Harare Review of Books

280 pages.

First published on Nov 2, 2021.

Genre: SF anthology.

In 2021, the Radical Books Collective held an event (livestreamed on YouTube) called Beyond Wakanda: Celebrating African Speculative Fiction (still available on YouTube, and so worth watching). Featured authors and books were:

• Children of The Quicksands x Efua Traoré
• Seasons in Hippoland x Wanjiku Ngugi
• Cosmogramma x Courttia Newland
• Library of the Dead x Tendai Huchu
• Theory of Flight x Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

Courttia Newland and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu were on the same panel. I had had Newland on my TBR for a while (true of so many!), but this event was the reason I made sure Cosmogramma was one of my 2022 books.

Well, Newland has a talent for story, and a prodigious gift with language. In here are stories about sea people (who are not the usual mer people), creepy plants, dragons, and mind control. Themes include immigration and racism, family, humans vs machines, and drugs (A Christmas Carol-ish, and also I read another similar story once, about meeting yourself). There’s even a solarpunk story.

What I enjoyed was how amazing Newland’s imagination is, and his facility for world-building in short fiction. What I didn’t like was how so many of these stories ended abruptly, less on a question than as if the power went out just as the movie got really interesting (—This has never happened to me, but I can picture it).

Anyway, here are my favourites:

• Scarecrow, the creepiest story about something very like lockdown;
• Cosmogramma, which is a very cool story about children (on an exoplanet?) with special powers (?);
• Seed—this is the one about creepy plants. Eek. Very memorable;
• Dark Matters, a First Contact story that doesn’t go the way you think;
• The Sankofa Principle, which nearly made me cry, because what if you could travel back and change history?

In short: Courttia Newland is hugely talented, and this is a wonderful showcase of that talent. This is a definite rec, whether you’re a fan of SFF, or not.