Terra Incognita – the latest Short Story Day Africa anthology – has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books, along with Dilman Dila’s A Killing in the Sun.
Short Story Day Africa, run by Rachel Zadok, Tiah Beautement and Nick Mulgrew, holds a short story competition every year, with the winning stories being collected into an anthology.
The Los Angeles Review of Books article, written by Mark Bould, is subtitled: “If Colonialism Was The Apocalypse, What Comes Next?”
Bould calls Terra Incognita “not only the most accomplished of the African SF anthologies published so far but also undoubtedly the most literary”. Of Killing in the Sun, he says the stories “are almost perfectly poised between the robustness of genre fiction and the more literary concern with ambiguity so frequently evident in Terra Incognita“.
He concludes:
Most of the stories in these two volumes articulate the relationship between globalized first-world culture, with its expectations of fiction, genre, and style, and various African localities, with their hardly pristine cultural specificities. Most of them reek of history and seem to be cast in a post-apocalyptic mode. They are not post-apocalyptic in the way British cosy catastrophes, Hollywood blockbusters, and incessant zombies have taught us to think of what comes after the end of it all. They are documents of the postcolony, and as Mad Max: Fury Road’s Namibian locations remind us, that is also, and always already, the post-apocalypse.
They are what comes next.
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Book details
- Terra Incognita edited by Nerine Dorman
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EAN: 9781920590918
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- A Killing in the Sun by Dilman Dila
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EAN: 9780987019875
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