Six best African sci-fi and fantasy books to read this holiday

Science fiction, fantasy, horror and other forms of speculative fiction are breathing new life into African writing. International awards, TV deals, new publishing imprints, a growing fanbase and academic studies are adding to the interest.

So what are the best sci-fi and fantasy novels, short stories and anthologies to add to your wishlist? The Conversation asked six scholars who specialise in African sci-fi and fantasy to pick.

Avenues by Train by Farai Mudzingwa

Gibson Ncube

Reading Zimbabwean writer Farai Mudzingwa’s Avenues by Train (2023), one cannot help but think of those moments when we find ourselves suspended between stations, neither here nor there, watching the passing scenes through the windows of a carriage that may or may not reach its destination. This coming-of-age novel captures the peculiar stagnation of contemporary Zimbabwe, where the promises of independence have given way to a landscape of never-ending transitions.

Jedza, the protagonist, is convinced that his life is haunted. First, by the guilt of being accidentally responsible for the death of a childhood friend who was run over by a train. Second, by the disappearance of his sister in Harare. The novel operates at two levels as it traces Jedza’s search for freedom and happiness.

On the surface it explores the realities of contemporary Zimbabwe – economic challenges, sex work, drug abuse. Another level deploys the metaphysical as it draws on Shona mythology and spiritualism evoking ngozi (avenging spirits), shapeshifting njuzu (water spirits) and ancestral spirits. It refuses to be bogged down into categories. One section reads like magical realism, another like fantasy and another like non-fiction, littered with historical details in footnotes.

Where it occasionally loses steam is in its grappling with the historical backdrop and the weight of Zimbabwe’s past. But it’s a poignant exploration of the country in prose that’s confident, lyrical and unflinching.

Avenues by Train marks an important contribution to Zimbabwean literature.

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way by Alistair Mackay

Deirdre C. Byrne

Set in a near-future Cape Town, South African writer Alistair Mackay’s 2022 novel It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way (affectionately abbreviated IDHTBTW) presents the horrors of accelerated climate change through the eyes of three gay protagonists.

There’s the environmental activist Luthando, his lover Viwe, and Malcolm, an unwitting accomplice of capitalist exploitation of the natural world. As ecocide intensifies, the divide between the haves, who can hole up behind the Wall in the air-conditioned Citadel, and the have-nots, who must endure fatally high temperatures and starvation rations, becomes more intense.

IDHTBTW warns readers of the disasters that will ensue if we continue on the path of using natural resources irresponsibly. The success of this form of dystopian writing depends on the elegance and pacing of its delivery. IDHTBTW delivers both elegance and pacing, and supplies a gay love story as well, which is not often found in the genre.

IDHTBTW does not flinch from hard reminders about the climate crisis, nor from complex, politically relevant answers.

Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology edited by Wole Talabi

Nedine Moonsamy

There has been a spate of African science fiction anthologies but Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology (2023), edited by Nigerian writer and editor Wole Talabi, exceeds the trend through its complex and shared worldbuilding.

The Sauútiverse is a shared and open world, and only exists through the collaborative efforts of its authors, invited into workshops over the span of two years to create the Sauútiverse. This method of multi-perspective storytelling means that our sense of the Sauútiverse changes with each story.

We are told stories by human and non-human subjects on different planetary bodies. The collection becomes an illustration of how radically new perspectives emerge when we look at the same event from different angles.

It generates the unique pleasure of reading for these points of interconnectedness, with carefully interwoven histories and characters featuring across stories. Stepping into the Sauútiverse is stepping out of the “dangers of a single story”. Read a full review here.

Rigland by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Carl Death

There are dark and difficult times ahead. In bleak times, speculative fiction is especially popular. It can help us imagine how we might endure the worst, and can also nurture the hope that alternative worlds are possible.

Nigerian writer Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s free-to-read short story Rigland (2023) does both these things: it inventively but realistically imagines how spaces of sanctuary might be built even in the midst of the climate cataclysms to come.

Short stories, at their best, communicate an original idea or situation with vivid detail and an efficiency of words. Rigland is one of the best examples of the form.

Temple Kodam, a genius mechanic and engineer from the Niger Delta, has built a refuge for his community “in the unlikeliest of places”. After “a storm so great its waters would never recede” he refused orders to flee inland and instead occupied an oil rig. Stripped of all useful material, it is designed to withstand storms at sea. Temple has made it a cosy home. Then the company that owns it returns to demand rent.

The story doesn’t avert our eyes from the violence, power relations and precarity of the oil- and climate-ravaged Delta, or from Temple’s own complex backstory. But it’s a testament to the power of communities to construct their own futures.

The Silence of the Wilting Skin by Tlotlo Tsamaase

Peter J. Maurits

A railway track cuts a nameless society in two, and the people living on either side are fundamentally different. Every month, a train filled with the already dead arrives to collect those who have recently died, yet only those on the nameless protagonist’s side of the tracks can see it. The Others, living in the District on the Other Side of the City, cannot, and seek to demolish the seemingly useless tracks.

This is part of their expansionist real estate project, which will pave over the protagonist’s district and relocate or kill its inhabitants. As a result, the nameless protagonist, her culture and her people face the threat of erasure.

This is the plot of Botswana writer Tlotlo Tsamaase’s virtuoso novella The Silence of the Wilting Skin (2020).

Unlike her freely available short stories and her debut novel Womb City (2023), which received significant market attention, the novella has largely flown under the radar. Yet, it stands as one of the more successful efforts in her broader literary project, linking struggles over the body and identity to dominant market forces and the misère of neoliberalism.

Its story world may or may not be Earth, as the sun rises and sets in the east, while the moon rises and sets in the west. It is populated by ghosts, and in this world, dream and reality are deeply entangled. It stands at the forefront of redefining what sci-fi can be – in its broadest sense.

Triangulum by Masande Ntshanga

Bibi Burger

Triangulum (2019) is a novel about alien abduction, time travel, messages from a supernatural source and visions of the future. It’s also about a schoolgirl growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, trying to make sense of the continuing influence of apartheid history, as she is simultaneously trying to figure out her sexuality, her family and who she is.

The novel, South African writer Masande Ntshanga’s second, is written in a dry, deadpan register that echoes the protagonist’s blunted affect – seemingly a side effect of her psychiatric medication. As a result of this tone fantastical events are represented in a matter-of-fact way that somehow makes their strangeness and everyday life appear equally alien.

Triangulum’s setting in King William’s Town (now Qonce) and surroundings is unusual not only in science fiction but in South African literature more broadly.

This area is also often neglected in the country’s national discourses. Ntshanga not only depicts this underrepresented space believably, he suggests that we might need to look to rural places and overlooked histories for answers to the vexed environmental and political questions of our present, and of our future. DM 

This story was first published in The Conversation. Gibson Ncube is a Senior Lecturer at Stellenbosch University. Bibi Burger is a Lecturer at the School of Languages and Literatures, University of Cape Town. Carl Death is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy, University of Manchester. Deirdre C. Byrne is a Professor of English Studies at the University of South Africa. Nedine Moonsamy is an Associate professor at the University of Johannesburg. Peter J. Maurits, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Humanity, Social Sciences, and Theology, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.