Inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame last year, and winner of Hugo, Eisner and Nebula awards, Nnedi Okorafor is one of the leading lights of Africanfuturism. Her latest novel, Death of the Author (Gollancz, £20), begins with an author’s rebirth. A self-described failure as a literary writer, Zelu – the American-born daughter of Nigerian immigrants, and “a 32-year-old paraplegic woman with an MFA in creative writing” – turns to “the wild, logical world of robots”, and a post-apocalyptic war between humanoid robots, or “Humes”, and their non-corporeal AI foes.
The parallels between Zelu and Ankara, the Hume hero of her wildly successful novel Rust Robots, are clear, as both navigate increasingly uncertain landscapes by fusing cutting-edge expertise to ancient traditions. Zelu avails of developments in bionic technology to visit her ancestral homeland and explore the hinterland of her Nigerian culture, while the fictional Ankara taps into the distinctively human gift for fabricating stories to counter AI’s faultless but monomaniacal logic, all the while scheming to save the world from an existential threat. Inventive, clever, funny and profound, Death of the Author leans into Roland Barthes’s essay of the same name to mischievous effect.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay (Tor, £22) opens with the xenobiologist Daghdev exiled to the gulag planet of Kiln for subversive activities designed to overthrow the repressive Mandate, and assigned to a chain-gang under scientists who are investigating “the remains of a mysterious, vanished civilisation”.
The dynamic narrative centres on the efforts of Daghdev and his fellow prisoners to overthrow the authoritarian regime of Commandant Terolan, who represents the Mandate and its perverse biocentrism, which insists (even if it means bending the science out of shape) on the primacy of humanity in the cosmos. What gives Alien Clay its heft, however, is Tchaikovsky’s brilliantly imagined world-building in devising a planet where evolution has run amok. Told with a slyly mordant wit, this blend of hard science and philosophical musing skewers the “manifest destiny” of a species desperate to prove itself “the most perfect expression of the will of the universe”.
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Hugely successful as a crime writer, Elly Griffiths introduces a sci-fi element to her writing with The Frozen People (Quercus, £22), the first in a series to feature DS Ali Dawson, a 50-year-old cold case detective who is also “a weird time-travelling mother”. Sent back to the Victorian era to investigate whether the great-great-grandfather of a prominent Tory politician is a serial killer of vulnerable women, Ali finds herself trapped in the past and the focus of said gentleman’s attentions.
The means by which Ali and her colleagues time-travel is glossed over; Griffiths, who has a very neat line in black humour, is far more interested in exploring the prosaic details of what working undercover in an historical era might mean. The result is a police procedural that is as is entertaining as it is offbeat.
Set on the futuristic interstellar hub of Kepler, Hawaiian author Makana Yamamoto’s Hammajang Luck (Gollancz, £20) begins with career criminal Edie Morikawa being sprung from prison by her old friend, and betrayer, Angel, who is planning to rip off the vastly wealthy Joyce Atlas, the founder of “a tech monopoly the likes of which the galaxy had never seen”.
As Angel gathers together a gang of misfits with specialised skills, however, the novel quickly becomes a story that is three parts heist yarn to one part sci-fi, and one that is chock-a-block with cliches (one character describes herself, without blushing, as a “mastermind”; the gang plot and scheme at their “hideout”). The story rips along at a ferocious pace, but there’s very little that adds anything fresh to the genre here.
Set in 2272, long after climate devastation has left large swathes of Argentina submerged, Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99; translated by Rahul Bery) revolves around the titular character, a “genetic mistake” who is half-human, half-mosquito. Bullied by his (or, as quickly becomes clear, her) human peers, our anti-heroine eventually snaps and embarks on a “crusade, one that would allow her to lay humanity to waste on a planetary scale”.
If that was all Nieva’s English-language debut had to offer, it would be intriguing enough; but the story folds back on itself via El Dulce, a 12-year-old hardened criminal and part-time video game player, who is obsessed with the interactive virtual reality of Pampatronics, the exploration of which allows for a palimpsest form of storytelling (“a multiply multilayered dimension”) whereby a number of fictional strata overlap and interact. The result is a series of interlocking stories that blend body horror, magic realism and a rip-roaring satire of late capitalism and humanity’s unerring instinct for self-sabotage.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).
