pauraque | Entries tagged with books: year: 2025

This is the fifth and final part of my book club notes on The Black Fantastic. [Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.]

"Spyder Threads" by Craig Laurance Gidney (2021)

( Disabled fashion models keep disappearing after they work with a mysterious designer. )

"The Orb" by Tara Campbell (2021)

( An environmentalist cult creates an ever-growing, consuming entity. )

"We Travel the Spaceways" by Victor LaValle (2021)

( A homeless man hears voices from deep space. )

"Ruler of the Rear Guard" by Maurice Broaddus (2022)

( A Black American woman travels to Ghana to join a pan-African repatriation movement. )

the end

Though these last few stories weren't my favorites, the collection overall had some strong entries. It was noted that there was more group consensus about which stories we liked and which we didn't than there has been in some other books we've read, so the discussions ended up being a little shorter than usual.

The group plans to continue with This All Come Back Now, the first ever published anthology of speculative fiction by Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors.

This is part four of my book club notes on The Black Fantastic. [Part 1, part 2, part 3.]

"The Final Flight of the Unicorn Girl" by Alex Smith (2018)

( Superheroes are co-opted into the system as tools of oppression, and younger superpowered people fight back. )

"Calendar Girls" by Justina Ireland (2019)

( In a misogynist dystopia, an illegal contraceptive dealer... well, it's hard to summarize. )

"Shape-ups at Delilah's" by Rion Amilcar Scott (2019)

( A curse causes all barbers to lose their hair-cutting abilities, except for one woman. )

"Habibi" by Tochi Onyebuchi (2020)

( Two young men in solitary confinement, one in California and one in Gaza, forge a magical connection. )

This is part three of my book club notes on The Black Fantastic. [Part 1, part 2.]

All of this batch of stories are available online!

"The Venus Effect" by Violet Allen (2016)

( The authorial voice repeatedly tries to write stories in different genres, only to be stopped each time by the Black protagonist falling victim to police violence. )

"The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington" by Phenderson Djèlí Clark (2018)

( What it says on the tin, in an alternate universe where magic is part of daily life. )

"The Hospital Where" by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (2018)

( An aspiring writer makes a Faustian bargain. )

"The Ones Who Stay and Fight" by N.K. Jemisin (2018)

( A response to Le Guin, in which a utopia has a dark side. Maybe. )

This is part two of my book club notes on The Black Fantastic. (Part one is here.)

"Sanford and Sun" by Dawolu Jabari Anderson (2015)

( Sun Ra makes a guest appearance on the 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son. )

"A Song for You" by Jennifer Marie Brissett (2015)

( A girl finds the disembodied head of a singing android who lived out the legend of Orpheus during wartime. )

"Tender" by Sofia Samatar (2015)

( A woman who wrecked her life as a human undergoes a cyborg transformation so she can monitor a radioactive waste disposal site. )

"The Malady of Need" by Kiini Ibura Salaam (2016)

( This is the second time I've read this story and I still don't know what happens in it. )

This is the first part of my book club notes on The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories. I appreciated the editor's introduction, which highlights connections between the oppressive realities of the past and present to the spark of Black speculative imagination—how can things be different, and whose ideas will shape the future? He's written a nonfiction book on this topic, Speculative Blackness, which I would be interested to check out.

Interesting to note that this collection places the stories in chronological order of first publication. We've had a number of conversations about how editors arrange stories in anthologies (similar themes together? most significant stories first and last?) and this is the first time I've seen this approach. It was mentioned that some books the group read before I joined did this as well, but those were more historical overviews that spanned a longer period of time, while these stories are all from the last 25 years. Perhaps the intention is to suggest a new history still being written.

There was also some discussion of the physical book itself having a good design and high quality paper and feeling nice to hold in the hand, to which I could add nothing because I have the ebook.

"Herbal" by Nalo Hopkinson (2002)

( An elephant suddenly appears in a woman's apartment. )

"All That Touches the Air" by An Owomoyela (2011)

( A human colony exists in uneasy equilibrium with aliens who can parasitize and control people's bodies. )

"Bludgeon" by Thaddeus Howze (2013)

( Conquering aliens are persuaded to wager the fate of Earth on a game of baseball. )

"A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i" by Alaya Dawn Johnson (2014)

( In a world dominated by vampires, a human woman collaborates with them to save herself. )

This is the third and final part of my book club notes on As the Earth Dreams. [Part one, part two.]

"deh ah market" by Whitney French

( A pair of cousins bend time and space to connect with worlds and relatives past. )

"Paroxysm" by Zalika Reid-Benta

( A woman isolating from a new virus starts hallucinating. )

"Just Say Garuka" by Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga

( Two teenagers test a friendship over magic carpet flying practice. )

the end

I think the group did not end up being super jazzed about this book on the whole, and I felt similarly. There were a few stories I liked, but some felt like maybe they needed another pass for cohesion, and the collection leaned thematically grim in a way that I had a hard time connecting with. Oh well, they can't all be winners.

The group plans to continue with The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories.

This is my second post about As the Earth Dreams, though these are the first stories in the book. I missed the book club meeting when they were discussed, so I'm afraid you'll only be getting my thoughts on them.

I also read the introduction and learned that it offers a one-sentence synopsis for each story, so I guess I can use those when I can't come up with a better one and/or don't understand a story's plot.

"Ravenous, Called Iffy" by Chimedum Ohaegbu

( A masseuse attends her mother's fourth funeral, a prelude to her latest resurrection, only to encounter family she's never met. )

"The Hole in the Middle of the World" by Chinelo Onwualu

( In a dystopian future, a refugee sells her memories. )

"A Fair Assessment" by Terese Mason Pierre

( An antiques appraiser summons spirits to learn more about the objects, and encounters her ancestor. )

This is part one of my book club notes on As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories, which is a title that I imagine might be relevant to the interests of a few of you here! I missed the first meeting so these are not the first stories in the book, which I will have to go back to when I have time.

"Peak Day" by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

( A person who (apparently) almost died of an aneurysm is 'saved' by an evil corporation and forced to work in a warehouse. )

"Hallelujah Here and Elsewhere" by francesca ekwuyasi

( A troubled queer woman goes through a rip in spacetime and visits an alternate version of her life. )

"Playing Dead" by Trynne Delaney

( An impoverished artist becomes a nanny for children whose blood is harvested by a rich dude to stay eternally young. )

"Mother, Father, Baby" by Lue Palmer

( An abuse survivor who was disbelieved by her mother is (maybe) haunted. )

Almost immediately upon the release of ChatGPT, everybody in the educational field realized it could produce an unlimited variety of essays that would pass muster in a high school or undergrad classroom, and might even get a better grade than a real student's work. Some concluded this meant the end of teaching students to write. John Warner, a college writing instructor, sees it differently—if the writing assignments we give our students are something ChatGPT can easily do, that means there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we have been teaching writing. This isn't a new problem, it's a decades-old problem that new technology is forcing us to finally confront: in our classrooms, we have forgotten what writing is for.

He argues that the process of writing offers invaluable opportunities not only to communicate ideas but to help us learn to think—to analyze our outer and inner worlds, and to synthesize meaningful conclusions. It's a tool for reflecting on and organizing our messy interiority, and (perhaps) using it to convey to other people something of what it's like to be us. This perfectly aligns with my own experience of writing, in which I often don't entirely understand what I think until I write it (and I am currently learning what I think about this book by writing this post) so I will admit that I'm not the best judge of whether Warner successfully communicates this to people who don't already believe it, but he seems plausibly convincing to me.

But education in the US has become increasingly dominated by teaching to the test rather than teaching anyone to think. (Warner traces this to Cold War-era anxieties over being outcompeted by rising economic powers like Japan, leading American legislators to push hyper-standardized measures of school success.) Students have adapted to this by learning only to write what the teacher expects to read—to produce essays that get everything superficially "right" but offer no individual thoughts or insights.

( cut for length )

John Green wants you to know three things:

1. Today, in 2025, the infectious disease that kills the most people worldwide is tuberculosis.
2. Tuberculosis has been curable since the 1950s.
3. The fact that over one million people are dying of this disease every year is a reflection of our collective choices, and if we start making different choices we can save their lives.

Tuberculosis has been part of human life for thousands of years at least, and this book describes how the ebb and flow of its prevalence and deadliness has tracked the changing course of human society, and how our attitudes toward it have in turn changed. The increased population densities of the industrial revolution created ideal conditions for TB to spread, ravaging all classes of society, including the elite. This may have contributed to the bizarre 19th century romanticization of "consumption" as a mark of the sensitive genius, the tragic poetic soul; TB's characteristic symptoms of pallor and bodily wasting were reimagined as delicate, waifish beauty.

But as the germ theory of disease became mainstream and antibiotics made effective treatment possible, romantic "consumption" turned into stigmatized tuberculosis, associated not with an artistic disposition but with poverty. It has become primarily a disease of the global south, where due to systemic inequities in health access, millions of people continue to die of TB today who could be cured by a course of the right antibiotics. Tuberculosis thrives where we do not bother to stop it.

Intertwined through this narrative is the story of Henry Reider, a 17-year-old TB patient who Green befriended in Sierra Leone. Henry puts a human face on a disease that most of us in rich countries no longer see in our daily lives, powerfully illustrating Green's point that we will change our priorities "only when we see one another in our full humanity, not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world."

This is not a comprehensive treatment of the history and science of TB, nor of global health policy—the book is only 200 pages long, after all—but more of a high-level overview with pointers to further reading and calls to action. If you've followed Green on YouTube over the past few years as he's gotten involved in health advocacy (and become obsessed with weird tuberculosis-related history facts) I don't think anything in this book will be new to you! But it is good to have it all in one clear and persuasive volume with a popular author's name on the cover to get the message out to as many people as possible. I think it's extremely admirable that he's using his platform and his novelist's flair for a turn of phrase to bring attention to these issues, and I hope it moves the needle.