Cover art by Cyan Daly
★★★★ (3.5 of 5)
- Full Title: Issue #15
- Author: (various)
- Editor: DeVaun Sanders
- Date: Summer 2020
- Pages: 89
- Genre: Speculative fiction
- Publisher: Fiyah
- Fiyah website
Summary
My first issue of Fiyah, a “magazine of Black speculative fiction”, Issue #15 contained four story stories and three poems, each of which I cover in mini-reviews below. As I very recently learned, Fiyah began in 2016 as a way to “to spill tea and throw shade in the most delightful way”, specifically a place for Black authors to publish their short speculative fiction. Part of the impetus for its founding was a study that found only 38 stories by Black authors among 2,039 stories published in the paying speculative fiction market.
In an unrelated note, two days before I bought this issue, the magazine gained a sort of frustrated fame during the 2020 Hugo awards when the white male host mispronounced it as “fee-yuh” (not realizing it was based on the word fire).
Commentary Per Story
Here are mini-reviews for each piece in the magazine.
★★★★ Red Cloth, White Giraffe, by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, 4,065 words
A recently dead woman recounts how her family argues after her death and whether she chooses in the end to go through the gates to become an Ancestor. I enjoyed the perspective from a culture different from my own, and the seemingly shy (or at least muted) humor and anger.
★★★★ The Last Testament, by Aurelius Raines II, 5,049 words
In the near-future, after a young Black man is killed by police, his genius younger sister builds a robot to resemble him, then teaches the robot to hack the police department’s computers and... More. My only complaint here was an unexplained time-jump that took away from the story rather than adding to it.
★★ The Black Menagerie, by Endria Isa Richardson, 6,952 words
This story might have been the best one. Several times while reading, something struck me and I thought: This will be the one I like best. But it kept failing to materialize into anything, and ended without saying anything I could parse. What is it about? I think it’s about a shape-shifting magic woman who has the power to haunt other people, and is often paid to haunt people (Black people pay, white people get haunted). But... an awful lot was unclear.
★★★★ Your Name Is Oblivia, by Vincent Tirado, 4,451 words
Downsides: written in second person and present tense, both of which are always distracting, jarring to me. Upsides: a very well-done story otherwise. Oblivia works at a bar that serves drinks flavored with memories. The author played with this idea well and ended it nicely.
• The Technicolor Simulations: Test #2020-Z, by Maya C. James, poem
• Late Moonwalk, by Uche Ogbuji, poem
• Libations, by Soonest Nathaniel, poem
I didn’t get anything out of any of the poems, which is fair, since few people get anything out of any of my poems despite most of them being meaningful to me. (Does this poem mean anything to you? It does to me.) I didn’t include them in my star ratings.
Conclusion
Overall this was refreshing. The stories were short enough and flowed quickly enough that I read all of them in a day. (Probably 15-20 minutes per story, divided into multiple sittings.) Each had something unique enough — in my specfic experience — that they held my interest. It has convinced me to subscribe to the magazine, which is quarterly, with the next issue coming out sometime this autumn.
Note: I’ve published a much shorter version of this review on Goodreads.
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