Book Review: THE LIES OF THE AJUNGO

TITLE: The Lies of the Ajungo

AUTHOR: Moses Ose Utomi

98 pages, TorDotCom Publishing, ISBN 9781250849069 (hardcover, also in e-book)

MY RATING:  4 stars out of 5

SHORT REVIEW: In The Lies of the Ajungo, Moses Ose Utomi gifts us with a story that turns that basic concept at odd and poignant angles, serving as commentary on the politics and societal maneuverings of our own world while still giving us a heartbreaking coming-of-age story set in an intriguing secondary fantasy world. The main character’s journey from innocent boy facing a brutal rite of passage to a man knowledgeable about the way the world really works is neither rushed nor dragged out. His path is not easy and involves un-learning “facts” and opinions that have been ingrained. Utomi also beautifully captures the “fairy tale / fable” voice in his omniscient narrator – I truly felt at times like Tutu’s story was being told around a campfire for a community of listeners. The style kept me engaged.

LONGER REVIEW: The Lies of the Ajungo could easily have been a grand multi-book YA fantasy series: young boy goes on a quest to save his city from the machinations of a more powerful, evil, city-state. Instead, Moses Ose Utomi gifts us with a story that turns that basic concept at odd and poignant angles, serving as commentary on the politics and societal maneuverings of our own world while still giving us a heartbreaking coming-of-age story set in an intriguing secondary fantasy world.

Tutu lives in the City of Lies, a drought-stricken city on the edge of the Forever Desert where what water is available is provided to the city by the Ajungo, a domineering foreign city-state. The Ajungo’s price? The tongues of every citizen at or above the age of thirteen, so they make speak no ill of the Ajungo. With his mother on her deathbed, Tutu approaches the city’s leader for a camel and supplies to go in search of a better water source. He is granted one year, with the reminder that “there are no Heroes in the City of Lies,” and that once he’s outside the city limits, “there are no friends to the City of Lies.” He heads out expecting no help from anyone he might meet along the way.

Of course, Tutu encounters a series of challenges to his quest, from desert wildlife he’s never seen before to humans he assumes are the Ajungo. But he also learns more of the outside world and his city’s relationship to it, through his encounters with three sisters who hail from a city where the Ajungo have demanded a tribute of ears, and a wise man from a city where the Ajungo demanded eyes. I was done with the book before I realized how deftly Utomi had worked in the classic “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” imagery in the form of the body parts the Ajungo choose to demand from the populace of these different cities. The trope is usually used to connote someone’s willful ignorance of the world around them; I think this is the first time I’ve seen it used as a tool of power, to subjugate and control the masses. Subtle and effective!

Tutu’s journey from innocent boy facing a brutal rite of passage to a man knowledgeable about the way the world really works is neither rushed nor dragged out. His path is not easy and involves un-learning “facts” and opinions that have been ingrained. Watching him go from untrusting loner to a team player without ever losing sight of his original mission is painful at times; Utomi doesn’t shy away from the anguish Tutu feels over his mother’s impending death or the inevitable betrayals that are a part of stories like this.

The Ajungo, who seem to have an answer to every city’s problem but always at a steep price, are the evil that looms over the entire book. I will not spoil the big reveals nor the resolution, but I will say that both are well-seeded, well-earned, and extremely satisfactory. And Utomi beautifully captures the “fairy tale / fable” voice in his omniscient narrator – I truly felt at times like Tutu’s story was being told around a campfire for a community of listeners. The style kept me engaged.

According to various online sources, The Lies of the Ajungo is only the first book in the Forever Desert series. While I think it stands perfectly well on its own as a complete whole, I do look forward to returning to this world in future volumes.

I received an advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. The Lies of the Ajungo released on March 21, 2023.

SUNDAY SHORTS: Three From The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction 2021

I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. I’ve considered promising to review a short story every day, but that’s a lot of pressure. And while no one will fault me if I miss days, I’ll feel guilty, which will lead to not posting at all. So better to stick to a weekly post highlighting a couple/three stories, as I’ve done in the past.

2021 saw the release of what will hopefully be many volumes to come of The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction, edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki. The inaugural volume includes stories by twenty-five authors from across the breadth of the African diaspora. The stories are, as one would expect, all top-notch. Here are my thoughts on just a few:

“Egoli” by T.L. Huchu features an old village woman on a sometimes precarious pre-sunrise walk, reminiscing about how much technology has changed since she was a little girl, when it was unusual for a village to have even a wireless radio to listen to news. Now there are smart phones and people not only leaving village life behind but leaving the entire planet behind. She’s out and about because her grandson has told her to watch the southern sky around dawn to see something remarkable. I don’t want to spoil what that something is or why it matters, but it is tied up in what makes the story at turns wistful, nostalgic, lonely, and almost elegiac. I’ve commented many times in the past about how I’m usually not a fan of “second person” narrative, where “you” are the character (I find it creepy most of the time), but Huchu is such a deft touch with emotional and sensory elements that I found myself invested in the story and not creeped out at all.

Pemi Aguda’s “Things Boys Do” focuses on three quite different men about to become fathers, and the fear and loss they experience upon the arrival of their sons. Wives get sick, die, or just leave; friends and family drift away; jobs are lost. It turns out the three men have a common past although they have not seen or thought of each other in years, and that past is haunting them. The story is obviously horror from the start, but the creepiness of the small details bio-accumulates – you notice them at first but they don’t seem so “horrific” until they start to add up. Aguda’s interspersing of each man’s travails in the present with a slow reveal of their shared past is perfectly paced. Even if you figure out early on where the story is going (and I don’t think I’ve spoiled anything big in this description), the path is twisty and will leave you thinking.

In “The Thought Box” by Tlotlo Tsamaase, a woman in an emotionally abusive relationship with a man who takes advantage of her begins to learn the depths of his control and infidelity after he brings home a “thought box” so that they can review each others’ thoughts and thus have “total trust” in each other. The truth of her situation is so much worse than she, or the reader, initially suspects. The SFnal element (a box that records and plays back thoughts) is just the wedge into what is really a psychological horror story. Tsamaaase slowly moves the main character from being concerned she’s just paranoid and overworked to the recognition she’s been gaslit, and it is masterfully done; I believed every turn in the main character’s emotional state. This is one of those stories where the final twist is a brutal gut-punch that the author has absolutely earned.

Book Review: Remote Control

TITLE: Remote Control

AUTHOR: Nnedi Okorafor

160 pages, TorDotCom, ISBN 9781250772800 (hardcover, also available in e-book and audiobook)

DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): “She’s the adopted daughter of the Angel of Death. Beware of her. Mind her. Death guards her like one of its own.” The day Fatima forgot her name, Death paid a visit. From here on in she would be known as Sankofa­­―a name that meant nothing to anyone but her, the only tie to her family and her past.

Her touch is death, and with a glance a town can fall. And she walks―alone, except for her fox companion―searching for the object that came from the sky and gave itself to her when the meteors fell and when she was yet unchanged; searching for answers.

But is there a greater purpose for Sankofa, now that Death is her constant companion?

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

MY THOUGHTS: I remember reading Nnedi Okorafor’s short story “Sankofa” in the anthology Decision Points (edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt) several years ago. I immediately wanted to know more about the title character, intrigued by her mysterious background, her ability to kill seemingly with a thought and how she chose to use/not use that power. I particularly loved the way Okorafor kept the reader wondering through most of the story as to how the legend of Sankofa (“adopted daughter of Death”) matched her truth.

I am happy to say that Okorafor’s new novella Remote Control expands the original short story in ways that answer most of my questions without sacrificing that intricate dance between the main character’s legend and her reality, all while introducing new questions about Sankofa’s origin, her abilities, and the near-future world she lives in.

The future Ghana of this novella is distant enough from our own that technology has made some advances (“jelli-tellies” that can be stretched to fit the available space on a wall, and which sound a bit more environmentally friendly than even our current flat-screens; robotic “cops” that control traffic at dangerous intersections) but not so far distant as to render the world unrecognizable. The advance tech is not the focus of the novel but is more than just window-dressing. It’s different enough to lend the book an undercurrent of “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” People still queue up outside electronics stores when they hear the latest items are due to arrive (although in this future, the line-up is due as much to the odds that new electronics shipments will be intercepted by roving pirates as it is to excitement about a new product), and people still place status on belongings (cars, paintings).

And people still “other” what they don’t understand. Sankofa, the girl who can kill living beings with a thought and technology with a touch, is subject to side-eye glances, gestures against the evil eye, and occasionally more violent reactions. In the first chapter, she has a gun fired at her; later, she is punched and kicked and run out of town by an angry mob. People (with a few exceptions) grudgingly accept the legend that has grown up around her – but they’d still rather not encounter her at all. Interestingly, the characters who attack her physically are almost all riled up because of the effect she has on the technology they rely on. In this near future, superstition and othering are still palpable forces as much as mob mentality and the “me first” mindset. Before this starts to sound too dismal, I should mention that not everyone Sankofa encounters is afraid of her or angry at her. There are kindly shopkeepers, farmers, and an Imam’s wife who all either accept Sankofa without question or who try to understand her role and want to help her out of her predicament.

Sankofa herself is unsure of why she has the abilities she has and what she’s meant to do, other than that it all started with a seed that fell from the sky and which has since been stolen from her. The personal history she has partially forgotten (including her birth name) is imparted to the reader in early chapters. We get to see the seed from which her power and her legend grew and the tragedy that drove her to partial amnesia and a nomadic lifestyle. She is dependent on the power of her legend to entice people to feed her, clothe her, and provide her with reading material, but she never abuses those who provide her what she needs. In the first chapter, realizing she needs food and new clothes, Sankofa bypasses the poorer houses of the village she is passing through and goes directly to the richest house in the neighborhood. And even then, she asks only for a good meal, her favorite drink (orange Fanta, room temperature), and a new set of clothes in her people’s native style. Sated and clothed, she leaves without doing anyone any harm. Sankofa also doesn’t abuse her actual power, other than killing mosquitoes who get too close. She only kills when someone who is terminally ill asks her to do so, or when it’s in self-defense (and even then, notably, she tries not to kill if she can avoid it). In other hands, this power could have been used to gain more power or control over a town or a region or more. Instead, it is somehow in the hands of a young woman who just wants to locate the lost seed that calls to her across great distances. She’s lonely and she’s tired of traveling. She loves animals, tries to see the best in people. She wants peace and privacy and a return to normalcy. They get denied to her at almost every turn, but she never loses hope that someday she’ll understand everything and have a quiet life.

Remote Control is a wonderful new entry under the “Afrofuturism” genre umbrella, science fiction fully immersed in African society, tradition, and history. I have no idea if Okorafor plans to continue Sankofa’s story. This novella has a satisfying ending that brings things full circle, but there are some questions I think are still lingering that could drive further stories.