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language: English
country: UK
year: 2022
form: short fiction
genre(s): fantasy, science fiction
dates read: 9.1.25-25.3.25
Glimpse: An Anthology of Black British Speculative Fiction, edited by Leone Ross, is, as anthologies, tend to be, a mixed bag for me — some things I thought were excellent and some things that didn’t land for me. I tend to struggle with anthologies / short fiction in general, but I’m glad I persevered on this one (shoutout to the library forcing me to finish it so I can return it because I’m out of renewals).
the anthology starts with a bang with Joshua Idehen’s “Green Eye”, a dystopian story — the plurality of the anthology is dystopian in one way or another — about labor, precarity, and consumption. it governs. this was probably my favorite story in terms of achieving its desired effect, with a twist I did not see coming and am still thinking about.
the next few stories in the first section, titled “Splinter”, didn’t really move me, but I liked the last two, Jeda Pearl’s “The Rust” — a taut, compressed climate dystopian story about memory and embodiment — and Judith Bryan’s “De Novo”, about a scientist studying feral children who have been excluded from the category of “human”, dealing with the politics of race, science, and eugenics. “De Novo” might be my favorite story overall.
the second section, “Fragment”, unfortunately mostly didn’t really move me — though I did appreciate the premise of Patricia Cumper’s “Skin”, which explores and contests the invisibility of both Black women and the elderly — except for the last story, Ioney Smallhorne’s “First Flight”, about a woman who finds herself growing feathers against the backdrop of the rise in British racism and xenophobia around the BrExit referendum.
the “Fragment” section also had the one story that gave me real ideological pause, Alinah Azadeh’s “The Beard”, about a group of powerful men — clearly modeled on aspects of the Iranian government — who are humiliated and unseated by being mysteriously transformed into women, summarily dying at the end of their transformations. with some of the details in the story it ended up feeling kind of transmisogynist. bad vibe.
fortunately, the third section, “Glimmer”, had several bangers. Koye Oyedeji’s “Children’s Story” is about a 12-year-old boy haunted — possibly literally — by his older brother’s violence and does a great job of capturing “child in a situation they know is complicated and fucked up but which they also know they do not fully comprehend”. Claudia Monteith’s “Devoted” is a fucked-up little fairy tale about an otherworldly woman and a man who thinks he understands her but does not, in fact, understand her at all. Nii Ayikwei Parkes’s “Incandescence” is a kind of dark comedy fable about a lightbulb-obsessed political prisoner in a facility that seems meant to evoke Abu Ghraib but without the occupation. honorable mention here to Peter Kalu’s “The Fall of the House of Penrhyn”, about an insurance agent who finds himself attending the ghostly comeuppance of noted slaver Richard Pennant — I don’t think it totally came together, but it was a fun concept and it has me excited to read some of Kalu’s books now.
if you can get access to a copy, I think it’s worth poking through it and seeing if any of these catch your fancy — and perhaps some of the stories that didn’t work for me will work for you.
moods: dark, hopeful, tense