Rosewater

"This is a book with a huge amount of buzz around it, and it’s first in a series of three. It’s the winner of the inaugural Noma Award for the best African science fiction novel, and it’s been multi-nominated across other awards. It is a cyberpunk novel set in a near-future Africa. Cyberpunk is a very clichéd term these days, but it has that kind of flavour to it. It’s also got an alien presence, a mysterious presence that has crashed, landed, or maybe even invaded in Africa, and the town of Rosewater that has grown up around it. It’s just fantastic. There are a lot of trilogies in science fiction. We talked about Yoon Ha Lee, we talked about Ancilliary Justice . To some, the literary ones are the single ones, if that makes sense. Trilogies, ongoing sequences, are usually a different kind of beast. But this was definitely one all of our judges were convinced to shortlist quite quickly. “Fans are actively saying: ‘we want more stuff written by new voices, who sound like us and look like us’” We talked a little bit earlier about voices of colour earlier, and you know, I don’t want to talk about it in the context of that too much, because it’s diminishing, to say ‘this is a great book by a writer of colour.’ But it’s introducing us to a new world, and a new voice. The African setting it is exactly what science fiction fans are calling for at the moment. Fans are actively saying: ‘we want more stuff written by new voices, who sound like us and look like us and understand our culture and our heritage.’ Equally – no matter our ethnicity we want to be diverse in our reading Also, Tade is really worth following on Twitter. He’s not shy in his opinions, let’s say. He has said on panels before that he prefers arguing to anything else. But you almost feel he’s written this book to make a point. I recommend it to absolutely anyone who’s got any interest at all in what great science fiction looks like today. That’s quite blurby, isn’t it? But I mean it."