Today's paid recommendation is unusual and awesome!
BogiReads brings you the daily speculative reading recommendation of editor Bogi Takács.
Today's recommendation -
This is a book in translation that I'm not seeing discussed much!
Author: Sarah Coolidge (ed.)
Title: No Edges – Swahili Stories
Venue: Two Lines Press, 2023.
Type: Anthology – but a short one, with 8 stories
Themes: Everything from demons to spaceships
Where to read: Buy on Amazon US / Bookshop.org (associate links)
This is going to be an odd recommendation in that it’s an anthology, but it’s really short, I don’t think the whole book is over novella length – so it does fit after all. I read it in print, but it only includes eight stories, some of which are brief excerpts from novels.
This is probably the first ever speculative anthology translated from Swahili – the back cover claims the first ever anthology, but that seems inaccurate. Not all of the stories are speculative (even though the back cover seems to claim that too?), but most are, and the ones that aren’t I also found worth reading. The book also looks cool as an object, with great cover art, interior typography, etc. I need to get more books in this series.
I’m usually frustrated with novel excerpts, but here one of my favorites was an excerpt: from Walenisi by Katama G. C. Mkangi, a biting satire that also relies on its speculative elements. (This was extremely relatable to me – this is an approach that has a rich tradition in Eastern Europe too.) There is a spaceship… which is used… to execute people. It makes a bizarre sense. Can someone translate the whole book please?
I’d recommend the non-speculative stories too – “Timo and Kayole’s Chaos” by Mwas Mahugu was one of my favorites. The topics and the speculative elements are quite varied, there are folk monsters, spaceships as I’ve just mentioned, psychedelic visions, and so on.
I also had some other unexpected cultural connections besides the SFnal political satire – I was listening to Swahili rap as a teen in RealAudio files downloaded over dialup (does anyone still remember this format? It was really so much worse than mp3s, but it was what we had!), I couldn’t understand a word, but I could admire the flow. Now I find out from the author bios that there is more than a little overlap between people who rap in Swahili and people who write fiction in Swahili. Very cool and it inspired me to re-find a bunch of artists from all over the continent. (Geographically quite distant from East Africa, but I had a bunch of Wolof rap tracks in particular too, for some reason.)
One odd thing about this book is that the editor isn’t listed anywhere; I got the editor’s name from Goodreads, but it might be incorrect? This is the second anthology focusing on a group underrepresented in English-language SFF I read this year already that didn’t have the editor named (the other one was Taaqtumi). Publishers, please name the editors, they’re not incidental.
Enjoy your weekend,
Bogi.