Review: How Long ’til Black Future Month?

(This review was written before I launched the review site)

I’ve just finished reading How Long ‘til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin.

I don’t usually read short stories. I always feel like I’m being torn away from these characters I’ve just gotten to know and love before I’m really ready to go. Sometimes I feel that way with full novels, too, but it’s more common with short stories because, you know, they’re short.

Black Future Month managed to get through my lack of care for the form, by virtue of how many good things I’ve heard about it. Many of my friends have read it, and recommended it. It’s won awards, and justly so. A girl with some of the coolest-looking hair I’ve ever seen was reading it on the bus across the aisle from me last month (it looked very similar to the hair of the lady on the cover, actually), which doesn’t really have anything to do with the book’s literary quality but is definitely a point in its favor. It’s a book that has been angling for my attention for a while, is what I’m getting at. I saw it on sale recently, so I picked it up and finally read it.

It turns out that N.K. Jemisin writes really good short stories.

This was a great book. The overall theme is, as you might expect from the anthology title, fantasy and sci-fi from the perspective of black or otherwise marginalized characters (or maybe that’s just how Jemisin writes, and it looks like a theme to me because so much sci-fi and fantasy is white by default? That would also be an interesting observation to make, if so). Most of them are really good stories. A couple didn’t really hook me, but that’s okay, they were usually over in a few pages anyway.

I want to talk about each of these stories.

“The Ones Who Stay and Fight” is the story that I’d heard the most about before starting the book, and to my surprise I found that it wasn’t really a story. It’s more of a narrator urging the reader to fight for equality and justice and happiness in the world, using a fictional alternate reality as an example of the way that things could be if we tried. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, to be honest–on the one hand I definitely agree with its message, but on the other hand I really was expecting a story with plot. Though that disconnect between expectation and reality only serves to drive the main point of the story home, so maybe that still works?

EDIT: I found out much later that this story was a reaction to “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, which to my shame I’ve never actually read. I went and gave it a read, and then reread “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” and if you’re in the same boat as I was I highly suggest reading “Omelas” first. “Stay and Fight” makes a lot more sense and is a lot more powerful when read with the context of Le Guin’s story.

“The City Born Great” contains a lot of the sort of vague, metaphorical magic that I usually hate in a fantasy story, but grounded in things that I love. I wasn’t sure of it at first, but it grew on me very, very quickly. This might be because I’m an enormous sucker for anything that describes cities through a mythical lens, and the myth of New York City is one of my favorites. The protagonist, a gay black homeless boy making art and trying to survive in a city that is often hostile to his very existence, is immediately relatable, and the story is fast and fantastical in all the right ways.

Any eldritch abomination that comes at New York had best not rest it’s head, because this city never sleeps. Give ‘em hell, kid.

Side note: At the end of the book I found a sample chapter from The City We Became, a novel which seems to be expanding on this story quite a bit. From what I can tell, it’s scheduled for release in March of next year. I’m looking forward to it.

“Red Dirt Witch” was a twisty little folktale that reminded me a bit of Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff, which is another great book you should read. Also, read this story. It’s good.

“L’Alchimista” was wonderful. It’s one of those things that doesn’t have any real conflict, doesn’t have a huge amount of stakes, but feels big all the same. Two people’s simple interactions, a wizard and a master chef, and the fantastic results of their conversations. Based on this story, I suspect that Jemisin knows a lot more than I do about cooking.

“L’Alchimista” and the following story are my two favorites in the book.

“The Effluent Engine” is exactly my shit. It’s so good that it reminds me why I don’t usually read short stories. Black lesbian spies in an alternate history New Orleans, with Hatian revolutionary airships in the sky and a sinister secret society trying to maintain slavery in America? Good God. Why is this one short story all that I get? I want an eight-novel pulp adventure series and a TV show that I don’t watch because I can’t imagine how it could be as good as the books.

“Cloud Dragon Skies” is another allegory story. It’s about the law of unintended consequences, and the arrogance of people who think they’re smarter than the natives. Not much else to say here. The story tells you a lot in its very spare form, and then ends right when it needs to. I do wish the titular cloud dragons were explained a little more, because right now they kind of just come out of nowhere as a sort of “I told you so!” for the main character, but I suppose they get the point across.

“The Trojan Girl” is another one of those stories that I wanted to be a novel. It’s about AIs sneaking around a cyberpunk datasphere, not understanding humans and accidentally causing great harm. Alien intelligences that we built without meaning to. Good stuff. Definitely the sort of thing where I’m bummed that I don’t know what happens next.

“Valedictorian” is a strange story. I spent the first half thinking it was about something entirely different from what it turned out to be. I don’t want to say too much about it here because I genuinely think you should read it for yourself, and I think spoilers would ruin a lot of it. In the end it almost seems like it’s the future of the world posited in “The Trojan Girl,” except…not quite. Whatever the case, it’s good. I think most sci-fi nerds can relate to its savant protagonist, at least a little bit.

“The Storyteller’s Replacement” is a classic fantasy fable, and quite horrifying. I thought it was great. It also plays around with the narrator a bit, with the fable being full of interjections from a storyteller responding to unheard (or unwritten) responses from their audience.

Throughout the course of the anthology, I’m slowly coming to realize that playing around with the narrator and the format of the story is one of N.K. Jemisin’s favorite pastimes.

“The Brides of Heaven” is a horror story, and I hated it, because afterwards it was in my head and wouldn’t leave. Same with “The Evaluators.” I spent the entire time reading both of them with an absolute certainty that something terrible was happening, and that I couldn’t possibly stop it. These stories are going to be the favorites of someone who is way more into creeping horror than I am.

“Walking Awake” is a story in a similar horror vein to the previous three, but modulated in that the characters actually fight the horror, with some success. It posits a terrifying future for the human race, enslaved by parasitic alien overlords of our own creation in a way that is far, far too believable for my peace of mind. I thought the ending was kind of weak, in that it involved a lot of that kind of wee-woo magic where it works (maybe?) because someone told you it would in a dream, but like…still a good and properly horrifying story.

“The Elevator Dancer” is a story about madness and God in a fascist theocratic United States that I really, really hope never comes to be. It was pretty short and very simple and I don’t have much else to say about it. To be honest I kind of skipped off its surface on my way to other things, only pausing to be relieved that it wasn’t another body horror story.

“Cuisine des Mémoires” is great. It’s another food story, which I approve of, while also being a story about letting go of the past so that you can live in the now and make positive changes for the future. You kind of know how the entire story is going to go after reading the title and the first couple of paragraphs, but that’s all right. There’s still delight in the journey.

“Stone Hunger” was great. Legit high fantasy, with a very detailed world built very quickly to tell a story of vengeance and post-apocalyptic survival. This is a story that I wouldn’t have minded seeing as an entire novel, but honestly it works so well as a short story that I don’t feel I have any right to ask for more. It’s whole and complete in itself.

EDIT: After writing out this entire review, I went and bought Fifth Season, book one of Jemisin’s Broken Earth series, and quickly figured out that “Stone Hunger” is set in that world. So it turns out I actually do get to visit the Stillness for an entire novel or three.

“On the Banks of the River Lex” is a sad, sweet story about the anthropomorphic personification of Death wandering through a city of lost fables after humanity has passed away from a non-specific apocalypse. It’s one of those stories that really likes people, and is extraordinarily mournful that there aren’t any around anymore. I’m not going to spoil the conclusion, because you should go read it yourself.

“The Narcomancer” is another high fantasy thing, this time about priests and dreams and sex. It’s good mostly because of the characters, and the long discussions between the holy Sister and Brother who make the journey upriver to try and solve a small village’s bandit problem. This one I wouldn’t have wanted to read as a full novel, but it was great in short form.

“Henosis” was a strange one. It’s about fame, and a creator’s relationship with their fans and their work, and also about a world where, you slowly come to realize, famous creators get murdered before they can fade away. And everyone’s somehow okay with this.

I understood what it was trying to say, but I didn’t like it. It’s one of those settings where I find it hard to suspend my disbelief, for whatever reason.

“Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows” is an existentially troubling story with a very sweet and strange message buried in it. I’m glad I read it, but I’m never going to read it again, because it broke my heart.

“The You Train” was weird. I liked its unique storytelling approach, of having each section be delivered as though it were a phone call between friends, but the story itself was mostly depressing.

“Non-Zero Probabilities” was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and I can see why, even if I didn’t like it nearly as much as many of the other stories in the book. It’s a charming little story that is precisely designed to appeal to an audience that isn’t quite me.

“Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters” was a really, really good story, and a solid one to end the collection on. Ghosts and goblins in New Orleans after Katrina, people trying to survive and also having surprisingly chill conversations with dragons that just show up and act like it’s no big deal. Great read. I don’t want a full novel from this story, but I wouldn’t say no to a sequel.

After reading all of these, I think I might be an NK Jemisin fan now.