Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Twenty sci-fi & fantasy books with a social justice message

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Joel Cunningham tagged "20 novels that incorporate themes of social justice into stories that still deliver the goods—compelling plots, characters you’ll fall in love with, ideas that will expand your mind." One title on the list:
Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor

This World Fantasy Award-winner is set in a post-apocalytpic future Sudan where a light-skinned race oppresses a darker-skinned one, and a girl of both societies, born out of violence and gifted with magical abilities, sets off to murder her father. Incorporating scenes of barbaric female genital mutilation and the use of rape as a weapon of control, it is a harrowing, angry novel about a woman who refuses to be a victim. Okorafor’s morerecent, Hugo-winner novella Binti would also fit nicely here; the protagonist is a woman from a marginalized human tribe who is the first of her people to be offered a chance to study at a the galaxy’s most elite university, but doing so will require her to give up her identity—but it is ultimately that uniqueness that will help her to save her own life and form new bonds of understanding across a vast cultural divide.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue