Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I am a harmonizer!” Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti (2015) is a neat Hugo and Nebula award-winning sf novella featuring a brilliant 16-year-old mathematician girl who’s leaving home for the first time after winning an all-expenses paid scholarship to Oomza Uni, the top university in the Milky Way (only 5% of the student body and teaching staff etc. are human). The only problem is that her people, the Himba, although adept in mathematics and known for making astrolabes (portable personal computer-like devices that contain one’s entire past life as well as all forecasts of one’s future life), are also known for never leaving home, preferring to explore the human mind rather than the universe, and Binti’s big family opposes her leaving for the Uni (and Binti reckons that by leaving home her marriage prospects just went from 100% to 0%). And then on the spaceship (“a magnificent piece of living technology,” being a giant, sentient creature genetically enhanced to process harmful gases and produce oxygen etc.) taking her to the Uni planet, a force of Meduse, war-like tentacled aliens who hate human beings (because, they say, “Humans only understand violence”) barge in and kill everyone on the ship, including Binti’s new university friends. The Meduse spare the pilot and Binti because they need the former for their mission and are unable to kill the latter because she carries a potent “god stone” (an ancient, blue stellated metal cube with strange fractal swirls of blue, black, and white inscribed on it made by some long gone culture) and is anyway of a different race than all the other passengers and crew members on the ship. About race, Binti comes from a dark-skinned, kinky-haired “tribal culture” living near a majority white-skinned race (the Khoush). Her desert dwelling, mathematically advanced people feel naked unless they’ve coated their bodies and hair with otjize, a fragrant clay and oil. The novel concerns the need to communicate with and understand the Other (especially in situations where each side thinks they’d better kill the Other before the Other kills them), the difficulty of such communication, and the way that such communication inevitably changes oneself in the process. It also is about the superiority of solving problems for harmony not violence (after all, “people were people anywhere”). Binti is a master Harmonizer, able to mathematically meditate and mediate and to solve complex problems and even to “make atoms caress each other like lovers.” Perhaps it’s all finally a little too easy; perhaps Binti gets over witnessing the massacre of all her new friends a little too soon; perhaps she is a little too special (yet another young adult heroine who is very special indeed, as in, “You’re the pride of your people”); perhaps the relationship between Binti and Okwu, a young Meduse she gets to know, could be more developed. But the writing is fine, and Binti is appealing, and the themes are fine, and the sf tropes feel fresh, and our world can use more sf protagonists (especially heroines) of color. I would like to read more about Binti’s further adventures in mathematical harmony and aliens and all. Robin Miles, the reader of the Audiobook, enhances the story. One interesting thing she does is give Binti an African accent and the white-skinned Khoush typical American white people’s voices, thus emphasizing the racial and cultural differences between Himba and Khoush. Recommended for fans of cleanly-written, intelligent, culture- and character-driven sf like that by Octavia Butler and Robert Heinlein. View all my reviews
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Jefferson Peters
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