I usually review short story collections individually. Although the overall feeling of a collection might be a certain way, the stories themselves might sway an interested reader. Also, it is a way that I can later recollect individual stories if I ever looked at my review again( I hardly recheck post writing before publishing, so it is a bit of a stretch to imagine me looking at old reviews so thoroughly).

I cannot deploy my usual tactics here because the number of chapters are too numerous for it to be a good use of my time to individually list them. I should have marked the ones that truly fascinated me, but I did not. That said, there were two stories in particular which were entirely not my thing and I actively disliked them.

My rating reflects my overall experience with this collection. The good overwhelmingly outweighed the bad. The stories here span several themes and genres. There are several which qualify as science-fiction, while a few would count as horror and so on. The underlying connecting factor is the belonging to the African identity. It plays into the narrative in different ways. I learnt a little about some of the more prevalent ‘myths’ and stories from some of the cultures. There is a lot of variety, varying styles of writing and different types of characters in this book.

This book is not an easy read, nor is it a quick read. It took me a while to get to this book and a lot longer to work my way through it but I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes short stories and finds the subject matter intriguing.

I received an ARC thanks to Netgalley and the publishers but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

An extraordinary collection of stories that show the breadth of the African-diaspora's fantastical and futuristic capabilities.

Wow this cover is so beautiful! And the stories inside are quite an adventure. I think this is the biggest collection of short stories I've read and I really liked that they pulled from many sci-fi subgenres but also mythologies and culture. Some stories definitely stuck out more than others but I'm general, I did enjoy it

What can I say, I’m a short story lover. There’s something about a tightly written story, that you can digest in a short time, one that might give you enough to soothe but not satisfy. Stories that can give you a glimpse, a tease.

My faves from this collection are:
“Hanfo Driver” by Ada Nnadi

“The Deification of Igodo” by Joshua Uchenna Omenga

“Peeling Time (Deluxe Edition)” by Tlotlo Tsamaase

But what a truly stunning collection of award winning tales!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an eARC in exchange for a honest review.

Fantastic collection of short stories that covered the many topics in Sci Fi. In ways that gave hope, dread, and hesitancy for the future.

Compilation of stories from African authors. Good read and the short stories are entertaining. Beautiful cover

From award-winning editorial team Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight comes an anthology of thirty-two original stories showcasing the breadth of fantasy and science fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora.

This beautiful book of short short stories from Africa and the diaspora landed in my hands and I'm so eager to read authors that are new to me.

The first story I read was The Ghost Ship written by @tananarivedue because I love her work and I was not disappointed. A short story does its justice when Im left wanting more

Thanks to @b2weird for facilitating this and many thanks @shereereneethomas @penprice @authorzknight for stellar editing and @Tordotcompub for gifting this book for review.

#B2Weird #AfricaRisen #B2WTours
#ReadSoulLit #bookstagram #BookstagramSVG #BookMail

Like any short story collection, there are obviously highs and lows. Not every story is going to appeal to every reader, and that's just fine. I had some favorites and some that were just okay, but the most appealing part about this collection is the overall project.

An absolutely mystifying collection of stories right here. As a long form reader, this was surprisingly easy to get into While of course, some stories just didn't tickle my fancy, the ones that really did refined and twisted my thoughts in a long lasting manner that had me unravelled and hungered for more.

One of the prettiest covers ever in my opinion, so this is an anthology collecting a bunch of different stories exploring the culture of Africa both past and present and it’s in the genre of scifi. It was so very interesting especially since we get a multiple perspective lens from many different African authors. Now there are 32 stories in this collection which is a lot. Normally you only get I don’t know half that or even less. Sometimes with anthologies like this, it can be a mixed bag but with 32 stories there more chances of you liking a lot of them which just ups that quality of life.

This book was absolutely fantastic. I've already added it to our list for order next year and will recommend it to students.

Africa Risen pulls together a massive 500 pages of original fiction from a range of established and rising star authors from both the African continent and the diaspora. 32 original stories is a lot to pull together for an anthology, and there were more ups and downs than I was expecting during the first half of the anthology, where a lot of stories end with the results of their climactic actions left uncertain and often with their protagonist's journeys feeling incomplete. I have complained before about stories that specifically end with the line "there was so much work to do", and there aren't any here that actually do that (unless I've blocked them from my memory), but going from the post-climate-catastrophe water prophecies of "Mami Wataworks" by Russell Nichols to the time travel technothriller of "Door Crashers" by Franka Zeph and into the intergenerational magic of "The Soul Would Have No Rainbow" by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, I found myself getting pulled out of intriguing story worlds faster than I felt ready to leave them. I don't know whether any of the authors have longer stories to tell within these worlds, and if so I hope that this anthology provides the springboard for opportunities to do so - but as a reader it made for a bumpier ride than expected, one which I think a different story ordering would have mitigated.

Still, there's a lot of great stuff throughout, and the stories that left me unsatisfied mostly did so in a good way. I really liked Steven Barnes' "IRL", which sets out a future in which the reality and an online "game" world intertwine and people can be tried online for real-life crimes. When Shango, an extremely successful teenager gamer whose real life is falling apart, has his father targeted by a rival intent on taking him down, he has to confront the inequalities of the system and decide what actually matters to him. Continuing the theme of satisfying horror, "The Lady of the Yellow-Painted Library" by Tobi Ogundiran tells a suspenseful, claustrophobic story of a man whose lost library book turns out to be from no ordinary library, and "A Soul of Small Places" by Mame Bougouma Diene and Woppa Diallo is an outstanding monstrous coming-of-age about a girl (also called Woppa Diallo) who is sexually assaulted on her way to school and comes out of the experience with a taste for flesh that she uses to try and keep the other predators at bay. I also really enjoyed "Peeling Time (Deluxe Edition)" by Tlotlo Tsamaase, which takes on musical misogyny through the concept of a struggling music artist who gains the power to bring real women into his "dream videos". I love a good chapter heading conceit and the track titles on this fictional album really do it for me, as does the satisfying comeuppance of this asshole musician.

An interesting collection of short stories.

There's a good variety of stories here, so I think fans of speculative fiction will probably find this collection a great way to find new authors.

While reading this I realized that I don't really like speculative fiction all that much, so unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this collection as much as I had hoped, but there were still some stories that I really enjoyed. The Lady of the Yellow-Painted Library was my favorite, creepy and intriguing.

This was such a great read! So many great short stories in this speculative collection. I have never read a collection like this where I get to read from so many authors in one place ranging from the authors' experience. Not every story connected with me, but each story is still good on its own. I think the editors did a good job with the flow of these stories, especially since this is a big collection. This is definitely a new era of speculative fiction indeed.

Anthologies are always difficult to review. By the very nature of the project there will be hits and misses, especially with an anthology this large. I do think for my tastes this anthology was longer than I typically like them to be and had more misses and hits for my taste. Not everything in this collection is dark but there were more graphic and dark speculative stories than there were hopeful ones, which add that to how long the collection is made it for some difficult reading. I spent two months slowly reading this anthology with friends and loved all the conversations it sparked, and that is how I would recommend people approach this work. Especially if you are unfamiliar with some of the mythology these stories may pull from. Even when we didn't like a story it was very rewarding to unpack why something did or didn't work and what was on us as the reader vs just personal preference. For readers who have been looking to be exposed to unique stories in speculative space I think this is a good starting point, especially if you like your stories to lean on the darker side.

First off, I really enjoy reading anthologies of short stories. I love how you can pick up anywhere at anytime and be immersed in a great story for a finite amount of time. This anthology is fantastically curated and offers genres for everyone: horror, sci-fi, fantasy, folklore and more. There's also all sorts of tones from humorous to serious. If you're looking to read more African or African diaspora writers, this is a great place to find new and familiar voices that celebrate African diversity.

Africa Risen is an anthology of short science fiction and fantasy stories from writers of African and African Diaspora Descent, with the stories collected by and edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight. This anthology, unlike others (like the Dominion Anthology which was also edited by Ekpeki and Knight), is concentrated entirely on shorter stories - if anything here exceed's the word count for the Hugo Short Story category, it is not by much. But don't mistake that for this being a small anthology, as the book contains Thirty Two (32!) different short stories from African or African Diaspora authors, including both more known authors (Tananarive Due, Tobias S. Buckell, Steven Barnes, etc.) and ones I haven't and others most likely haven't heard of before.

Just to be clear, short stories are not my favorite format of story to read and review - I prefer longer stories that have more room for characters and ideas to develop, even if they don't need to reach novella length. So take my review with a bit of a grain of salt - there are a bunch of stories here which to me feel like incomplete, like they're the start of a longer story, and for me those stories don't really satisfy...but obviously they do for others, given this is far from the first collection I've read with them. But even taking that as a given, Africa Risen does contain a number of stories I liked quite a bit, to go along with a perspective that is not the one most Western readers are familiar with, so it's certainly worth a recommend for those looking for SF/F short fiction.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Rape, Sexual Abuse, Child Abuse, Racism, Sexism, Homophobia. All of these issues are used well in their respectives stories and are never superfluous, but the anthology does NOT contain warnings that a particular story contains certain triggering issues, so if you have issues reading about them, there isn't really a guide of which stories you might want to skip.


When I review smaller anthologies I generally try to do a quick one sentence sum-up of each story. But for one like this, writing up summaries for all 32 stories will take up way too much space, so I'm going to just really do highlights here in this review. As you might imagine, in a collection this varied, my feelings on the stories varied a lot - with some stories really just not doing anything for me, or feeling like they were incomplete parts of a larger whole that I never got a chance to read, but with some other stories really making a lasting impression. As you might imagine given the common threads between the authors, there are a lot of stories here dealing with the ramifications of the slave trade and Western colonial oppression - or dealing with them directly through past and future stories. There are also a few stories based upon current conditions and oppressions of modern day African countries, or of Western countries where the diaspora has wound up in (particularly the United States). Of course, while this results in a lot of serious and sometimes hard to read stories, there are also a few lighter ones mixed in, or ones that use African myth and cultures in really interesting and sometimes fun ways, even if they do still sometimes deal with more serious topics.

Anyhow, let me call out seven stories I thought were highlights.

The Lady of the Yellow-Painted Library by Tobi Ogundiran:
One of the ummm, "lighter", stories which follows a man in Lagos who lost a library book and tries at first to pay the library money to resolve the issue and then to run away and ignore the library when the Library won't accept anything but the book back....except the Library isn't a normal one, and the Librarian isn't willing to take "no" for an answer....Truly gripping with an amazing twist I won't spoil.

Hanfo Driver by Ada Nnadi:
An actually lighter story, featuring a man whose father's friend - known for entrepreneurial schemes that always go wrong - gets him to drive a Danfo (a Nigerian Bus)...that hovers, aka a "Hanfo" and maybe to set him up with a cousin's son. Really fun with a very cute ending, a lovely story.

Exiles of Witchery by Ivana Akotowaa Ofori:
A story that namedrops Doctor Who and feels very much like it, where an African girl with paranormal senses and knowledge drives a wormhole traveling device around to help people, and on a journey to help a woman with a schizoaffective disorder get her medicine finds them both instead helping a girl like herself, with special senses on the run from a priest who cried witchcraft. Really well done African twist on this type of story.

The Sugar Mill by Tobias S. Buckell:
A White-passing Carribean man, descendant of slaves, tries to sell the land his ancestors were forced to labor on to make money to a privileged White Couple, as his ancestors haunt him and try to make him change his mind. Predictable but well done.

Where the Mami Wata met a Demon by Moustapha Mbacké Diop:
A story that is exactly what it sounds like, where a son is forced to summon a Mami Wata (an African mermaid) to try and save his mother from a Djinn/Demon, only to find difficulty when the Mami Wata is a young inexperienced girl. Really good.

IRL by Steven Barnes -
A strong story featuring a dystopia where corporations have used VR to take control of governance and power, and a son who thrives in VR has to come together and sacrifice his gains when his dad is targetted.

A Dream of Electric Mothers by Wole Talabi
The story of a woman who rose up in society so that she could consult an ancestral combination of minds and memory - ostensibly for a question of national importance - but really to answer questions about her past and her mother's death. Really wonderful story about the merits of being beholden to the past vs looking towards the future.

Other stories worked decently well for me as well, and while there were a few stories I didn't think really worked, I suspect that different readers of this collection will have a few others that they count on as their favorites, which is a good sign of an anthology. All that makes Africa Risen a definite recommend.

In an anthology, one of the first things I look for is how well does the anthology fit the theme. In this book, various threads and beliefs are woven into each story in the anthology but all explore the diversity and vibrancy of Africa and give the reader authentic voices and perspectives.

What I love the most are the different voices. There are both authors I know, such as Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due but also new authors to me. What that gives me is the opportunity to hear other voices, other perspectives and beliefs other than the ones I grew up with. But not only do I get the chance to explore but every one of the stories is a marvel of imagination and wonder. Some deal with different religions from the one I grew up with. Others deal with generational trauma and what that means. Others show us a new way of looking at the world. From strange to heartbreaking, each story has a unique perspective and blends technology with wonder to create poignant beautiful stories. 

If you want to immerse yourself in science fiction at its best, enjoy authentic voices, and explore stories that blend technology or different religions from Africa, then I truly recommend this anthology. The stories are each beautiful, engaging, and woven with love from the authors. From Air to Shape Lungs to The Taloned Beast, each story is crafted beautifully. I believe readers will love this anthology showcasing the breadth of fantasy and science fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora.

An absolutely stunning collection of stories as I expected it to be. Exploring all the possibilities of imagining sci-fi worlds, this is a beautiful book and one I'll remember for a while.

I love this anthology! The contrast from the writing styles of each author is refreshing and the stories are top tier. I Love that I have been introduced to so many new authors to add more works to the library. I'm happy that this came together.