Postcolonial Speculative Fiction

Course Texts

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor 

Winner of the 2016 Hugo Award (Novella)
Winner of the 2015 Nebula Award (Novella)
Finalist for the 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award (Novella)
Finalist for the 2016 British Fantasy Award (Novella)
Finalist for the 2016 Locus Award (Novella)
Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs. Knowledge comes at a cost, one that Binti is willing to pay, but her journey will not be easy. The world she seeks to enter has long warred with the Meduse, an alien race that has become the stuff of nightmares. Oomza University has wronged the Meduse, and Binti's stellar travel will bring her within their deadly reach. If Binti hopes to survive the legacy of a war not of her making, she will need both the gifts of her people and the wisdom enshrined within the University, itself - but first she has to make it there, alive.
From Worlds Without End

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

Finalist for the 2014 British Science Fiction Association Award (Novel)
Finalist for the 2014 Red Tentacle Award (Novel)
Finalist for the 2014 Tiptree Award (Novel)
When a massive object crashes into the ocean off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria's most populous and legendary city, three people wandering along Bar Beach (Adaora, the marine biologist- Anthony, the rapper famous throughout Africa- Agu, the troubled soldier) find themselves running a race against time to save the country they love and the world itself... from itself. Lagoon expertly juggles multiple points of view and crisscrossing narratives with prose that is at once propulsive and poetic, combining everything from superhero comics to Nigerian mythology to tie together a story about a city consuming itself. At its heart a story about humanity at the crossroads between the past, present, and future, Lagoon touches on political and philosophical issues in the rich tradition of the very best science fiction, and ultimately asks us to consider the things that bind us together--and the things that make us human.

From Worlds Without End

Kabu-Kabu by Nnedi Okorafor
Finalist for 2013 Locus Award (Collection)
Kabu-Kabu-unregistered illegal Nigerian taxis-generally get you where you need to go. Nnedi Okorafor's Kabu-Kabu, however, takes the reader to exciting, fantastic, magical, occasionally dangerous, and always imaginative locations you didn't know you needed. This debut short story collection by an award-winning author includes notable previously published material, a new novella co-written with New YorkTimes-bestselling author Alan Dean Foster, six additional original stories, and a brief foreword by Whoopi Goldberg.

From Worlds Without End

Monster Portraits by Del Samatar and Sophia Samatar

Recommended Reading by NPR's Book Concierge

Relentlessly original and brilliantly hybrid, Monster Portraits investigates the concept of the monstrous through a mesmerizing combination of words and images. An uncanny and imaginative autobiography of otherness, it offers the fictional record of a writer in the realms of the fantastic shot through with the memories of a pair of Somali-American children growing up in the 1980s. Operating under the sign of two--texts and drawings, brother and sister, black and white, extraordinary and everyday--Monster Portraits multiplies, disintegrates, and blends, inviting the reader to find the danger in the banal, the beautiful in the grotesque. Accumulating into a breathless journey and groundbreaking study, these brief fictions and sketches claim the monster as a fragmentary vastness: not the sum but the derangement of its parts. Del Samatar's drawings conjure beings who drag worlds in their wake. World Fantasy Award-winning author Sofia Samatar responds with allusive, critical, and ecstatic meditations. Together they have created a secret history of the mixed-race child, a guide to the beasts of an unknown mythos, and a dreamer's iconography. The monstrous never looked so simultaneously haunting and familiar.

From Worlds Without End

The Black God's Drums by P. Djèlí Clark

This page has paths:

  1. Introduction to the Project Rhonda Knight

This page references: