The Sword and Laser discussion

Author Namina Forna introduces her new book (The Gilded Ones) with an article in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

I thought this was a really interesting article - in full disclosure I'm an American white dude, so take my talk about race with that grain of salt. The author was born in Africa and emigrated to the US as a child and talks about the difference between stories of black people in the two places. She brings up some points that made me think a bit about how I read. Here's a few paragraphs that I particularly liked:

"Yes, some Black people had been slaves, but others had been queens, kings, adventurers, tricksters, country folk. Yes, there were huts and slave cabins, but there were also castles in Ethiopia, towering walls and streetlights in Benin, libraries in Timbuktu and fortresses in Great Zimbabwe. ... There was more to Blackness than struggle.

But in every Black book that won a medal, or every Black film that won an Oscar, there was always a Black person struggling against racial oppression. There are consequences to only lauding such portrayals. Perpetually tying the narrative of Black people and Blackness to slavery, colonisation and oppression meant that Black people – Black children especially – were denied the chance to see ourselves as heroes with agency over our worlds."

It made me realize that I perceived it as natural that a book by or about people of color would include social justice topics, certainly a bias on my part. I don't mind having struggle in the books I read, but I read SFF specifically to get stories with those adventurers and tricksters that the author talks about. Hopefully these sorts of stories begin to gain some traction in the market. Anyway, I figured some of you might find it interesting too.

My library recently featured a bunch of afrofuturist fiction and it's really interesting because it's not seen in the US. Most for some reason seems to be set in Nigeria and Nigeria isn't all of Africa, but still it's different.

I'm early on in Rosewater which is excellent so far and The Liminal People was also very good. Need to read some Nicky Drayden. Nnedi Okorafor etc are all excellent too and very different takes on this.

I cannot recommend Rosewater enough so I'm so happy to see more people reading it.

Think is is why The Black Panther resonated so strongly: the juxtaposition of a free African people who were never conquered and the struggle of American blacks led to natural conflict between those worldviews.

Neither the Wakandan nor Killmonger points of view were wrong, but their individual perspectives were both limited by their lived experience. That’s not something we typically get from fiction about the black experience, which is treated as monolithic and universal and almost always about subjugation.

Rick wrote: "My library recently featured a bunch of afrofuturist fiction and it's really interesting because it's not seen in the US. Most for some reason seems to be set in Nigeria and Nigeria isn't all of Af..."

It’s a direct result of the Nigerian Civil War back in the 1960s. Due to the war casualties and mass starvation there was a massive international outcry whose response reverberated across the world in various ways.

The most obvious and highest-profile was the creation of Medicins sans Frontieres, aka Doctors Without Borders, as a direct response. The second, which is starting to come to fruition now, was the Nigerian diaspora. The children of those kids and young adults who fled the warzone have come of age and are writing books, plays and music, all of it steeped in the stories of their lost homeland. Many of those books are SFF.

Even in small ways it’s had an impact on culture, such as the lead singer of the Dead Kennedys taking the stage name “Jello Biafra”, Biafra being the democratic separatist state that the larger autocratic Niger set out to crush. That was actually my “in” to learning about Nigeria, because his name was so odd. And my parents said that punk music was a waste of time.

Thanks for the Rosewater recommendation. I know I've heard of it, but it wasn't on top of my pile to read. I'll bump it up towards the top.

Trike - know about the war but hadn't connected it to this. Thanks. Also didnt know that's where MSF came from.

Everfair by Nisi Shawl is another one for the reading list - not African Futurism but African alternate history which imagines how the Congo’s history might have unfolded differently if the people there had discovered steam technology before the Europeans.

Ruth wrote: "Everfair by Nisi Shawl is another one for the reading list - not African Futurism but African alternate history which imagines how the Congo’s history might have unf..."

I actually almost didn't read this one because it got a pretty tepid review by Amal El-Mohtar on NPR. But I ended up reading it anyway and liked it. It really reads like good narrative history, jumping across time and distance to get to crucial moments. The characters aren't quite as front-and-center as the sweep of fiction history is, which is maybe why El-Mohtar didn't like it as much.

As a book, it's interesting because it engages with both sides of what this article talks about. There is both the struggle against subjugation and the the African king who builds a modern nation which is a serious player in world politics. Anyway, it's well worth a look.