How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

By N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her short fiction, which includes several never-before-seen stories, Jemisin equally challenges and delights with narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.

Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

Anyway, this book and a random comment elsewhere made me realize how much I was enjoying these short stories, and the last time I felt like this, which was when reading Connie Willis.  Short stories are tough, man!  I just put a book in the giveaway pile because I read like, four of the ten stories are didn't really get into any of them.  Obviously not all of the ones in a collection are going to be knock-outs for me, but here's some of the ones I liked best:

•  Red Dirt Witch, which combines the fae and Civil Rights Era Alabama,

• L'Alchemista, whose main character is a down-on-her-luck chef in Italy, who is given some magical ingredients,

• Cloud Dragon Skies, about the consequences of interference with nature again after we already fucked it up and then agreed to live with it,

• The Storyteller's Replacement, which uses the framed story to tell a story about a king who eats a dragon heart in order to get a massive hard-on, but karma revisits him in the form of his daughters (somewhat similar to a story by Kate Elliot, whose book of short stories I wasn't into nearly as much)

• The Brides of Heaven, about the interrogation of a woman who, in her desperation to re-seed a male population which has died off, has allowed something...wrong...into their homes

• Walking Awake, which is about a woman who works  at a body replacement facility slowly realizing that she's doing something awful and fighting back,

• Sinners, Saints, Dragon, and Haints, in the City Beneath Still Waters, which is about post-Katrina New Orleans, except with dragons (and sinners and saints and haints and the battle for the City's soul).

Not that the others aren't good - at a minimum, they all do that good sci-fi thing where they tell a story about our world using another world, i.e., The Ones Who Stay and Fight (which is a direct response to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursala K. LeGuin, which I had to look up because I'd never read it) is a reminder that we've simply accepted how fucked up things are, but even in a world that demands cruel things, we don't have to let ourselves be cruel, or simply walk away and wash our hands of those necessary evils.

Or the Narcomancer, which I enjoyed, and which was more straight-on fantasy, but which felt also like the shorter version of a bigger world (which she says in the introduction it was).  Henosis, which is about legacy, combined with a touch of Shirley Jackson. Or The Effluent Engine, which is a steampunk New Orleans spy-action story, set around the time of the Haiti Revolution. I'm telling you, if you like sci-fi or fantasy at all, you gotta read this. Or The Evaluators, about a predator that takes on the shape of those it hunts (which, I'll be honest, only made a little bit of sense to me, but it felt cool).  There's definitely something for everyone. Also a lot of like, pregnancy horror, so I would say not to read it if you're expecting.  Pregnancy is enough horror all on it's own. 


So this was a bit of a last minute add-on because The Woman in the Window got pushed to 2020, and in the spirit of the competition, I decided I would definitely read a book being made into a movie that was actually released in 2019, but when all was said and done, I didn't really want to read The Goldfinch, since I'd already tried A Secret History and hated it, so I decided I would make Where'd You Go, Bernadette? my selection for 01, and move How Long 'Til Black Future Month? into 16.  Long story short, I am very glad I got prodded into Black Future Month, and very sad I read The Woman in the Window which turned about to be for nothing, nothing!


16: A Book With A Question In The Title