Harare Review of Books

320 pages.

First published February 13, 2024 (DAW)

SFF anthology.

I consider Wole Talabi a master of literary futurism. Perhaps because of his background as an engineer, and certainly because he was an early reader of sci-fi, his work is conceptually dense with wonderful, very believable ideas—like, in one of the stories in this collection, Debut, AI makes art on its own. And although I’m not a fan of African fantasy, Talabi may make a believer of me yet; as he has said, he doesn’t feel constrained by genre when he writes, and many of his stories are a blend—a “continuum of the fantastic” (see this fantastic talk with Gary K. Wolfe).

Convergence Problems is a collection that displays Talabi’s literary philosophy to full effect. Apart from the enchanting Debut, included in the collection is the wonderful, and yes, dreamy, Hugo- and Nebula Award-nominated novelette, A Dream of Electric Mothers, which blends African belief in consulting ancestors with technological means of doing so, in an imagined alternate African future. But Talabi is not all about imagined futures; he keeps his eye firmly on the present, too, with stories like the excellent Nigerian Dreams, which examines migration, and Abeokuta52, where Nigerian citizens pay a high price for Nigerian development (hints of neocolonialism here). Abeokuta52 is my favourite of the two hermit crab stories in the collection; the other story is Comments on your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core. Ganger imagines a post-apocalyptic Nigeria with people divided by class into arcologies and villas under a dome; I look forward to reading the eventual novel about revolution.

There’s much more in the collection, including Saturday’s Song, which references the nightmare god Shigidi from Talabi’s wonderful BSFA-nominated and Nebula Finalist debut novel, Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, and the Gravity (movie)-esque The Million Eyes of a Lonely and Fragile God. And the heartbreaking Embers, another of my favourites in this collection, about a man stranded in time when the world moves on from oil. Although I will rate Talabi as one of my favourite African writers, he is properly placed on the world stage as one of today’s most exciting SF writers.

Thank you to DAW books and to NetGalley for early access.

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