Last year I wrote a post on "Black History of the Future" with reviews of novels by Samuel R. Delany, Walter Mosley, and Octavia E. Butler. This year for Black History Month, I decided to take an even more explicit cue from N. K. Jemisin's How Long 'Til Black Future Month in calling this post "Reading for Black Future Month 2022." I read two books set in future Ghana and Nigeria respectively: Nnedi Okorafor's Remote Control and Tade Thompson's Rosewater.
I also started a book in Octavia E. Butler's Patternist series, Clay's Ark, but it looks like that one is going to spill over in to Women's History Month for me. Look for that review soon.
And of course nobody should limit their reading of Black and/or women authors to February and/or March! But these provide nice ways to give some structure and inspiration to my reading.
Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor
The novella Remote Control is more great stuff from Okorafor! There's more depth here than meets the eye, both in terms of the background of the story and in the ideas.
A young girl in a future Ghana discovers she has a strange--and deadly--power, one that causes others to fear her but also to respect her in an odd sort of way. It took me a few chapters to get into this one, and since it's a novella, it was over somewhat quickly, but it's quite a journey. And especially toward the end there are hints that there's a lot more going on than it first appears with ties to some major science fictional concepts (some other reviewers have complained that this isn't science fiction, which I find deeply puzzling because it's clearly there if you pay attention!).
I feel like there's some deeper significance to the fact that the main character's power arrives as she forgets her original name. There's likely something deeper to say about a girl who comes of age in a way, gaining power that those around her fear and misunderstand. I'm not quite sure what this deeper significance is, or whether I'm the best person to comment on it, but it's obviously there.
I don't in any way mean this as a criticism. On the contrary, this shows that Okorafor has packed a lot into a relatively short novella. Remote Control has only deepened my already great appreciation of her style and skills as a writer.
Rosewater by Tade Thompson
Rosewater is a really interesting book that I enjoyed quite a bit.
The central idea is that a mysterious alien dome appears in Nigeria, and a city called Rosewater is built around it. Around the same time some humans begin developing what, for lack of a better, non-spoilery term, let's call psychic powers: telepathy and so on. Without giving any major spoilers, I'll just say there's a perfectly rational (if science fictional) reason for this that's super interesting.
Our main character Kaaro can sense people's knowledge. It's not so much that he hears their thoughts, but he can sometimes just immediately know things that other people know. It would be a fascinating thought experiment for epistemologists, because Kaaro does seem to know without knowing that he knows (the old internalism versus externalism debate in late 20th century analytic epistemology, with versions in classical Indian philosophy as well: see Stephen Phillips's work on Nyāya).
Kaaro uses his powers in his job for some sort of shadowy government agency. We experience the story of his recruitment and early missions though a series of flashback chapters interspersed with the "present day" chapters set in 2066. Jumping around in time didn't confuse me as much as I thought it might, but I admit I felt like I didn't get to know many of Kaaro's acquaintances and associates all that well and I sometimes found myself forgetting who's who. But then he's a bit of a loner, so maybe he doesn't know them all that well, either.
The whole novel is in the first-person and Kaaro's not always the nicest guy (some of his thoughts about women are problematic), but he has his redeeming qualities even if he remains almost something of a Camus-style protagonist or Ellison-style invisible man (I imagine this was Thompson's intention, though, so this is not a criticism).
Thompson's engaging writing style immediately pulled me in. Although I found myself wondering where it was all going around the middle, we start to learn enough about the mysterious aliens toward the that I'm excited to read the sequel. Also, the sequel will give us more POV characters, so I can't wait!
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