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mmcirvinI've always thought the novella was a good length for science fiction, but it's one that can have trouble finding a market, because they can be too short to sell as individual volumes and too long to collect easily. One of the interesting consequences of e-book sales is that suddenly this is a tempting format--you can offer a novella à la carte for just a few bucks, and it's no more or less convenient than any other length of book.
I picked up Nnedi Okorafor's Binti by this means, but I probably shouldn't have, because, hankering for its sequels Binti: Home and Binti: The Night Masquerade, I then realized that buying the omnibus Binti: The Complete Trilogy was a better deal. (It's actually what Douglas Adams would have called the more-than-complete trilogy, since there's an additional short story included, "Sacred Fire", which fills a gap between the first and second novellas.) So that's what I recommend. The Binti stories form a tightly connected narrative, so the omnibus is worth reading straight through.
Binti is a teenage girl of the Himba, a real group of people who live in northern Namibia. But these stories take place in a distant future world that has been substantially transformed by contact with extraterrestrials and technology-indistinguishable-from-magic. Binti's family business is making "astrolabes", which seem to be a handcrafted distant descendant of the smartphone. The regional (maybe global) superpower is the Khoush, who have interstellar travel in intelligent organic spaceships, and a long-running, brutal war going on with jellyfish-like aliens called the Meduse.
Binti is a harmonizer: she has abilities we might regard as magical that arise from her perception of mathematics. Her skills have, over the objections of her insular family, won her admission to Oomza Uni, a centuries-old institute of higher learning covering an entire planet and attended by intelligent beings of many species. But on the way there, the living Khoush spaceliner she's in is mercilessly attacked by the Meduse, who plan to invade Oomza Uni for reasons of their own. By a happenstance Binti manages to survive... and prevail in startling fashion.
If the ending seems a little too pat, well, Okorafor evidently agrees, because the subsequent stories reveal that it's not that simple. Binti adjusts to life at Oomza Uni and deals with the trauma she's experienced, then decides to go home again bringing a representative of the Meduse, which only brings more trouble. In the process, there are new revelations about, and physical transformations of, Binti's own identity. To a large extent this is a story about having a liminal identity, not entirely one thing or another, and Binti's accumulates more and more layers of liminality as the story goes on. But this doesn't happen without pain and violence. Okorafor portrays her altered far-future Namib as, if anything, a place holding more wonders and surprises than the extraterrestrial university.
A thing I really liked about this series is that at any given moment, I honestly could not tell where it was going--it breaks the mold of any science-fiction or fantasy story structure I was familiar with (the closest I can think of in atmosphere might be Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia, another coming-of-age story set in an almost dreamlike far future). If I have a quibble, it's that Binti is supposed to be a mathematical prodigy--her abilities are mathematics-based--but the math we actually see her use is all fairly basic stuff that you might encounter in popular-mathematics works. I suspect that is intentional, though; this isn't aimed at as technically esoteric an audience as, say, Greg Egan's books, and it might have been off-putting otherwise.
I picked up Nnedi Okorafor's Binti by this means, but I probably shouldn't have, because, hankering for its sequels Binti: Home and Binti: The Night Masquerade, I then realized that buying the omnibus Binti: The Complete Trilogy was a better deal. (It's actually what Douglas Adams would have called the more-than-complete trilogy, since there's an additional short story included, "Sacred Fire", which fills a gap between the first and second novellas.) So that's what I recommend. The Binti stories form a tightly connected narrative, so the omnibus is worth reading straight through.
Binti is a teenage girl of the Himba, a real group of people who live in northern Namibia. But these stories take place in a distant future world that has been substantially transformed by contact with extraterrestrials and technology-indistinguishable-from-magic. Binti's family business is making "astrolabes", which seem to be a handcrafted distant descendant of the smartphone. The regional (maybe global) superpower is the Khoush, who have interstellar travel in intelligent organic spaceships, and a long-running, brutal war going on with jellyfish-like aliens called the Meduse.
Binti is a harmonizer: she has abilities we might regard as magical that arise from her perception of mathematics. Her skills have, over the objections of her insular family, won her admission to Oomza Uni, a centuries-old institute of higher learning covering an entire planet and attended by intelligent beings of many species. But on the way there, the living Khoush spaceliner she's in is mercilessly attacked by the Meduse, who plan to invade Oomza Uni for reasons of their own. By a happenstance Binti manages to survive... and prevail in startling fashion.
If the ending seems a little too pat, well, Okorafor evidently agrees, because the subsequent stories reveal that it's not that simple. Binti adjusts to life at Oomza Uni and deals with the trauma she's experienced, then decides to go home again bringing a representative of the Meduse, which only brings more trouble. In the process, there are new revelations about, and physical transformations of, Binti's own identity. To a large extent this is a story about having a liminal identity, not entirely one thing or another, and Binti's accumulates more and more layers of liminality as the story goes on. But this doesn't happen without pain and violence. Okorafor portrays her altered far-future Namib as, if anything, a place holding more wonders and surprises than the extraterrestrial university.
A thing I really liked about this series is that at any given moment, I honestly could not tell where it was going--it breaks the mold of any science-fiction or fantasy story structure I was familiar with (the closest I can think of in atmosphere might be Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia, another coming-of-age story set in an almost dreamlike far future). If I have a quibble, it's that Binti is supposed to be a mathematical prodigy--her abilities are mathematics-based--but the math we actually see her use is all fairly basic stuff that you might encounter in popular-mathematics works. I suspect that is intentional, though; this isn't aimed at as technically esoteric an audience as, say, Greg Egan's books, and it might have been off-putting otherwise.