Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Rafeeat Aliyu

Marian Denise Moore

Eugen Bacon

Odida Nyabundi

Dare Segun Falowo

Nicole Givens Kurtz

Mame Bougouma Diene

Ekpeki Oghenechovwe Donald

Nuzo Onoh

Michael Boatman

Dilman Dila

Dominion is the first anthology of speculative fiction and poetry by Africans and the African Diaspora. An old god rises up each fall to test his subjects. Once an old woman's pet, a robot sent to mine an asteroid faces an existential crisis. A magician and his son time-travel to Ngoni country and try to change the course of history. A dead child returns to haunt his grieving mother with terrifying consequences. Candace, an ambitious middle manager, is handed a project that will force her to confront the ethical ramifications of her company's latest project—the monetization of human memory. Osupa, a newborn village in pre-colonial Yorubaland populated by refugees of war, is recovering after a great storm when a young man and woman are struck by lightning, causing three priests to divine the coming intrusion of a titanic object from beyond the sky. A magician teams up with a disgruntled civil servant to find his missing wand. A taboo error in a black market trade brings a man face-to-face with his deceased father—literally. The death of a King sets off a chain of events that ensnare a trickster, an insane killing machine, and a princess, threatening to upend their post-apocalyptic world. Africa is caught in the tug-of-war between two warring Chinas, and for Ibrahima torn between the lashings of his soul and the pain of the world around him, what will emerge? When the Goddess of Vengeance locates the souls of her stolen believers, she comes to a midwestern town with a terrible past, seeking the darkest reparations. In a post-apocalyptic world devastated by nuclear war, survivors gather in Ife-Iyoku, the spiritual capital of the ancient Oyo Empire, where they are altered in fantastic ways by its magic and power.

An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora

Dominion

Mage of Fools

In this lush interplanetary tale, Novic is an immortal Sayneth priest who flouts the conventions of a matriarchal society by choosing a name for his child. This act initiates chaos that splits the boy in two, unleashing a Jekyll-and-Hyde child upon the universe. Named T-Mo by his mother and Odysseus by his father, the story spans the boy's lifetime--from his early years with his mother Silhouette on planet Grovea to his travels to Earth where he meets and marries Salem, and together they bear a hybrid named Myra. The story unfolds through the eyes of these three distinctive women: Silhouette, Salem and Myra. As they confront their fears and navigate the treacherous paths to love and accept T-Mo/Odysseus and themselves, the darkness in Odysseus urges them to unbearable choices that threaten their very existence.

Claiming T-Mo

Eugen Bacon's work is deemed cheeky with a fierce intelligence in text that's resplendent, delicious, dark and evocative. NPR called her novel Claiming T-Mo 'a confounding mysterious tour de force.' The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories imbues the same lushness in a writerly language that is Bacon's own. This peculiar hybrid of the untraditional, the extraordinary within, without and along the borders of normalcy will hypnotize and absorb the reader with tales that refuse to be labeled. The stories in this collection are dirges that cross genres in astounding ways. Over 20 provocative tales, with seven original to this collection, by an award-winning African-Australian author.

The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories

Creative and Critical Approaches

Writing Speculative Fiction

Dominique Hecq

Speculate is a hybrid of speculative poetry and flash fiction, thrumming in a pulse of jouissance and intensity that chases the impossible.

A Collection of Microlit

Speculate

Chasing Whispers is a unique Afro-irrealist collection of black speculative fiction in transformative stories of culture, longing, hybridity, unlimited futures, a collision of worlds and folklore. It contains 13 stories, 11 of which are original, with a commanding introduction by D. Harlan Wilson. The collection is aligned with the themes of Eugen Bacon's other fiction, and her recognition in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for "doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction." ﻿Chasing Whispers casts a gaze at mostly women and children haunted by patriarchy, in stories packed with affection, dread, anguish and hope. The connecting theme is a black protagonist with a deep longing for someone, someplace, something... and a recurring phrase in each story: "a deep and terrible sadness."

Chasing Whispers

Stephen King

Elizabeth Massie

Chuck Palahniuk

Victor LaValle

Zoje Stage

Gary A. Braunbeck

Josh Malerman

Kaaron Warren

Steve Rasnic Tem

Linda D. Addison

Cynthia Pelayo

Eric LaRocca

Gabino Iglesias

Scott Edelman

Hailey Piper

Lee Murray

Gordon Linzner

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

A literary blend of sci-fi and horror by some of the finest contemporary writers of speculative fiction, edited by multi-award-winning editor Michael Bailey and illustrated throughout by Pat R. Steiner.

Vol. 2

Qualia Nous

Milton Davis

This is the follow up to the highly acclaimed The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction 2021 which collected twenty-nine stories by twenty-five writers, which the press describes as "some of the most exciting voices, old and new, from Africa and the diaspora, published in the 2020 year." This new anthology introduces three two new editors who join award-winning writer and editor Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki of teh first to introduce readers to an ever more diverse set of writers associated with Africa. Ekpeki is the author of "The Witching Hour," which won a 2019 Nommo award, and the co-editor of two other forthcoming anthologies: the nonfiction collection Bridging Worlds: Global Conversations on Creating Pan-African Speculative Literature in a Pandemic (with Zelda Knight) and the speculative fiction collection Africa Risen (with Zelda Knight and Sheree Renée Thomas). For the new anthology he is joining forces with Eugen Bacon, a 2022 World Fantasy Award finalist and Milton Davis, an award-winning Black Speculative fiction write and editor.

The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2022)

'Eugen Bacon gives us a cornucopia of dark fruitfulness. Her writing is equal parts fecund earth and fine-cut jewels; her stories juxtapose the scarred and abused with the powerfully magical, the numinous and the deceptively mundane. They travel the known world, remaking all its parts as they go, and they pull new worlds, fully formed, from Bacon's unfettered imagination.' MARGO LANAGAN Danged Black Thing is an extraordinary collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, patriarchy and womanhood, from a remarkable and original voice. Traversing the West and Africa, they celebrate the author's own hybridity with breathtaking sensuousness and lyricism.Simbiyu wins a scholarship to study in Australia, but cannot leave behind a world of walking barefoot, orange sun and his longing for a 'once pillow-soft mother'. In his past, a darkness rose from the river, and something nameless and mystical continues to envelop his life. In 'A Taste of Unguja' sweet taarab music, full of want, seeps into a mother's life on the streets of Melbourne as she evokes the powers of her ancestors to seek vengeance on her cursed ex. In the cyberfunk of 'Unlimited Data' Natukunda, a village woman, gives her all for her family in Old Kampala. Other stories explore with power what happens when the water runs dry - and who pays, capture the devastating effects on women and children of societies in which men hold all the power, and themes of being, belonging, otherness.Speculative, realistic and even mythological, but always imbued with truth, empathy and Blackness, Danged Black Thing is a literary knockout.

Danged Black Thing

In this engaging and accessible guide, Eugen Bacon explores writing speculative fiction as a creative practice, drawing from her own work, and the work of other writers and theorists, to interrogate its various subgenres. Through analysis of writers such as Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling, this book scrutinises the characteristics of speculative fiction, considers the potential of writing cross genre and covers the challenges of targeting young adults. It connects critical and cultural theories to the practice of creative writing, examining how they might apply to the process of writing speculative fiction. Both practical and critical in its evaluative gaze, it also looks at e-publishing as a promising publishing medium for speculative fiction. This is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of creative writing, looking to develop a critical awareness of, and practical skills for, the writing of speculative fiction. It is also a valuable resource for creators, commentators and consumers of contemporary speculative fiction. Chapter 8, 'Horror and the Paranormal' was shortlisted for the Australasian Horror Writers Association (AHWA)'s 2019 Australian Shadows Awards.

From what began as a dialog between two adventurous writers curious about the shape-shifter called a prose poem comes a stunning collection that is a disruption of language-a provocation. Speculate is a hybrid of speculative poetry and flash fiction, thrumming in a pulse of jouissance and intensity that chases the impossible. One might describe some pieces as complex, relentless, but above all, speculating or crossing borders in the fantastic playground of language. We invite you to leap onto the stage of your own imaginings, plunge into what Henry James called the house of fiction. This is how we envision ours: A single detached house tossed out of Speculate settles across your dreams. Skin, paper-thin, desiccated and scripted like a collage, covers the absence of doors, thresholds, verandas, stairways and footpaths. But there are windows and louvers that look out to rain-licked grasslands. This is a house unsealed, with the sky art and earth art washed or rolled into each other on adjacent floors and walls. The roof, unlettered, is made of two sliding suns of creamed panels, foundation-like. Round the back is a rope ladder that will win you over. Up, up you go. Enter with care as you would any fiction that blurs the boundaries of genre, mode or form, that goes beyond the written and borrows from the unwritten. Together we can interweave art with language and watch it shape itself anew in an endless process of spontaneity and play because we can be here and there and away, all at once. -Dominique Hecq and Eugen Bacon

Eugen Bacon

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