How Long 'til Black Future Month?: Stories

An Amazon Best Book of December 2018: N.K. Jemisin has been sweeping science fiction and fantasy awards for years with her Broken Earth novels. Now Jemisin gathers almost two dozen short stories she crafted during her writing career, and, golly, you can see "award winner" on every page. I usually avoid reading short story collections, because inevitably the first two stories are excellent and the third through the eighth stories are mediocre, sucking away the propulsion to keep reading. But each one of Jemisin's tales is gloriously bright and complex, thrusting you forward to read the next, and the one after that…and then suddenly it's the next morning and you haven't gotten a wink of sleep. The collection's title reflects Jemisin's realization that the science fiction she read frequently excluded characters of color, making it seem like people like her had no place in writers' dreams of the future. Jemisin's stories reshape that vision through the lens of alternate history, dragons, fairies, near-future drama, and far-future events that spotlight the age-old blight of discrimination and upend readers' assumptions about who can be heroic. Through her imagination and fierceness, Jemisin declares that Black Future Month can be now. --Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review