Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com) | review by Stephen Theaker

To be the first from your family to go to university is a curious experience, and, although Binti’s family is exceptionally talented, she is the first of the whole Himba tribe to attend a very special university: it’s on another planet. She’s made friends there with Okwu, a Meduse who was present at an event in the first book that left Binti badly traumatised – and, more positively, left her with alien head tentacles that wave around when she gets mad instead of braids. A year later, she is still getting used to those, to everything, and, even though she’s a dab hand at using maths to calm herself down, she decides to return home during the holidays, to Earth, to go on a traditional pilgrimage and sort herself out. When she gets there, there’ll be some comfort, some pain, and a new, unexpected and revelatory adventure. Binti is a fascinating character with a fascinating background who is living a fascinating life, and what more do you need for a great book? Though this is the middle story in a trilogy, and at the end things are set up for the third book rather than concluded, there is plenty going on. It is easy to sympathise with her feelings about it all. It’s a book with lots of fun ideas, like spaceships that are giant pregnant fish, and when Binti dances she can “manifest mathematical current within me, harmonising it with my muscles, skin, sinew, and bones”. However, she’s forbidden from dancing, from going in the water, from being seen in public without otjize, the happiness of returning home tempered, as it is for so many people, by the need to fit back into the metaphorical cocoon. An old friend, Dele, tells her sadly why he doesn’t want to hang with her while she’s back: “You’re too complex.” But as she comes to realise, “Change was my destiny.”

Note that the Kindle edition can only be downloaded on a limited number of devices, which seems odd for a DRM-free title. We ran out quickly, because everyone in the family wanted it on their Kindles. ****

Black Panther | review by Rafe McGregor

Coogler’s third strike is as complex and compelling as his first two.

I was worried about watching this film – almost as much as Blade Runner 2049 (reviewed for TQF here) albeit for entirely different reasons.  I wanted to like Black Panther, but the odds seemed stacked against me. I wanted to like it because I admire Ryan Coogler for his artistic genius and for the way in which he has extended both black consciousness and consciousness of anti-black racism in his previous two films, Fruitvale Station (2013) and Creed (2015).  Merely releasing a film with the title Black Panther, which recalls the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of the 1960s and 1970s, in the era of Black Lives Matter, heightened racial tensions in the US, and Trump’s New Nationalism constitutes a political statement in itself.  The Alt-Right countered with attempts to sabotage the success of the film via social media, but their efforts proved spectacularly unsuccessful when Black Panther broke several opening weekend box office records.  I felt this took a little of the pressure off me because regardless of what I write now the film is already a commercial and critical achievement by Coogler.  Why did I think the odds were stacked against me?  Despite many attempts, I just can't get to grips with superheroes as protagonists, with superhero narratives, or with the superhero aesthetic in general. I can’t even manage a second viewing of The Dark Knight Trilogy, which is by one of my favourite directors. Black Panther is a Marvel Comics character, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966 (coincidentally, the same year in which the  Black Panther Party was founded), and Black Panther is the eighteenth film set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  The film is also the second of three in which Black Panther appears, after Captain America: Civil War (2016), and before Avengers: Infinity War, due later this year.

Lagoon (Hodder & Stoughton) by Nnedi Okorafor | review

Lagos was lazily named by Portuguese explorers in 1472, we are told: lagos means lagoon. Five hundred and thirty-eight years later, just after 11.55 pm on 8 January 2010, a huge alien craft plummets into the same lagoon. The ship has a transformative effect on the Nigerian ocean, “now so clean that a cup of its salty-sweet goodness will heal the worst human illnesses and cause a hundred more illnesses not yet known to humankind”. The swordfish we meet in the prologue triples in size, acquires retractable spines and golden armoured skin.