I've been chipping away at reading through The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women. It's a fantastic volume and I can't recommend it enough. I've really been enjoying the stories selected by the editor. One of my favorite stories so far is "Spider the Artist" by Nnedi Okorafor. It really stood out to me as a unique story and an author offering up a very different experience of sci-fi. The futuristic African-set story really captured my imagination with it's mix of technology and domestic conflict.
So it was with great excitement that I discovered my library has Okorafor' trilogy of Afrofuturistic novels. I burned through the audiobooks for the Binti trilogy in no time. Okorafor brings both a subtle and insightful feminine and non-western perspective to the handling of characters dealing with alien species, interstellar conflict, and family dynamics in a world that mixes both the ancient and the far-flung realities of a world far more technologically advanced than our current one. While I love reading Ben Bova and Michael Crichton (most of the time, though there are exceptions), it's so great to branch out and read sci-fi from some non-white males for a change.
