I’ve never connected with a book this much as I did with Black Apocalypse. It astounds me how passionately and impactfully Tavia Nyong’o clutches Franz Kafka’s axe that shattered the frozen sea within me as I read this nonfiction about articulating ‘blackness in an antiblack world’. At 87 pages, I marvelled at how this three-chaptered book sweeps through alienation, cognitive estrangement, decolonisation and black tragic vision—a disciplined practice for imagining alternate futures. It also gazes at the animated role of dystopian fiction in the digital space, in a quest to redefine our relationship with the cosmos. This book is a vital confronting read for anyone seeking to grasp the essence of humanity and who sees wrongness in anti-black racism.
Juxtaposing the world-building of afrofuturism and the world-negating of afropessimism to show how both movements have offered us critical resources of hope.
Science fiction imagines aliens and global crises as world-unifying events, both a threat and promise for the future. Black Apocalypse is an introduction to the past and present of black engagement with speculative futures. From Octavia Butler to W.E.B. Du Bois to Sun Ra, Tavia Nyong'o shows that the end of the world is crucial to afrofuturism and reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore their similarities.
Interweaving black trans, queer, and feminist theories, Nyong'o examines…
Kathe Koja does queer writing in ways that give me goosebumps. This revamp of her queer body classic is vibrant decades after its first irruption. Skin ballets in with motion and sound, kinetic and manic, cascading to fever pitch in a volatile way. Each page is white hot and fluid, ductile and distorting, as text forms/deforms to a fierce sense of dark metal energy. Koja is performative in this creative novel, dramatic in a continuous chorus of scaffolds and butcher blocks, vibrant in an alloy that’s a psychedelic orchestra. Skin is cinematic with a deep sense of place whose characters inhabit and melt the reader in a white hot story.
As a sculptor of metal, Tess is consumed with the perfection of welds, the drip of liquid metal, addicted to the burn. Her solitary existence ends when she meets Bibi. A self-proclaimed "guerilla performance artist," Bibi pushes her body to the utmost in her dancing, sculpting it into a finely tuned machine. But the limits of her body frustrate her. With Tess, she creates a performance art of mobile, bladelike sculptures and human dance that becomes increasingly violent and dangerous. Still this is not enough for Bibi. Her desire to grow and transform leads her to body piercing, then to…
Usurper is a public experiment on the square root of readerly performance to the power of writerly implosion divided by undertext to the sum of an open-minded ‘futurian’ irradiating subsets of psychosis. Sentient text oscillates between irreality and the ineffable in vignettes rich with molecular consciousness in a New Wave of ‘philosofun’ as authentic as it is
In the sequel to the critically acclaimed Outré, a novel that explores the future of cinema through the unlikely vehicle of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, D. Harlan Wilson turns to James Joyce's Ulysses as a source of inspiration, entertainment, and social commentary. Outré tells the story of an aging movie star battling the tyranny of filmmaker Donovan Ogg and an antagonistic, seemingly omnipotent Studio. Set in an irreal dystopia, Usurper focuses on Donovan's prodigal son, Caliban Ogg, who cannot crawl out from under the shadow of his father's massive legacy as he struggles to adapt the so-called "Doomsday Edition" of…
What if you were trapped in a cycle of dying, repeat—would you do anything to understand it? Meet Novic, who camels to the mountains, to the Temple of Kripps in the Land of Praeyer at a place below zero in a hope that a female monk named Brad might give him answers. A story warped in beauty and gore, interspersed with poetic vignettes. A rich and dark standalone prequel to Claiming T-Mo that clutches you with themes of family, parenthood, death, and immortality—what about Novic?
