To be perfectly honest, it was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s name that made me pick up this collection: sci-fi is not my fave genre but N.K. Jemisin didn’t release another bunch of shorts and these were stories that promised a variety of styles (hard and soft) so I knew I’d simply have to enjoy at least 3 of them. False: I liked them all. Of course Adichie’s “The Visit” was my fave (and more like an alternate reality than pure sci-fi, along the lines of Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “Skinned”), but even the stories that were tech or space heavy were easy enough to lose myself in.

I think that maybe I find a lot of conventional sci-fi hard to embrace because a lot of it just ignores or breezes over the bleak history of humanity that got the characters to their brave new worlds (Firefly hooked me because its world is one where English at least lost out as the dominant language). In these stories, the main characters are all too cognizant of the lives their ancestors lived, not to mention that there are sometimes still others living nearby who have no intention of allowing people whose melanin is relevant to ever live in peace.

These stories offer a lot to think about, like a Butler or Le Guin story. At least three made me want a novel so the concepts could be explored at length. But all worked perfectly as short stories.