Year's Best SF 17

Nnedi Okorafor (www.nnedi.com) is a novelist of Nigerian descent who lives in the Chicago suburbs with her daughter; she is a professor of Creative Writing at Chicago State University. She is known for weaving African culture into creative evocative settings and memorable characters. In a profile of Nnedi’s work titled, “Weapons of Mass Creation,” The New York Times called Nnedi’s imagination “stunning.” Her novels include Who Fears Death (winner of the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel), Akata Witch Witch (a 2011 Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), and The Shadow Speaker (winner of the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award). She’s also written one children’s book titled Long Juju Man (winner of the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa). Her chapter book, Iridessa and the Secret of the Never Mine (Disney Press), is scheduled for release in 2012.

“Wahala” was published in the original anthology Living on Mars, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Set in the Sahara desert in a post-apocalyptic future, local people, colonists, are returning in a ship from Mars, as if from the past. Several mutant humans await their arrival. The protagonist is a plucky telepathic teenage Nigerian girl reminiscent of characters in Zenna Henderson’s stories of The People.

I wasn’t lost. I wanted to cross “The Frying Pan of the World, Where Hell Meets Earth.” I was fighting my way through this part of the Sahara on purpose. I needed to prove to my parents that I could do it. That I, their sixteen-year-old abomination of a daughter, could survive in a place where many people died. My parents believed I was meant to die easily because I shouldn’t have been born in the first place. If I survived, it would prove to them wrong.

The sun was going down and the “frying pan” was thankfully cooling. Plantain, my camel, was walking at her usual steady pace. We’d left Jos three days ago and we were still days from our destination, Agadez. I’d traveled the desert many times … well, with my parents, though, and not here. I was okay, for now.

I was staring at the small screen of my e-legba, trying to forget the fact that I might have made a terrible mistake in running away and coming out here. It was picking up the only netcast available in the region, Naija News.

“Breaking News! Breaking News, o!” a sweating newscaster said in English. He stared into the camera with bulging eyes. He was wearing an ill-fitting Western-style suit. It was obviously the reason for his profuse sweating.

I chuckled. Everything on Naija News was “breaking news”. Drama was the bread and butter of Nigerians. Even our news was suspenseful and theatrical. It was why our movies were the best and our government was the worst. I laughed. I missed home.

“Make sure you listen to what I am about to say, o! Then turn to those beside you and tell them! Tell everybody,” the man stressed. Spit flew from his mouth, hitting the camera lens as he spoke. He wiped his brow with a white handkerchief. I could see individual beads of sweat forming on his forehead. “This is no laughing matter, o!”

“Let me guess,” I muttered. “Another farmer! has lost his flock of goats in a spontaneous forest. Someone’s house! is infested with a sparkling lizard. Another boy! turned into a giant yam.” I smiled, ignoring my chapped lips. This kind of “breaking news” happened all the time.

“It’s heading this way right now!” the anchorman said. He clumsily held the microphone and wiped his brow again. He switched to Igbo. “This is utterly unbelievable!”