My guest today is Wole Talabi, a writer and engineer nominated for the for the Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. I’ve been reading and enjoying Wole’s work for some years, and it’s so great to have him here!

You can find him at Instagram and Bluesky.

Tell me more about The Fist of Memory and what made you write it.

The Fist Of Memory is primarily an action-packed speculative fiction thriller about a Nigerian assassin and a South African astronomer who find themselves caught in the turmoil precipitated by the discovery of an alien object heading towards Earth while trying to come to terms with their identities and complicated pasts. It’s basically John Wick meets Arrival by way of The Three Body Problem. That’s the simple description. And it’s mostly right. But because nothing I write is entirely amenable to simple distillation, it’s also about many other things. It’s a story of finding philosophical balance, of the possibility of redemption for both individuals and all of humanity, of connection and community and the fundamental nature of reality and consciousness, of the many ways in which memory shapes us all, for better or worse. Many people have described the book in different ways depending on the specific theme that most resonates with them but the one thing they almost all agree on is that it’s a unique story, unlike anything they've read before. Which is pretty awesome.

As to why I wrote it... I've been working on this novel for a while, so my motivations have evolved over time, but the main driver that was always present is this: I wanted to tell a unique, exciting and grounded African first contact SF story. Not only African in the location (we're all tired of Aliens only ever going to the US) and characters and plot but also in its core themes and philosophy of what the Aliens represent, why they would visit us, and what that would mean for humanity. I wanted a visceral and gripping science fiction novel that could simultaneously explore higher minded concepts of Sankofa and Ubuntu and Afrocommunitarianism, and respect traditional knowledge, belief systems and practices while also capturing the way in which contemporary African politics and religion would shape any response to something like an alien arrival.

What is your take on first contact stories? What can we expect from the book?

I absolutely love first contact stories. They make up some of my favorite stories in all of SF. I mean, which SF writer can resist picturing the first encounter between humans and aliens? Yes their historical connection to, and parallels with anthropological ideas around the first contact between human civilizations casts a long shadow but there have been so many explorations of what meeting a previously unknown intelligence that is fundamentally different from ours would mean for us as a species and as well as individually. Even one of the earliest written works of African speculative fiction is a first contact story (Cameroonian Jean-Louis Njemba Medou’s Nnanga Kon, published in 1932. A story in which foreign colonialists are cast as technologically advanced supernatural beings. It is a powerful first contact narrative which apparently spawned new folktales in his native Cameroun).

But while first contact stories are ostensibly about humans meeting aliens, they aren’t really about that. Not really. First contact stories are stories about us. They are mirrorshades through which we examine ourselves.

Introduce something truly strange into the human experience, like a giant alien spacecraft, for instance, and suddenly every human being becomes a test subject in a grand experiment. What do we fear? What do we worship? Do we even care? What do we fight over? What parts of ourselves do we discover? First contact stories come in all flavors from the philosophical to the comedic to the abstract and even the terrifying. What is the modality of the contact? How do we communicate? What are each party's intentions? Would we even recognize truly alien intelligence? How does human-alien communication work? Could it even work? So many questions, with an endless possibility of answers. Stories like Contact, Exordia, The Deep Sky, Arrival (and the short story its based on Story Of Your Life), Rosewater, The Three Body Problem, and even the aforementioned Nanga Kon all handle this differently but in the end the aliens are often just a metaphor we use to understand ourselves or a catalyst to precipitate a human reaction and that’s exactly what I take advantage of in The Fist Of Memory.

I start the book with a classic first-contact premise riffing on Rendezvous With Rama (a favorite of mine): an enormous alien spacecraft appears in the sky, approaching Earth. But I'm not interested in colonial-history inspired alien invasions or scientifically optimistic large-scale coordinated national responses to such an event. I mean, I am but that’s not my focus. I'm more interested in what happens to people (especially the morally ambiguous and internally conflicted) once they know something like that is coming but not what it is. When change is imminent and uncertainty becomes a primary driving force. And I explore them through the concepts of Sankofa (a Western African concept that emphasizes the importance of remembering and learning from the past to shape the future) and Ubuntu (the Southern African philosophy that interconnectedness and community are what make us what we are). I lean into these quite strongly in the novel and blend them with very science fictional ideas around quantum mechanics, panspermia, and string theory to tie it all together. I guess you could say that if first-contact stories are usually framed as conversations between humanity and the unknown, The Fist of Memory is me asking if the alien encounter wasn’t really trying to tell us anything new but to make us collectively remember something fundamental we've forgotten.

So, given all that, what can readers expect from the novel? A ton. A cyberpunky, noir-adjacent near-future vision of Africa impacted but not destroyed by climate change. Political shenanigans. An assassin who would really prefer life to stop becoming more complicated. An astronomer having the kind of dreams that would make you question whether reality has a quality-control department. Some big ideas about memory, identity, connectedness, and questions about what it means to be human. Hard SF blended with African traditional belief systems. If you've read my work before, you'll know I have a habit of using syncretic frameworks to ask philosophical questions in the middle of car chases and explosions, of blending pulp and literary sensibilities, of writing stories that read cinematic while giving you something to think about. Because why choose between contemplation and excitement when you can have both?

What is a piece of fiction that you think didn’t get enough attention?

I loved Temi Oh's More Perfect and I don’t think it got the recognition it deserved. It’s a retelling of the Greek myth (very timely) of Orpheus and Eurydice as an SF parable set in London. It’s got some very clever ideas about human connection and a moving romance at its center. It’s a beautifully written tale of two people whose love is caught in a battle for the minds of humankind. It's moving, powerful, and deeply human.

I also think Eliane Boey's Club Contango (a cyberpunk murder mystery about identity, crime, community and labor rights in the age of AI) deserved more attention. It’s Fight Club in a space station with a single parent protagonist and a cracking voice. Immersive, timely and clever with a beautiful layering of cool characters, Singapore-inspired setting, intricate plot and stylish prose. I’m surprised it didn’t get more notice.

Show me an illustration that you love and tell me why!

I love photorealistic character imagery, symmetry and visual surrealism so there is something I find incredibly appealing about Greg Ruth's character illustrations for the TV show The Last Of Us.

I also really love Joey Hi-Fi's illustration for the Spanish language cover of Nnedi Okorafor’s novella series Binti with its lovely geometric patterns, symmetry and the main character’s tentacular hair.

And finally, how can I not mention the oh-so-cool cover of MH Ayinde’s A Song Of Legends Lost, which is just incredibly powerful and striking, captures lots of lovely Africa-and-Asia inspired details and communicates some of the novel’s best ideas visually.

You're an advocate for more African SFF representation in the field. As a Brazilian writer (a country with a huge part of its population descending from African peoples), it's great to see what you do! Thank you for that. What did you notice in terms of trends and changes in African SFF since 2020?

Thank you! I appreciate you saying that and I hope to visit Brazil sometime soon to take in the connection it has to West Africa, which is something I am deeply interested in exploring in some of my own work.

Trends are… interesting. African speculative fiction remains in a state of dynamic growth and expansion with some caveats. In the 2010’s there was a significant rise in the global recognition of African speculative fiction. An explosion in activity in the network of stories, new connections forming and new questions being asked. Some of this was part of the post Black Panther rising tide. Some of it was due to seminal work by authors like Nnedi Okorafor and Tade Thompson and Sofia Samatar. Since 2020, while there have been pivotal anthologies like Africanfuturism: An Anthology (2020), Africa Risen (2022), which served to give opportunities to a new crop of authors producing innovative, and fascinating new work today, I also see less support for these new and upcoming African authors from Western SFF reading audiences that there was in say, 2023. I’m not sure why, some of it might be the publishing and political climate globally or there may be other factors at play but I really hope audience keep paying attention to African SFF because we have a lot to say and making SF global isn’t just about “diversity” or “representation” at a surface level to make people feel good, even though that itself is already a very worthwhile goal (and a natural result). Reading SF more global is about making SF itself fundamentally better because speculative fiction, especially science fiction is a genre of ideas, of concepts, of ways of looking at the world and of being human, so the more of that we are aware of and consider in SF - the more views, philosophies, scientific approaches, religions and cultures, etc. – the more variations of ways of being human that we can factor into our considerations, our stories and our projections about the future of humanity. Producing and reading global science fiction helps us understand ourselves and each other better, it helps us build a better empathy, gives us a broader palette of root ideas to apply to our visions of the future rather than focusing on one dominant hegemonic thought framework. So, anyone that cares about the soul of science fiction should care about its global diversity and African SFF is an essential part of that. It’s one of the reasons I wrote The Fist Of Memory – to inject that very African viewpoint into the canon of first contact narratives.

On the positive side of trends, as western interest has cooled, I think local African publishers have picked up the ball. 2023 saw the birth of two new African publishing house imprints dedicated to speculative fiction – Phoenix by Ouida Books and Mother by Jacana Media. Publishers like Masobe books and Mirari Press are also publishing great books leading to a great variety of work being available. So that’s cool.

There are also many other positive trends strengthening the network at its center. Like the growth of collaborative writing and homegrown communities - writing collectives and shared worlds are starting to appear, and many collaborative works include the larger African/Black diaspora. For example, the Sauúti collective of which I am member. A wider acceptance of the ideas around Africanfuturism as distinct from Afrofuturism, although there is emphasis now on the connection between the two and usage of the term is still not universal. There are those African authors who are fine with the term Afrofuturism, those who prefer to use other broader terms like “Afro-centric futurisms” and others, yet who are fine with the larger umbrella of speculative fiction or without any labels at all.

It remains to be seen what it will all add up to, but the future is bright, the network is strong. But we are all interconnected and African SFF isn’t a separate thing – its part and parcel of the global SFF canon so I hope readers all over the world continue to support and embrace it – along with all the brilliant SFF being written all over the globe.