It seems like it’s always award season somewhere, and right now the Speculative Chic crew is reading the nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award!
After the Flare (2017)
Written by: Deji Bryce Olukotun
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 275 (kindle)
Publisher: The Unnamed Press
Why I chose it: I picked this particular book from the list of nominees because I love apocalyptic events, and because I’m making a conscious effort this year to read more authors of color.
Premise:
A catastrophic solar flare reshapes our world order as we know it – in an instant, electricity grids are crippled, followed by devastating cyberattacks that paralyze all communication. With America in chaos, former NASA employee Kwesi Bracket works at the only functioning space program in the world, which just happens to be in Nigeria. With Europe, Asia, and the U.S. knocked off-line, and thousands of dead satellites about to plummet to Earth, the planet’s only hope rests with the Nigerian Space Program’s plan to launch a daring rescue mission to the International Space Station. Bracket and his team are already up against a serious deadline, but life on the ground is just as disastrous after the flare. Nigeria has been flooded with advanced biohacking technologies, and the scramble for space supremacy has attracted dangerous peoples from all over Africa. What’s more: the militant Islamic group Boko Haram is slowly encroaching on the spaceport, leaving a trail of destruction, while a group of nomads has discovered an ancient technology more powerful than anything Bracket’s ever imagined. With the clock ticking down, Bracket – helped by a brilliant scientist from India and an eccentric lunar geologist – must confront the looming threats to the spaceport in order to launch a harrowing rescue mission into space. In this sequel to Nigerians in Space, Deji Bryce Olukotun poses deep questions about technology, international ambition, identity, and space exploration in the 21st century.
No spoilers
Discussion: To begin with, this book is the sequel of a novel called Nigerians in Space which I didn’t bother to read because people on goodreads seemed to think After the Flare stood alone just fine. Maybe that’s true? I haven’t even looked at what the first book is about. But I spent a lot of this book confused by world building type things, and I’d like to believe it wasn’t just a feature of this book but something I missed from the first.
That or goodreads is lying to me and quite frankly, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Despite my confusion, this story was truly interesting. I love a good apocalypse, and I love more a good apocalypse that focuses on what to do after the big event happens and less on how to prevent it. As the title suggests, the Flare happens on the first page, in the first paragraph of the book, almost. No prevention, no one saw it coming, it just happened, and it knocked out almost everything except everything right along the equator.
And it wasn’t a grand sweeping tale of how humanity scraped by and rose from the ashes. There are heroes in this story, but as the premise section suggests, it’s really a very insular tale about humanity’s efforts to rescue one woman from the International Space Station, and less how to fix the world for the rest of humanity.
It’s really almost more of a mystery than it is a science fiction novel, except that it definitely has strong science fiction elements to it. First there’s the tech, from phones that look like geckos (and are actually called geckophones) to splicing living creatures with hardware you can program to mystical meteorites that respond to tonal input, there’s actually a lot of science fiction in this story.
It sounds like a lot of sub plots to weave together in the premise and it was almost a little too much for such a short book. The Boko Haram (or the Jarumi, they used these names interchangeably) were treated like boogeymen coming into the city, but for all their menace and build up, not much ended up happening with that plot line. The most underdeveloped plot line ended up being the most important in the end.
He thought about what the trader Ibrahim Musa had said, that the Jarumi would spare only the lives of people who were worth something. If they were to come to the spaceport, who would they come for? Bello? Maybe. Then it struck him. Of course. They would come for the very people who were being trumpeted all around the world: the Naijanauts. The true heroes. If the Jarumi came, they would come for the Naijanauts. (Loc 1197)
The plots all wove together in the end in ways I definitely did not anticipate. This is a book that asks you to do some lifting in the reading of it, but it definitely rewards you for your efforts.
In conclusion: I did like this book and I am interested in reading Nigerians in Space, especially to see if this book really is a stand alone. Will it win? I’ve only read one of the other entries, and I’d pick this one over Bannerless.
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