How Long 'Til Black Future Month?: Stories

In the introduction to her first collection of short stories, Hugo Award winner N.K. Jemisin addresses the role of short story writing in her development as a writer. She explains: "Shorts gave me space to experiment with unusual plots and story forms--future tense, epistolic format, black characters." The 22 stories here (four of which have not been published before) are a testament to this experimental style. They range from a few pages to a few dozen pages; narrative perspective shifts from first person to third person to a string of e-mail correspondence; the settings range from worlds very much like our own to future realms almost unrecognizable.

In "The Ones Who Stay and Fight," the narrator asks the reader to imagine a world where humanity is recognized in every citizen. In "The You Train," a commuter flirts with long-retired and not-yet-invented subway lines in what feels like modern-day New York. "Cuisine des Mémoires" introduces a restaurant that perfectly re-creates dishes based on diners' memories; humans act as hosts for their machine-like "masters" in "Walking Awake"; a high-achieving student considers the cost of being the best in her class in "Valedictorian."

The risk with any collection of short science fiction is the sheer exhaustion that can come from moving among diverse and varied worlds. But Jemisin is a master of the "quick hook and deep character," to use her own words, and as such, How Long 'Til Black Future Month? never feels tiresome. Quite the opposite, in fact; the collection is energizing in the way the best science fiction aims to be, forcing readers to look back on the "real" world with new and eager eyes. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

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