"I live in a society where it is possible for me to live in a nice apartment and provide some level of comfort for me, but I can step out my door and right next to me is a woman living on the street with twins."
“I have come to recognize Nigeria. Yes, it is not original; it is not true per se; but it works. I am no more just an Itsekiri. I have siblings from other tribes. Now we have to make those partnerships work based on mutual consensus. How are we going to share our wealth? Do we have a true federalism and monetary system? We need to fight for that space. The minority voices need to be heard and registered and given room to express themselves within that Nigerian identity.
“I’m Nigerian, I’m African, based on colonialisation. But my blood is Itsekiri.”
This is what stories will be like when told by our post-apocalyptic descendants cobbling together estimations of Michael Bay films from their uranium-addled memories.
It is in this shimmering on the borderland, the boundary between the quotidian life of the city and Zipolite’s world of dreams that Sea Monsters allows us its most potent glimpses of the fantastic.
Writing generally about SF, Fennell occasionally over-simplifies. But, by searching beyond rigid genre-boundaries, he is able to present stories by authors, especially female authors, rarely found in anthologies and discussions of the genre.
Due to the precarious financial nature even of critically acclaimed publishing ventures, we have only a few places where SF&F writers can explore specific themes with any promise of payment whatsoever. According to the Kickstarter page for this project, the team involved in this effort wanted very much to add to that number of venues. So this essay is more workshop than review, which I hope might also benefit other teams bravely developing SF&F platforms on minimal resources.
The story of his wide influence and charismatic character is being told on websites, on social media, and at a series of memorials being organized in Nairobi. This piece focuses on Binyavanga’s contributions to speculative fiction by Africans, while summarizing some of that wider story.
