It’s science fiction, yet it borrows liberally from other traditions of the fantastic. I find it difficult to discuss what Binti: The Night Masquerade is doing. This is where Binti: Home ends, and Binti: The Night Masquerade begins. Binti is in the desert, learning about another side to her heritage from her father’s mother’s people, when the conflict starts.

In Binti: Home, she returned home with Okwu, discovered new things about herself and her family, and found herself and Okwu at the centre of a flashpoint of renewed conflict between the Khoush and the Meduse. In Binti, she left home, suffered significant trauma, formed a connection with Okwu, a member of an alien species (the Meduse) who have a long-standing rivalry with the Khoush – the people who rule the area in which Binti’s people live, and who look down on her people – and became part-alien herself. Binti is a harmoniser, with a natural talent for mathematics and a predisposition towards bringing people into new, better, more peaceful connections with each other. Well worth a look is Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti: The Night Masquerade, third and concluding volume in her trilogy of novellas starring a young Himba woman who defies cultural expectations to go to an off-planet university.

Binti the night masquerade