MAGE OF FOOLS, SF novel by Black woman creator tha SLAPS

MAGE OF FOOLS
EUGEN BACON
Meerkat Press
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the dystopian world of Mafinga, Jasmin must contend with a dictator’s sorcerer to cleanse the socialist state of its deadly pollution.

Mafinga's malevolent king dislikes books and, together with his sorcerer Atari, has collapsed the environment to almost uninhabitable. The sun has killed all the able men, including Jasmin’s husband Godi. But Jasmin has Godi’s secret story machine that tells of a better world, far different from the wastelands of Mafinga. Jasmin’s crime for possessing the machine and its forbidden literature filled with subversive text is punishable by death. Fate grants a cruel reprieve in the service of a childless queen who claims Jasmin’s children as her own. Jasmin is powerless—until she discovers secrets behind the king and his sorcerer.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Lyrical prose...maybe sometimes too lyrical for its own good...telling a tale of monopoly, abuse of power, an apartheid of haves and have-nots, that not coincidentally resembles the modern technological world metastasizing across the agrarian peasantry of Africa and keeping its fruits entirely apart from those who feed them.

The worldbuilding is *stellar*, the narrative drive does not let up, and the plot speaks to my Social Justice Warrior soul. So what happened to that fifth star, you wonder. The story is told in eight parts, each of many chapters, and in almost as many viewpoints. I get that this is a choice made to facilitate the slightly seasick sense of the story’s walled-off world, where nothing is shared, nothing is given away, and the walls that enclose you form strict limits that are transgressed at the greatest possible risk to life and limb. When we learn that technology emanates from actual aliens, it comes less as a surprise than as a peek over a wall...not, for this reader, the best way to induce full investment. The upside of the structure for me was that I was always in a state of readiness for the next shift, the next magical revelation, and the horrors that always lurk where magic and technology collide. But I was always riding along, moving forward, keeping up...never getting to know anyone well enough to feel deeply with them in their tragedies, not even Jasmin.

In a time where the tsunami of Information is drowning the wisdom and the guidance humans need by replacing stories with infotainment, this book’s lushness of both imagination and prose, its demand for you to pay attention to where you are, who is speaking to you, and what they want you to know, is very evocative. It summons darkness, it rings the feeding bell for the monsters implicit...even inherent...in totalitarian systems. Learn what those who least want you to resist least want you to know if you plan to live instead of exist.

Resistance is not, in fact, futile.

Costly. Dreadfully painful. But never futile. Villains can, and must be, fought at every level and with every atom of one’s being. The price is awful, but the price of submission is even worse.