How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? is a brilliant collection of short stories from a brilliant author.

So many different ways of tackling resistance, love, human messiness, and speculative futures. 

This collection includes: a strikingly beautiful story on food & memory, a chilling tale of Masters who take over bodies (and trade them in a little too frequently), a horror story of an interaction with an alien species told through computer logs & transcripts, spies & inventors who fall in love in a steampunk New Orleans, a world where everyone is stuck in a separate 10-hour loop, the first form of The Great Cities Duology & a dip back into the world of The Broken Earth Trilogy, and so much more. 

It’s seriously a whirlwind – you may need to take breaks between each story, because they will jolt you in so many different directions and open windows into so many new universes, and each one deserves to be fully digested. 

While not every story struck me the same way, Jemisin is seriously a SFF genius. And all of these stories left a mark. She takes risks, unfurls fully-developed worlds in a small number of pages, and has the power to make you completely forget reality. 

CW: death (child) & murder, rape, grief, animal cruelty & death, racism, misogyny, homophobia, mass death, natural disaster, cannibalism, references to slavery & lynching, implied nonconsensual pregnancy, miscarriage

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