Black Stars focus on Black SciFi Authors including Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, and Nisi Shawl
Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, Nisi Shawl, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Black Stars features six Kindle short stories with audio narration—available free for Amazon Prime members.
For a few years now, Amazon’s publishing division has been creating digital anthologies named “Amazon Original Stories” featuring stories for Kindle and Audible, which readers can get individually or as packages. So far, Amazon has created a few genre projects.
The Black Stars project is a multi-dimensional collection of speculative fiction from Black authors whose cosmic short stories explore futures set in a variety of locales, from an alley in New York to an interstellar wormhole. This particular setup includes some of today’s most influential Black authors, including Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, Nisi Shawl, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, C.T. Rwizi, and Victor LaValle. The audiobook portions come from a variety of narrarators. (Including LeVar Burton!)
Here’s more info about each story:
A GALAXY OF NEW WORLDS
The sky is not the limit. The path to the future looks different for everyone!
Six Kindle short stories with audio narration. Read the collection for free with your Amazon Prime membership.
By fate and fire, a being four millennia old is reborn in Mali in a short story of contemporary African life and ancient secrets by the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of the Binti trilogy.
Issaka has returned home to Timbouctou and a devastating al-Qaeda raid. His only hope for survival is Faro, a stunning, blue-beaded supernatural entity who rises free from the flames of her imprisoning book as it burns.
Compelled to follow Faro, Issaka is opening his eyes to their shared history and the ancestral wisdom of his own past.
A past struggle for racial equity could achieve a profound future victory in this audacious short story about technology, hoodoo, and hope by a Nebula Award-winning author.
Burri is a fashion designer and icon with a biochemistry background. Her latest pieces are African inspired and crafted to touch the heart. They enable wearers to absorb nanorobotic memories and recount the stories of Black lives and forgiveness. Wenda doesn’t buy it.
A protest performance artist, Wenda knows exploitation when she sees it. What she’s going to do with Burri’s breakthrough technology could, in the right hands, change race relations forever.
African-descended USians are finally obtaining reparations—underwater. Plunge into the action of a visionary future by the award-winning author of Everfair, with narration by LeVar Burton (Star Trek: The Next Generation).
Five miles off the South Carolina coast, Darden and Catherina are getting their promised forty acres, all of it undersea. Like every Black “mer,” they’ve been experimentally modified to adapt to their new subaquatic home—and have met with extreme resistance from white supremacists.
Darden has an inspired plan for resolution. For both those on land and the webbed bottom-dwellers below, Darden is hoping to change the wave of the future.
As a powerful matriarchy reshapes the world, two men—old friends—confront the past and future in a bracing speculative short story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Americanah.
One night in Lagos, two former friends reunite. Obinna is a dutiful and unsophisticated stay-at-home husband and father married to a powerful businesswoman. Eze is single, a cautious rebel from his university days whose arrival soon upsets the balance in Obinna’s life. In a world where men are constantly under surveillance and subject to the whims of powerful women, more than Obinna’s ordered and accustomed routine might be on the line.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Visit is part of Black Stars, . Each story is a world much like our own. Read or listen to them in a single sitting.
Accidents happen in the strange realms of the African Union system. One of them sends two humans to the far side of a star gate in a thrilling short story of hope, survival, and new dimensions.
Copilots Msizi and Tariro are testing a newly constructed wormhole jump that presumably leads to unsettled habitable worlds. Then an explosion sends them off course, far from where they started and with little chance of ever making it back.
Now they’re stranded on their new home for the diaspora. It’s called Malcolm X-b. But they’re beginning to wonder how many light-years from civilization they really are.
Otherworldly interference in real-world New York City? Or delusions? For the answer, follow two loving strangers in an astonishing short story of faith and hope by a World Fantasy Award winner.
Grimace is a homeless man on a holy mission to free Black Americans from emotional slavery. His empty soda cans told him as much. Then he meets Kim, a transgender runaway who joins Grimace on his heroic quest.
Is Grimace receiving aluminum missives from the gods, or is he a madman? Kim will find out soon enough on a strange journey they’ve been destined to share.
About the authors
Nnedi Okorafor
Nnedi Okorafor is an international award-winning New York Times bestselling novelist who has won LOTS of awards for her science fiction and fantasy for children, young adults and adults. Born in the United States to Nigerian immigrant parents, she is known for drawing from African cultures to create captivating stories with unforgettable characters and evocative settings.
Champions of her work include Neil Gaiman, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, George R.R. Martin, and Rick Riordan. Literary ancestors Diana Wynne Jones, Ursula K. Le Guin and Nawal El Saadawi also loved her work. She has received the World Fantasy, Nebula, Eisner and Lodestar Awards and multiple Hugo Awards, amongst others, for her books.
Okorafor’s fiction includes the Binti series (the highly-acclaimed science fiction trilogy that began with the Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning first book), the Nsibidi Scripts series (affectionately dubbed “the Nigerian Harry Potter”), Who Fears Death (now optioned as a TV series for HBO with executive producer George R. R. Martin, this World Fantasy Award-winning magical realism novel follows a remarkable woman in post-apocalyptic Africa), The Shadow Speaker (a CBS Parallax Award winner), Noor (a science fiction novel of intense action and thoughtful rumination on biotechnology, destiny, and humanity in a near-future Nigeria), The Black Pages (part of the epic event Black Stars, featuring several Black speculative fiction authors), Lagoon (a British Science Fiction Association Award finalist for Best Novel), Remote Control (a thrilling sci-fi tale of community and female empowerment for which the audiobook version won the AudioFile Earphones Award), The Book of Phoenix (prequel to Who Fears Death that New York Times called a “triumph”), and lots more.
The author also writes for comic books and movies. Her writings for Marvel Comics include Black Panther, the Shuri series starring Black Panther’s techno-genius sister, and the Wakanda Forever event.
More about Nnedi Okorafor online
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Nalo Hopkinson
House of Whispers series by Nalo Hopkinson
Jamaican-born Canadian speculative fiction writer and editor Nalo Hopkinson often infuses her fiction with Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling. Her books include the novels Brown Girl in the Ring (a young woman must solve the tragic mystery surrounding her family and bargain with the gods to save her city and herself), Midnight Robber (a man commits an unbelievable crime—and his daughter must fight to save her own life), The Salt Roads (which blends fantasy, women’s history, and slavery), and The Chaos (a blend of fantasy and Caribbean folklore that navigates between myth and chaos).
She also wrote the collections Falling in Love with Hominids and Skin Folk. She was the curator of Six Impossible Things, an audio series of Canadian fantastical fiction on CBC Radio One. She is also one of the Black authors involved with the SF Black Stars books.
Hopkinson entered Neil Gaiman’s Sandman universe with the comic book limited-series House of Whispers (DC Comic), taking readers from the bayou to the Dreaming. “What’s wonderful is that Neil and the artists who did the original Sandman series wrote the roads into to inclusivity,” Hopkinson told Gizmodo. “I want to bring in a diverse diversity of African-ness. Our skin colors are different, we speak different languages, we have different socioeconomic backgrounds. I have so far used at least three languages. I’m hybridizing our existing mode. Yoruba is a religion that has numbers of different versions of it, and I’m hybridizing those. There’s a feel of kind of breaking orthodoxy that sort of gives me pause, but I need to do it to make the story go where I want.”
More about Nalo Hopkinson online
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Nisi Shawl
Nisi Shawl (they/them) is an African-American writer whose science fiction works often reflect real-world sociocultural factors such as race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Shawl’s fiction includes the multiple award-winning anthology New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, the 2016 Nebula finalist novel Everfair and its upcoming sequel, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award winner Filter House. They also wrote Speculation, a middle-grade fantasy book about Black families, family history, family curses...and a really marvelous pair of spectacles.
In addition to New Suns and its brand-new follow-up New Suns 2 : Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, they edited or contributed to The WisCon Chronicles, Vol.5: Writing and Racial Identity; Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler; Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany; and the crime fiction collection Detroit Noir, from the massive Akashic Noir series.
Shawl is co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other.
Shawl’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and numerous other magazines and anthologies.
Shawl received the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award from the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association. The award is given by the SFWA for significant contributions to the science fiction, fantasy, and related genres community.
Shawl lives in Seattle, where they take frequent walks with their cat.
More about Nisi Shawl online
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works include novels, short stories and nonfiction. Her novel Americanah has received numerous honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction, and being named one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year.
She also wrote the novel Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, a New York Times Notable Book, and a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year; and the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck, which was published to critical acclaim.
Adichie was described in The Times Literary Supplement as “most prominent” of a “procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors...attracting a new generation of readers to African literature.”
A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Adichie’s work has been translated into 30 languages and appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Financial Times, and Zoetrope: All-Story.
She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
More about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie online
C.T. Rwizi
C.T. Rwizi is the author of the epic fantasy Scarlet Odyssey series, set in a landscape inspired by the history of southern and eastern Africa and its myths and magic. His science fiction novel House of Gold is dystopian fiction exploring genetic Engineering.
Born in Zimbabwe, Rwizi grew up in Swaziland, finished high school in Costa Rica, and got a BA in government at Dartmouth College in the United States. He now lives in South Africa with his family, and enjoys playing video games, taking long runs, and spending way too much time lurking on Reddit. He is a self-professed lover of synthwave.
More about C.T. Rwizi online
Victor LaValle
Victor LaValle is the author of several works of fiction—including novels, novellas, and short stories. His novels include The Changeling, The Ballad of Black Tom, Lone Women, and The Devil in Silver. His novels have been included in best-of-the-year lists by The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Nation, and Publishers Weekly, among others.
He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Key to Southeast Queens. He lives in New York City with his wife and kids and teaches at Columbia University.
More about Victor LaValle online
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