Binti: The Complete Trilogy

Binti is very creative and thoughtful, but it also annoyed me and I wish I only ready the first novella instead of the full trilogy.

Pros:

I really like Nnedi Okorafor as a person. I first heard her talking about sci-fi and imagination with Br. Guy Consolmagno (the Vatican's top astronomer), and her vision and creativity struck me. Those attributes show in Binti abundantly: the wildly different alien species, the technology and travel, it's all a brilliant kaleidoscope of ideas. It's very easy to cheer for the protagonist. The Binti trilogy is also very thoughtful about the complexities of interactions between different species and human prejudice. I read these novellas because I'm trying to stretch myself a bit, and these definitely fit the bill.


Cons:

As is perhaps inevitable with trying to stretch myself with new material (my cultural background is wildly different from the Nigerian-American Ms. Okorafor), I found Binti to be SUPER weird. A character genetically fuses with other species/races not once, not twice, but three times during the plot. There are a LOT of features about this future world that are not explained at all and are just accepted in passing; some of these are fine and comprehensible, like a type of meditation they call “treeing.” But characters can apparently summon electric currents by thinking really hard about math equations, talk to animals, and all sorts of other oddities. Ideally, a reader would be so enchanted by the story that these would be trivial details that you accept in stride, but I was never quite “into” the story enough to avoid being irked every time one of them popped up.

The author also had a habit of writing oddly clipped sentences sometimes that drove me nuts.