One had launched itself at me but then froze an inch from my flesh it had reached a tentacle toward my edan and then suddenly collapsed, the tentacle turning ash gray as it quickly dried up like a dead leaf. The Meduse were hovering less than a foot away. I prayed to the mystery metal my edan was made of because that had to be the only thing keeping me alive at this moment.īreathing hard from my mouth, I peeked from one eye. Heru’s blood was on my face, wet and thick. I held my breath, the stench of them still in my nasal cavity and mouth. My body was shuddering so hard that I could imagine what it would be like to die from terror. I held it to my chest, shut my eyes, and I prayed to it, I am in your protection. I prayed to a metal even my father had been unable to identify. In my culture, it is blasphemy to pray to inanimate objects, but I did anyway.

But knowledge comes at a cost and to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs.įeast your eyes on Christine Foltzer’s beautiful cover and read an extract below. In Okorafor’s new novella we follow the journey of Binti, the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. This extract from her Tor.com novella Binti amounts to a few pages. Le Guin said of Nnedi Okorafor that ‘There’s more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor’s work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics’.

Binti novella