DOMINION: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora
edited by Zelda Knight and Ekpeki Oghenechovwe Donald
Aurelia Leo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now
Rating: 5* of five
The Publisher Says: Dominion is the first anthology of speculative fiction and poetry by Africans and the African Diaspora. An old god rises up each fall to test his subjects. Once an old woman’s pet, a robot sent to mine an asteroid faces an existential crisis. A magician and his son time-travel to Ngoni country and try to change the course of history. A dead child returns to haunt his grieving mother with terrifying consequences. Candace, an ambitious middle manager, is handed a project that will force her to confront the ethical ramifications of her company’s latest project—the monetization of human memory. Osupa, a newborn village in pre-colonial Yorubaland populated by refugees of war, is recovering after a great storm when a young man and woman are struck by lightning, causing three priests to divine the coming intrusion of a titanic object from beyond the sky.
A magician teams up with a disgruntled civil servant to find his missing wand. A taboo error in a black market trade brings a man face-to-face with his deceased father—literally. The death of a King sets off a chain of events that ensnare a trickster, an insane killing machine, and a princess, threatening to upend their post-apocalyptic world. Africa is caught in the tug-of-war between two warring Chinas, and for Ibrahim torn between the lashings of his soul and the pain of the world around him, what will emerge? When the Goddess of Vengeance locates the souls of her stolen believers, she comes to a midwestern town with a terrible past, seeking the darkest reparations. In a post-apocalyptic world devastated by nuclear war, survivors gather in Ife-Iyoku, the spiritual capital of the ancient Oyo Empire, where they are altered in fantastic ways by its magic and power.
I RECIEVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM THE EDITORS. THANK YOU!
My Review: Whenever you see this review: GO GET THIS ANTHOLOGY. It's the 24th...your ereader or tablet is just sitting there, you can't play your gifted games just yet, and Krampus only knows how long it will be until you get snacky. Read these intense, startling, urgent stories...no excuses! You read The Lord of the Rings and had no problem following those fake, complicated character and place names so don't front that these are any harder. And believe me: The stories are (almost) all so vivid and alive and enfolding that you are gonna be up late. The always-useful technique I call the Bryce Method of making notes and offering ratings story-by-story is my guide.
Trickin' by Nicole Givens Kurtz gives us the "after" of a world almost, but not quite, like our own; the Trickster Raoul is, or isn't, the Trickster God...? No matter, the old world's dead:
Once, a bustling metropolis existed, but now, only disappointment remained.
–and–
Some spoke of a virus that each warring country deployed against the other in an effort to gain the upper hand in a battle already slippery from bloodshed.
Can you think of a particularly compelling reason to care if this is the God or simply the psychopomp of sacrifices' souls? 4 stars
Red_Bati by Dilman Dila explores the eternal tension between slave and master. Granny's grandson, in her final years, gifted her with a "pet red basenji" robot, modified in a few ways to make sure it could keep Granny truly engaged with the world. This, as with all well-intentioned interference in the Way Things Are, has consequences.
Red_Bati becomes, after his fashion, sentient through his modified programming growing to respond to Granny and her human demands, needs, habits, wants. But as must be, Granny dies and her grandson sells off her property that's of no use to him. Including Red_Bati. Forgetting his well-intentioned mods to the robot might need taking care of, Red_Bati resultingly leaves Granny's body...though not her being...as he is repurposed for asteroid mining. An injury, "life"-changing, results:
Once his battery ran down, he would freeze and that would damage his e-m-data strips. Though these could be easily and cheaply replaced, he would lose all his data, all the codings that made him Red_Bati and not just another red basenji dog, all his records of Granny. He would die.
"That won't be a bad thing," Granny said, chuckling. "If you were a true dog, you'd be as old as I am and wishing for death."
He was not a dog. He was a human trapped in a pet robot.
–and–
The VR printers would give birth to more of his kind, but they would not grow like human children. They would be fully functioning adults at birth, with almost nothing new to learn because they would have all the knowledge that forebots had gathered. Would exploring for new worlds and searching for mew matter give their lives a meaning?
Yes, well, that's the penalty of leadership, isn't it, defining "meaning" for all who come after you. Yours the power, yours the responsibility...and what does a real human do when Responsibility bears down on him? Passes the buck, of course; but to whom...? 4 stars
A Maji Maji Chronicle by Eugen Bacon can't be faulted for its refrain of "be careful what you wish for" in today's world. We're facing several existential crises and, like the Emperor of Ngoni, we might very well become that which we defeated on our way to restoration of balance. Even the wise should fear power:
Lust predated greed that predated power that predated altruism. The Emperor gathered a harem of one thousand wives whose shelter spread across three villages. Their feed took resources from twelve more villages now forced to pay 'protection' tax to the palace.
And thus the wages of interference in the path of Destiny, History, Doom, call it what you will. Some things are not the result of evil-souled malice, but of simply being alive. A message well worth hearing. 3.75 stars, a slight star-ding for what felt to me a slightly infelicitous haste in relating this urgent message; needed more about the future before I bought the journey, for example.
The Unclean by Nuzo Onoh is far from fresh ground to till. An unwanting and unwanted wife, woman haunted by ill fortune and bad decisions made for her by men who seek only to use her womb for sons. A curse brought on by her bad Chi, a child lost, a rival gained, finally death calls on her husband and his house again and again. And it's all her fault, in everyone's eyes including her own.
Pretty standard stuff. There are beatings. The husband's fat sisters and his fat new wife and the whole family close her out, conspire against her, her own dead child visits her...this body-shaming and man-loathing goes on a long time before the woman is rescued by her younger, modern sister, who finds her bound to her dead husband's side by magic spells as she awaits the judgment of a tree on her viability and guilt. Sister breaks the curse by stomping up, gathering her into her Westernized arms, and whisking her off. I was interested in Igbo culture's demons and beliefs for a while, but honestly? This is a well-worn path among African women's writing, fathers and husbands and brothers all foolish and greedy and abusive, that I don't really want to follow along to anymore. YMMV, of course. 3 stars
A Mastery of German by Marian Denise Moore uses that most anodyne of settings, The Corporate Workplace, to explore a chilling, and I suspect fast-approaching, Brave New World: Sharing the essential You via genetic manipulation. Young Black woman Candace is new at her job of Project Management at fast-track pharma developer QND. The founder gave her full control over a Black geneticist's mysterious, and underperforming, project...find out if it will be profitable, how soon, and if that window makes sense; or kill it and we move on.
Clear, simple directive; tangled, ethically questionable decision. The best kind for a story. What if Candace, keeping this project alive, has the ability to keep the Sands of Time from burying the lives and accomplishments of Black people?
"I hit a wall {her father says of his genealogy research}; this always happens. Josiah Toil was just a Black laborer, so his work wasn't recorded. Every generation," he paused, "like Black Wall Street, like all of the Black towns after the Civil War, like all of the Black miners at Matewan."
"We know all of that," {Candace} said quietly.
"No, we rediscovered all of that. It gets wiped away and then two generations later people say 'we were kings and queens in Africa'. Well, sure. But we were city planners, architects, engineers, bricklayers, and professors here in America."
Now, you're Candace; you have the power to end that vicious, racist cycle forever by supporting this mysterious project you were tacitly told to kill; but it will take one giant hellacious demonstration with intimately controlled variables to keep it alive. How much of yourself would you be willing to give, permanently, to make it happen? This story gripped me, refused to let me go, from the outset. I hope that, one day, it grows into the big novel I feel it longing to become. 4.5 stars
Convergence in Chorus Architecture by Dare Segun Falowo is a novella that simply will not let you stop reading it...or, if you're a white westerner without curiosity, won't let you start. I want you to be one who starts.
It is no more difficult to read The Lord of the Rings than it is to experience this story in all its richness. It has astounding dieties, it has magical events, it has a dense world full of exciting and involving details to ponder over, to play out in your mind...and no one who's read the elvish stuff in Tolkien has any excuse but uninterest to avoid this deeply satisfying read. There are titanic storms and there are mystical journeys and there are people on quests to do things for the betterment of all Humanity. There is an intricate arabesque of a plot that will, at times (and I believe at the author's will), lead you astray:
Everyone stood and looked bored, insenseate, until the moment. The moment a single wail left their mouths just as their bodies caught on fire and they ascended into the black body of the ship. The boneship swallowed all without discrimination: women who had escaped war and men who had refused it and children who did not know its scars until later in their lives.
–and–
The bodies rose around as he made his way through a maze of rippling flesh. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. To the one who brought him it was a normal situation but to him it was like walking through a dense forest made of limbs and buttocks, a house of sleeping skin.
–and–
The black boneship slipped out of thoughtspeed into an infinite ocean. The ocean was still and white as purest sap. The boneship ceased to move with any precision and began to drift and spin slowly. Nothing moved in the whiteness. There was no sound.
Do not despair. You're on a quest, when was that ever easy? And, in the end, you're going to be so much richer for the read. The title, obscure to the point of obfuscation, is actually the only possible title this necessary tale could ever have. 5 stars
Emily by Marian Denise Moore is a brief poem about life as a child-slave. I have no context to rate poetry. It's very short, though, so don't just skip it.
To Say Nothing of Lost Figurine by Rafiyat Aliyu plays to my love of heists and of portals between dimensions. I'm as happy as a puppy in a puddle as I follow Odun to Kur, therein to retrieve his ngunja called Jooh. The fun of this is its deeply held belief that there is no Western "pure science" or African "folk magic" there is Reality and it is far, far stranger than we know:
"Greetings to you and those you hold in your possession," the agent said in a deep, raspy voice.
"Greetings to you and those you hold in your possession," Odun replied.
Covered from head to toe in a flowing robe of pitch black, the border agent's identity was hidden. Yet the greeting signalled that the agent was someone like Odun, someone selected to control the variety of staffs, wands, and figurines that made up the corpus of the ngunja.
–and–
This year was particularly crucial: it would mark Odun's sixth win, qualifying him for a promotion and hopefully an all-explense paid move to another frontier town where he could push the limits of his ngunja and terrakinesis abilities.
Now, these details tell the experienced caper-reader what we need to know to suss out the ending before it unfolds; in a short story, that's not the least common fault, so the focus of an old reader shifts to the places, the characters, and the ideas we're getting. And I approve, whole-heartedly, of them all. Odun's local guide Aule is a worthy sidekick; she has her physical powers and her wildly different way of thinking to fit with Odun's more "but but but these are RULES and RULES ARE IMPORTANT" mien. Absolutely admired the economical way Author Aliyu snuck in the Kurians' objections to humans like Odun, and their deep physical aversion to Aule. Please, Author Aliyu, please make more stories in this universe! I give it 4 stars, but that's only because there is a missing step in their heist...the escape!
Sleep Papa, Sleep by Suyi Davies Okungbowa takes father/son conflict to a level I simply was not expecting...Max, whose carelessness while he's in a body-parts market is enough of infraction of the necromantic laws that a damned weird and terrible penalty is exacted: he and his dead father must battle out Max's guilt at wanting to leave the family trade, his father's gift of a career to him, and his growing need to be a modern man:
There are mud tracks on the floor tiles that he didn’t notice before. They run from the door, but don’t end at Max’s feet at the entrance to the kitchenette. The TV’s light is insufficient, so Max squints to follow the tracks, which he notices are odd because while one is a complete footprint, the opposite foot has most of the sole with no trace of toes.
It is moments like this that tell you you're not in Lagos as you and I know it. It tells you that Author Okungbowa leads us into the world of horror and body horror to explain how a man must fight for every foot of distance from family and its expectations. One of the standout stories. 4.75 stars
Clanfall: Death of Kings by Odida Nyabundi needed more Shibuor and fewer interchangeable men! What a hellacious, intense, adrenaline-pumping ride! More now please. 4.5 stars and please note the "please" at the end of "More now" was really pro forma...get more of these stories out!!
The Satellite Charmer by Mame Bougouma Diene scintillates, coruscates, makes my knees go weak and my ears ring with divine prosody:
He flung the galactic bow away, the soundbox expanding, his fingers drumming the thick chords like a bass. The satellites winked out as giant ♬♫♩♪ hammered them in waves, destroying cities across the planet. Somewhere his body died. His fingers merged with the chords, he and the bull fiddle were one vibration, bouncing between satellites until a ring of debris circled the earth. He inhaled, or rather somewhere in the vastness of space a galaxy exploded. He let his fingers rest. Light years away the bass line birthed a star.
Do you need more? I can go on... 4.75* of five
Thresher of Men by Michael Boatman was deeply uncomfortable to read, and very very on point; I wished for Kisazi to do more. Never mind content warnings...any sensitivity you can name is likely to experience a strong response. I don't know what to say rating-wise...let's go with intensity of response = good, so 4 stars
Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon by Ekpeki Oghenechovwe Donald brings this collection to a climax, not a close. Every word is limned with acetylene, high heat cutting the obdurate titanium of post-apocalyptic reality with beautiful figures and delicate patterns...that will then roast themselves into your readerly skin as Author Donald smacks you with them. A fitting conclusion to this astounding, intense, often brutal read. 5 bright stars
“Ife-Iyoku” is a work of daring moral imagination as well as a story expertly constructed. What makes this story’s achievement even more spectacular is that {it} stood out for the jury in a bumper crop of thought-provoking and challenging speculative fictions." Winner of the 2020 OTHERWISE AWARD! Bravo!
