Noor
by Nnedi Okorafor
2021

This is really good and I highly recommend it. It’s Afrofuturistism with the plot beats of a YA novel but a complexity to the characters that makes it feel more adult. It’s set in a relatively near future that grew from our current world. It’s scifi with technology that has continued to advance from what we have, but with a thread of mystical realism that makes me look at the current world and wonder if that is how a religious true believer sees the world. (I’m in this with the main character, AO, who is solidly atheist and yet is beginning to wonder…) It’s set in Nigeria, which is a culture that I’m not particularly familiar with and thus can’t always tell what is based on reality and what has been fictionalized. But the characters and the world are so beautiful and so difficult.

The plot is that our two main characters have each been through separate traumatic attacks in which they defended themselves with lethal force. But they both know that society does not recognize them as having the right to self-defense at the cost of their attackers’ lives. Our primary main character, AO, was born with severe birth defects and now uses extensive and experimental prosthetics, that make many of the people around her question if she is truly human or not. On the run from both her own actions and societies judgement of her, she learns more about other people on the outskirts of society and the exact nature of the experiments that have been done with her and her prosthetics.

The plot also just feels very timely as it comments on how easily the terms “attack” and “defense” can be swapped back and forth when someone’s mere existence is considered a threat to a dominant power in society. And how useful having such a threat can be in maintaining that power, right up until it turns out to actually be a threat rather than carefully massaged propoganda.

Anyway, I really enjoyed and highly recommend this.