★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Binti : The Night Masquerade
• Author: Nnedi Okorafor
• Year: 2017
• Pages: 203
• Genre: Science Fiction, africanfuturist
• Publisher: Tor
• ISBN 978-0-7653-9313-5 (trade paperback)
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

The third book in the Binti series, Binti: The Night Masquerade is the longest of the three and the final bit of the story. It is a finalist for the 2019 Hugo novella category (the first book won both the Nebula and Hugo awards). This concludes the story of title character Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka, now 17 years old. After traveling into space, befriending the non-human Okwu, and averting a war (in the first book); and returning home to her family and a deeper mystery (in the second book); in The Night Masquerade Binti comes to grips with who she really is.

It wraps up most, if not all, of the remaining story tendrils introduced in the first two novellas.

 

Commentary On Style

Like the first two, this book is told in first person, which I typically enjoy, and the chronology is mostly linear (with a few flashbacks). Though it wasn’t always clear to me what exactly was happening, I think this was intentional — to give the reader the same sense of confusion that Binti feels. Most of the action, however, was clear and easy to follow.

Note: There IS a section told in third-person, but I can’t explain that bit without a serious spoiler.

 

Characters

As with the first two books, the characters here feel like real people. Binti at times seems younger than her 17 years, and at other times older — which is completely normal for 17-year-old humans. We meet more characters in this book, but few of them are developed as well as the people we already know. None of the characters felt two-dimensional. As before, Okorafor excels in precise and tangible character descriptions, using just a handful of words to give the reader important information about people.

 

Originality

Despite this being the third in a series, I still felt its originality, its quantitative difference from almost all other sci-fi (or fantasy) I’ve read before. There are elements of fantasy in these Binti stories, but it reads like science fiction and the “magic” or mystical elements can be explained in at least pseudo-scientific terms. (It’s also sometimes difficult to tell which things are actually happening and which things are merely in the minds of characters — much like religion in real life.)

 

Points Off For...

Though more bits of the universe were eventually explained, I still think the primary weakness of all the Binti novellas is the lack of universe description. By this, I mean the reader finishes knowing next to nothing about the forms of government, the history leading up to this point, and what society at large truly looks like. We learn mostly of Binti’s Himba people, with a few hints of the related Enyi Zinariya, but still know very little of the warlike Khoush (humans) or their enemies the Meduse (non-humans), or any other sentient species. I’m a sucker for world-building, and always feel lost when this part is left out of the story. (I assume the author fully developed the world in her own mind, and then left it out of the story for literary reasons.)

(If ratings included decimals, I would rate Binti: The Night Masquerade slightly higher than the first two.)

 

Conclusion

Like the first two, this book asks little of the reader other than imagination. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a different twist on the genre. (Though I think only the first one can stand on its own; the latter two require the earlier stories to make sense.)

 

Addendum, 2019.10.09

The author, Okorafor, tweeted in March 2019 that she does not want the term “afrofuturism” applied to her work. Until seeing that tweet, I had assumed (incorrectly) that she was the one who had coined the term — I’ve seen it in reviews of her books and even on their dust jackets. Now that I know that assumption was incorrect, I will use the term she suggested in the tweet, which is “africanfuturist”. I don’t know what the difference is, but am perfectly happy to use the genre terms specified by authors. I have edited my “genre” bullet point above. Here is a screenshot of her tweet:

 

 

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