Nigerian Science Fiction #SpaceSaturday

What is the history of Nigerian science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction? What role did the CIA play in the development of novels in Nigeria? How does Things Fall Apart fit in? Here’s a fascinating conversation with Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke, author of  Nigerian Speculative Fiction: The Evolution (2025), from Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations:

First, a point of clarification: you use the term “speculative fiction” as your operative generic category. What is your definition? What does it encompass?

fantasy, horror, and science fiction have their unique aesthetics that differ from one another. For instance, I follow Carl Freedman’s definition in the monograph regarding the distinction between science fiction…. However, I read all of them together in the book as speculative fiction…many Nigerian writers, such as Akwaeke Emezi and Chigozie Obioma, are not happy to be called speculative writers, as they argue that their worldbuilding is not made up, unlike Tolkien’s in his books, but rather based on reality from the viewpoint of their own cosmology.  What a defining speculative text from the lens of ontology helps me do is to respect the Igbo culture from which it is written. Yes, their texts are based on the reality of their culture, rather than being made up, like Tolkien’s world. However, as long as the explanation of reality in their texts extends beyond the current human episteme, it falls within the realm of metaphysical knowledge. Thus, that knowledge is ontological and therefore part of a speculative tradition.

This formulation is not just applicable to African literature, but also to Western fiction. For instance, those within Christian cosmology see the existence of a devil as a reality. Even though the devil is a reality to people within Christian cosmology, it is an ontological concept because it lies outside the current human episteme, which encompasses things that can be explained within the human intellect. To say that texts like Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018), which is based in Igbo cosmology, are ontological texts, like Tolkien’s, whose worldbuilding is made up, is not to equate both texts, but to map out their shared character as ontological texts.

See more!

from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! https://ift.tt/zcKQxZU
via IFTTT