Wole Talabi’s new collection, Convergence Problems, brims with near- and far-future dangers, each extended and allegorized through a Nigerian lens. We see Abuja torn apart by riots, artificially intelligent art achieving singularity in Lagos, Nigerian-led mining operations on Mars, and digital ghosts who follow the logics of Yoruba folktale. This is not Afrofuturism in the Black Panther sense, an exotified Africa painted from the outside in tribal patterns, designed condescendingly to portray an African-led future as inherently brighter, cooler, or more colorful than a Western- or Asian-led one. It is a serious, at times skeptical, exploration of where technology may lead us, in which Nigerian culture is the default lens through which the world is seen, but in which that lens is itself also held up to scrutiny.
The stories collected here come from the past decade of Talabi’s career, and many have previously been published in prestigious science-fiction periodicals: Asimov’s, Analog, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld are among the titles named on the copyright pages. Many others have appeared in collections of Nigerian or African writing, illustrating Talabi’s emergent status in national, continental, and international science fiction. He has also worked hard to promote and anthologise African science fiction and the Afrofuturism movement, as outlined by Geoff Ryman in this 2019 interview. Although this latest collection is weighed down by awkward prose and a nagging sense that these stories have their eyes set on screen adaptation rather than on the unique potentials of language and literature, there is an appealing tenacity to the way Talabi worries away at those matters—of energy extraction, artificial intelligence, and systems management, in particular—in which he has a stalwart and refined expertise.
This is the second time Talabi’s own stories have been collected into a book. The first was Incomplete Solutions, against which title the new one, Convergence Problems, chimes pleasingly. Talabi also has a published novel, Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, from which the title character Shigidi returns in this collection, in the uneven “Saturday’s Song.” This story is one of the furthest departures from the techno-speculation that is Talabi’s stock in trade: here, he turns instead to blending neon-lit urban fantasy with the structures and characters of folklore. Fairy-tale is not, however, Talabi’s strength. In these softer-focus tales, he has a tendency to offer syrupy sentimentality as a placeholder for profundity: one character is described, without irony or constraint (or much in the way of punctuation), as having “[t]he look of someone who had seen the worst of the world had stared into the dark heart of humanity but had survived and resolved to live, love and laugh freely despite it” (p. 30).
The better stories in the collection, by contrast, are unambiguously science fictional, and trade in battle-scarred pessimism. Two of the best written are the very shortest tale in the book and the longest. The shortest, “Gamma (Or: Love in the Age of Radiation Poisoning),” is a sweetly drawn story that resonates beyond its narrow confines. Two children, a boy rich enough to afford a radiation suit and a girl who is without (and is thus doomed to soon die), play hide-and-seek in the irradiated rubble of a global nuclear catastrophe and fall in love, in full knowledge of the girl’s rapid physical decay. Love, play, trust, permission, and death flicker, painfully quickly, across the reader’s eyes.
The longest story, coming directly after “Gamma,” is “Ganger”—short for Doppelgänger. This novella takes up most of the middle hundred pages of Convergence Problems’ attractive gold-and-purple hardback. It gives us a Matrix-like dystopian future, where cities controlled by a wealthy few offer the only shelter from a world rendered hostile by failed attempts to geoengineer catastrophic climate change. These elites spy on the poor through quantum processors implanted in their brainstems (Talabi’s “hard” SF reputation does not deny him the occasional lurch into vague technobabble to service the story—nor should it!), leaving “nothing to do except exist and obey. Eat, shit, sleep and entertain [the overclass]” (p. 91). Our heroine, Laide, is unwillingly saved from suicide by a medical robot that notices her aberrant brainwaves, and she sets out to take down the elites using a rebel technology that allows her to project her consciousness into that same medical droid. In case we’ve missed it, Laide spells the central question out for us: “what use is privacy in a city where your own brain is always spying on you?” (p. 90-91). The result is a fun, dark, pleasingly techno-sceptic heist thriller, although its ending feels an awful lot like a season one cliffhanger.
Indeed, it’s tempting to wonder how many of the stories in Convergence Problems are not literary end-goals in themselves, but pitches for an eventual screen adaptation. The superhero tale “Shock Absorber,” in particular, reads like a sketched pilot of a Marvel-style movie or series, while “Lights in the Sky” reads so much like someone describing a video game that I was surprised to realize that the character wasn’t playing one, but was fighting an interplanetary war for real. Even “Ganger,” which is rich and thoughtful, reads at times like background notes for a rich and thoughtful movie, game, or series, perhaps with a budget and cast to rival HBO’s Westworld. The “Author’s Notes” which Talabi writes for every story, placed in the book’s end matter, acknowledge that “The Million Eyes of a Lonely and Fragile God” began as something like fan fiction of the Alfonso Cuarón movie Gravity.
Certain fixations recur in Talabi’s tales. One is thematic. Dead parents, especially mothers, appear time and again. The memory of these lost maternal figures is often accompanied by miscommunication between grieving siblings. Indeed, the death of the mother, the incomprehensibility of living in a world in which your mother is dead, is a more potent common thread than the alleged uniting theme of “convergence problems.” This grief is a rich theme, and one about which the author clearly has much to say.
The other key tenet of Talabi’s world is the idiom of the Nigerian professional educated middle classes—often members of this middle class who have risen into it, proudly, from poor beginnings. Talabi himself is an engineer, and proud of it, and his characters are often engineers too, or they are doctors, scientists, or tech support who feel that tech support is a little beneath them. They have performance reviews, submit patent applications, attend financial management conferences. Most specifically, they are graduates, often specifically graduates of mechanical engineering at Nigerian universities. The best of these is perhaps the most troubled: Uduak, the tragic protagonist of “Embers,” is supposed to be his village’s chosen son, its great hope, when he is given a scholarship by an oil company to study Mechanical Engineering Technology at university. In Uduak’s world, however, fossil fuels are replaced by a miraculous biotech-powered clean energy source from Japan, and his scholarship falls through halfway through his degree. This is great news for the planet, but apocalyptic for Uduak, who turns first to drink and then to violent revenge against a world that promised him everything, then ripped it away in the name of progress. “Just like that, it was gone,” Uduak laments (p. 244), and his wife’s tongue-lashing disappointment in the failure he has made of his life is one of the most affecting sequences in the collection, awfully prefiguring the violence Uduak unleashes when he snaps. Following these emotional heights, Talabi’s brief epilogue to Uduak’s revenge rampage seems unnecessary—it might resonate more strongly to abruptly cut away a page earlier, when Uduak gloat-laments, “Look at me. I am an oil man,” (p. 255) at the climax of his destruction.
Convergence Problems is undeniably patchy. A slimmer volume made of its best tales—for me, perhaps just those stories on which I focus in this review—“Gamma,” “Ganger,” “Embers,” and “Performance Review”—would not only have a higher average quality, but would hang together better, and be more demanding of critical attention. There are plenty of good moments in the other stories, but far too many feel like filler, and the weaker moments compound each other: they lapse into similar rhythms and concerns to the extent that you learn to spot when the writer is hurrying past an undercooked story point, and to filter out the points that he has already made. The collection is not chronologically or alphabetically arranged, and thus has presumably been curated for structure and flow. This makes it puzzling that many of the thinner stories are placed at the book’s beginning: of the opening five stories—“Debut,” “An Arc of Electric Skin,” “Saturday’s Song,” “Lights in the Sky,” and “Blowout”—none is among the collection’s best. The grisly reveal of "Lights in the Sky"—that its central character is physically bonded to his mech-suit—is the first real sense of what Talabi is capable of when on form. This structuring error teaches the reader a dislike of Talabi’s shortcomings that takes a little unlearning when the better-written stories at last come along—with the one-two punch of “Gamma” and “Ganger”—in slots number six and seven.
Despite this inconsistency and occasional bloat, Talabi is certainly fully plugged into the electric current of technology and its effects upon society and the planet. These are stories set in the future but that are about now, about right now, here in the 2020s. They operate on a precise understanding of the trajectories of catastrophic climate change, the development of artificial intelligence, and the emergence of digital hauntings and superstition. One of the stronger stories, “Performance Review,” was written with the “assistance” of prototype AI writing software. It reads like a Nigerian Black Mirror episode, and it carries a satiric bite which isn’t attempted elsewhere in the collection. It is interesting to speculate to what extent Talabi’s AI amanuensis affected this inflection point. Indeed, cross-referencing the “Author’s Notes” with the quality of the stories reveals a mind, so strong on detail and extrapolation, that is most powerfully fired up when writing with the input of some collaborative force. Whether this is the AI “assistant” of “Performance Review,” or the friend who wrote the lengthy, detailed "story seed" for Ganger, or the Kamelot power-metal song that inspired “Gamma,” Talabi soars highest when a creative partner provides the launchpad. The exception is the Cuarón-influenced “The Million Eyes of a Lonely and Fragile God,” but that story has a deeper problem revealed in those same notes: it is a romance, and its author confides that he doesn’t read romances.
The question of AI literature, then, is not so much hanging over Convergence Problems as invited into its heart, both by its author’s curiosity about AI as a theme, and his unusual openness to it as a writing technology. The Booker-shortlisted Paul Murray recently dismissed the threat to his job from Large Language Models by saying “I think that novelists are insulated, insofar as it’s harder for an AI to produce a literary novel.” Murray’s own writing, operating in the mode of literary fiction, may bear this out. Talabi’s insistent but unlovely prose, however, does sadly seem to have the exact style which an AI might find easiest to imitate. There is frequent recourse to overexplaining, and little bounce or song to the narrative voice. Emotions are stated as facts, and aphorisms are offered like sacrifices. And sentence fragments. There is a lack of subtext throughout: with the odd exception such as “Gamma” or the better parts of “Embers,” these stories’ endings confront you baldly with the lessons they have already taught you on the way. This all coalesces to create the impression that these stories are built upon televisual rather than linguistic scaffolding, raising the question of adaptation that I discuss above.
Nonetheless, it is promising, and to Talabi’s credit, that two of the best-written stories here are the most recent. These are “Ganger,” first published in this collection, and “Embers,” previously published but heavily revised for this republication. This suggests a writer who is still improving. The collection’s last stories (not the latest by date), are “Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core” and “A Dream of Electric Mothers.” These operate in a digital gothic setting of AI ghosts, called "memrionics," and although they are not the best stories here, this feels like a topic that Talabi is not done exploring. It will not surprise me if a fully realized version of this world of digitized ancestors and reversible e-death is the subject upon which his best work may eventually come. The conclusion of “A Dream of Electric Mothers,” however, returns us again to Talabi’s tendency to overexplaining: “in the end,” he writes, breaching the focalizing character’s point of view to make sure we haven’t missed any implications, “she couldn’t fight her own emotions” (p. 288). But this same conclusion contains a potent seed, a fraught ending in which AIs, modelling their cunning on the tricksy ancestors of Yoruba folktale, offer—as a final act of digital self-sacrifice that teaches us to distrust the AI itself—advice that they know we will be too morally squeamish to follow. Here, truly, two interesting lines—technological progress streaking away into the future, and wise ancestral manipulation streaking deep into the past—converge, collide, and create something new.