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Thursday, November 19, 2020

Review: How Long 'til Black Future Month?

 How Long 'til Black Future Month? is the first collection of N.K. Jemisin's short stories. I loved her Inheritance Trilogy but bounced off "The Broken Earth" series hard, so the short story collection was a great way to sample many ideas in a short read while reminding myself of how great a story teller she is.

The stories range from science fiction (Robots, AI, etc) to fantasy (with a haunting story about sleep magic in the Narcomancer). While some of her novellas went for the twist ending, in this collection of stories twist endings are actually are. Strangely enough, the later stories for me were not as compelling as her earlier stories, since they became much less about fantasy than about contemporaneous events that (for me at least) still hold trauma after all these years (Katerina , for instance), which distracted me enough from the fantasy elements that she was after.

There are many themes in the stories that are there if you're looking for them (one story depicts a family's encounter with the Faerie Queen as an encounter between Black Americans and White women), but none of the themes are so overbearing that they derail the enjoyability of the short story or the book. Almost all the stories in the first half of the book are so well done that I would recommend them to anyone.


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