The most recent issue of Vector, the British Science Fiction Association’s critical journal, landed on my doormat last month. Its arrival was a pleasure, as it’s the first mailout to come to my new Finnish address (the rest, I believe, languish as-yet-unread in my sister’s house in Surrey).
Best of all, it’s a themed issue, something I gather Vector is doing more of these days. The last issue was on economics and science fiction, which I look forward to reading. This issue covers African and Afrodiasporic SF, and it’s one of the most interesting issues of Vector in recent memory. So much so that I wanted to share a quick overview of its contents, and encourage my many readers to consider joining the BSFA. It’s an almost entirely volunteer-based organisation, after all.
This issue’s guest editor is Michelle Louise Clarke, who contributes a lengthy editorial that is, as they say, worth the price of admission alone. She’s a scholar of African SF at London’s SOAS and unless you’re already an avid fan of African SF there’s probably a lot here that you’ll want to follow up on. I’m particularly intrigued to learn of the 1992 “surreal classic of African SF”, Kojo Laing’s Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars.
The editorial also provides a helpful precis of several terms: Afrofuturism, that is “an aesthetic exploring the intersections of African-diasporic cultures with science, technology, and speculative fiction”, and African Futurism, which steps away from Afrofuturism’s Afro-American focus to centre instead on the continent of Africa and its many established and emerging artistic and literary traditions. This significant distinction resurfaces in pieces from several other contributors.
Elsewhere in the issue, Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor makes numerous appearances. I’d been meaning to check out her novel Lagoon but it had slipped off my radar; now, thanks to an essay that dives deep into its themes, I regard it as a must-read. In another essay two of Okorafor’s stories, written fourteen years apart, are explored and contrasted in an approach that compares them to the Afrofuturist and Arican Futurist traditions respectively.
Several creators are interviewed: Dilman Dila, a filmmaker, visual artist and writer in many mediums who regards himself foremost as “a storyteller”; Wole Talabi, an engineer, writer and editor; and Mounir Ayache, a French visual poet and artist from the North African diaspora whose interviewer was invited to visit his studio. Each is fascinating. So too is an essay contributed by Masimba Musodza, who writes of the ChiShona language, which as he describes is looked down upon even by those who speak it, a state of affairs he seeks to challenge, and in which he has published the first science fiction novel.
There is more, but I’ll have to leave you there. I have some films to track down, some books to order, and even an Afrofuturist hip-hop album to listen to.
