely no point, the Jews are safe, having seeded their shtetls with drachometrs, early warning devices. And so they sit in their underground burrows and let the dragons have a go at other targets, to the chagrin of the affected Russians and thus the Tsar. But one of these Jews, sitting out a dragon attack, is Bronstein, latterly known by his revolutionary name of Trotsky, who has at some point tracked down another brood of dragon eggs in faraway lands, and is now hatching and imprinting them, to put them at the service of the revolution, under the command of his comrade Lenin.
Nominally the story is being told by a nameless (and essentially faceless, by definition) court functionary, telling it to his guard. It is also told with a lot of hindsight, as he describes himself as “a man who has turned against the revolution that employed him for nearly thirty years” - of course he was, as such functionaries do, employed by the Tsar at the time of the story. And freshly married, to the delightful and much younger Ninotchka, which adds some personal frisson to the story.
