Surely, I thought, the rest of the world would have opinions, sides, action, in response to a culture of Earth having a potentially devastating war with an alien species.

Even as we see that a rival to the Himba, the more dominant Khoush, have had a long running conflict with an alien species, I kept wondering about what the rest of the world thought about this. Binti’s concerns and settings never touch on or even mention London, New York, Moscow, Beijing, Dubai, Mumbai, or Brazilia. I can’t tell whether this is a future where African polities have risen to pre-eminence in our future, or a world where it has always been so. The three volumes are held up as examples of Afrofuturism, with a central focus on a mid-future African experience of a mankind in contact with the rest of the galaxy. The third volume, Binti: The Night Masquerade, which comes out as a short novel rather than a novella, picks up from the cliffhanger at the end of Binti: Home and runs with it to surprises, delights and a most fitting conclusion for her arc and her story. Binti’s actions from the first novella are reexamined, questioned, and eventually have far-ranging consquences for her people, the Khoush and the Medusae aliens. Thicker than the first volume, we dive ever deeper into her and her world and get to the root of the Matter of Binti and what her story in these volumes is shaping up to be. Binti’s Himba’s status and her relationship to the Khoush are absolutely essential to understanding the plot, as Binti’s travels are interrupted by a sudden and shocking alien attack, aliens with good reason to hate the Khoush.īinti: Home tells of the return to her home and people, facing the music of having made her unwelcome choice to go to the University. We get some detail on her Himba people origin, how she sits within that culture, and how that culture interacts with its more powerful neigbor, the spacefaring Khoush. Binti’s story is told in Okorafor’s Binti, Binti: Home and the finale of the trilogy, Binti: Masquerade.īinti, the first novella, tells of Binti’s journey to Oomza University, and the cataclysmic encounter she has on the way there, an encounter that changes her forever, and her choices ultimately drive the second two volumes. Binti’s like that, though, breaking norms and boundaries as she finds her way to the University, back home, and what happens thereafter. Binti’s desire to go the finest University in the galaxy breaks all sorts of norms. Binti is a prodigy among her people, the Himba, in a mid-future world constructed by author Nnedi Okorafor.

The binti trilogy