I previously read Okorafor's memoir Broken Places & Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected about her personal experience as a teen star athlete who becomes paralyzed and finds purpose as a writer of science fiction, specifically africanfuturism.
I listened to the audiobook, the start of a trilogy, on Hoopla. It is narrated by Robin Miles. It is super short and sets up the characters and world in a way that leaves me wanting to find out what happens next. This is a story of diplomacy and stopping a war between alien species. Binti is from a desert community in Africa on Earth. Her peoples' culture and habits seem foreign to the Western majority culture. She loves mathematics and wants to go to the prestigious Oomza University on another planet. She is accepted, but all her friends and family discourage her because they think she will never truly be accepted as representing the larger Earth culture, so she runs away. The spaceship is a sort of living giant shrimp thing with hollow spaces for the humans to inhabit. Binti's new Uni life is interrupted en route by a Medusen attack. There has been a long-standing armed conflict between Earth's majority culture and the Meduse. I picture the Meduse as human-sized jellyfish. Binti's position as an outsider even among humans, coming from a long line of diplomats called "harmonizers," and an alien piece of tech that she does not completely understand makes her unique in position to stop more violence when the spaceship arrives at the University. We meet more diverse alien species at the University, and the resolution happens a bit too quickly. But, perhaps, it is the diversity that leads to quickly accepting the wrong that has been done, apologizing, and ending the war.
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