Binti is the first human girl from the Himba people to win a place at the prestigious Oomza University, where the best and brightest from hundreds of civilisations across the galaxy gather to learn. But Binti's journey to the university is interrupted by the hostile Medusae, who intercept her ship and wipe out the crew. Binti is trapped on a living ship with only hostile aliens for company and five days until she reaches her destination...
Binti: The Complete Trilogy is an omnibus of Nnedi Okorafor's Binti series of short stories and novellas: Binti (2015), Sacred Fire (2019), Home (2017) and The Night Masquerade (2019). Combined, these four works barely last 350 pages but tell a narrative that starts in Africa and spans the entire galaxy, with the fates of billions resting in the hands of the protagonist.
Much of the story is told from Binti's point of view and she's a fascinating protagonist. She's a brilliant mathematics student with the freedom to choose any career she wants, but she is constrained by a culture which wants her to marry and have children above all else. She defies that by running away to university, but this isn't a standard story of rejecting a culture to find something else; Binti continues to lionise and respect her traditions and heritage throughout the series, but also notes its flaws and the way it stops women achieving their full potential. Potential seems to be a key theme of the series, with not just individuals but also entire communities and cultures held back by prejudice, by anger and by the temptation to violence. The university in the story, as well as being a literal location and setting, is also a metaphor as place which helps people fulfil their potential; it helps Binti to allow her culture and several others (most notably the Medusae) fulfil theirs as well.
The first story, Binti, won the Hugo and Nebula Awards and it's easy to see why. In under 50 pages, Okorafor creatures an entire star-spanning new setting, lays out the Himba and their rival Khoush cultures, introduces the Medusae and the university and tells a gripping story rich in tension as Binti has to find a way to survive and get off her ship, which requires a lot of careful negotiations with an alien species with very good reasons to distrust humans. The story is perhaps a bit too fast-paced (the resolution could have been expanded on a bit) but otherwise this is a great, tight and focused story.
Sacred Fire, a new short story for this collection, expands on the aftermath of the massacre on Binti's ship, which is adversely affecting her work at university, and sees her (helped by her new student friends) trying to find a way to put the horrific events behind her. Home and The Night Masquerade are both individually much longer, but also form a continuous narrative that unfolds when Binti returns to Earth with her Medusae friend Okwu and has to negotiate the perils of relationships between cultures who were recently at war.
The Binti series of stories is mostly excellent, taking in ideas such as family, communication and the interrelationship of very different cultures who have to coexist and resist the urge to warfare, all revolving around a strongly-defined central protagonist. The writing is excellent. The collection suffers a little from the medium. As it is made up of four separated narratives, there's a somewhat start-stop affair to the pacing and occasional re-statings of things we already knew from the earlier stories. This is very much an omnibus of four separate narratives, not a fixup novel, and should be read as such.
The other problem, also stemming from the medium, is the lack of depth for some of the concepts and ideas being used. In the case of technology, not getting much of an explanation for the edan, the living ships and the relationship of the setting to our own time (the Himba seem to be descended from a real African ethnic group of the same name and the Khoush from Arabians, but other human ethnic groups are completely missing) is all fine as it adds to the atmosphere of the story, but not getting much of an explanation for the Medusae and why they seem to be living on Earth, or why the edan hurts them or the otjize heals them, or other elements more central to the narrative can leave some elements feel underdeveloped.
Once you get beyond the unusual and intriguing new setting, there are a lot of standard tropes at work here. Binti is a special character who becomes central to the crises at hand and quickly earns the respect and trust of multiple characters and entire cultures with what at times feels like unconvincing ease. Again, that's a problem of the medium, which does not allow for as much organic storytelling as might be wished. I'm also not certain that expanding the story over several novels and hundreds more pages would be the right move either; there's a tightness to the format and the storytelling that makes it a compelling read.
Binti: The Complete Trilogy (****) mixes in refreshing new concepts with more established SFF tropes and ends up being a rewarding experience. Strong writing and strong characterisation are undermined a little but the background not being as fleshed out as it could be and the narrative can feel a little choppy, but beyond that this is a very solid read from a skilled writer. The book is available now in the UK and USA.
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