The ending is particularly powerful.Įrnest Hogan’s Skin Dragons Talk sees Goro dealing with his dragon tattoos, which have inexplicably begun to talk to him. The online world allows some interaction, since “the mingling of so many minds kept time linear”. Time seems to be resetting itself every 10 hours, and people are disappearing in droves. Jemisin slays it again with a brief, bizarre tale called Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows. I’ll just note a few of my favorite tales from this volume. Some of these stories didn’t entirely read as sci-fi to me, but it’s one of those genres that can be tough to define. The locales include Iceland, Japan, Haiti, Sudan, the Moon, and beyond, so you’ll find plenty of variety! The characters are particularly well-rounded and interesting, from all sorts of backgrounds. So if you don’t tend to find difficulty with somewhat surreal, philosophical narratives, you might enjoy this book more than I did (note that I’m still giving it a 4 out of 5, which I consider a “very good”). Some of the stories are a bit on the confusing and/or surreal side, or they get rather philosophical, and I was less fond of those, but that will vary by reader. (For example, there’s a story with a Native American journalist in Japan.) This anthology is edited by Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall and is a pretty decent length. While the title of Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond indicates that these stories are Afrofuturism, the diversity is a wider range than that. Campbell lives in Washington, DC, where he spends his time with his family and helms Rosarium Publishing.Cons: Some of the stories are pretty confusing

In the summer of 2021, Campbell won a Locus Award for his work helping to diversify the field of science fiction.

His historical graphic novel with Bizhan Khodabandeh, The Day the Klan Came to Town, was released by PM Press in 2021. His Afrofuturist spaceploitation graphic novel, Baaaad Muthaz (with David Brame and Damian Duffy) was released in 2019. Delany with Nisi Shawl, Future Fiction: New Dimensions in International Science Fiction and Fantasy with Francesco Verso, and APB: Artists against Police Brutality with Jason Rodriguez and John Jennings (for which he won a Pioneer/Lifetime Achievement Glyph Award). He also co-edited Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Along with Edward Austin Hall, he co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond.

Bill Campbell is the author of Sunshine Patriots, My Booty Novel, and the anti-racism satire, Koontown Killing Kaper.

Mothership by Bill Campbell