Blogging an African Novel

“Science fiction is an entertaining way to worry about the present. It uses stories set in the future to confront issues of today.”

Kevin Kelly recently wrote the above quote at his blog Technium and it perfectly captured the mood I’ve been in lately. In “Looking for the African Akira” I talked about the role fiction plays in shaping culture, particularly science fiction. My own words were as follows:

Fiction represents the ideas of a society that’s thinking as much about it’s future as it is it’s past and present. It represents as much about the hopes of that collective society and it’s factions as it does the fears. The concept of who and what heroes and villains are, protagonists and antagonists, are critical concepts for framing identity.

And of course I still feel that way, even moreso after reading Kevin Kelly’s take on the subject. At a time when the future of speculative fiction itself is in question, people need to help broaden the genre and push it forward. The other reason for publishing is simply to etch a place in history for the way things are. Africa is notorious for having not much written history, much of what we know was passed down from explorers and missionaries from other parts of the world and the oral traditions passed down by local populations. That’s unfortunate because this world is shaped by the way history is both recorded and reinterpreted. (Just ask any European vets who watch American World War II films.)

It just so happens I’m an avid writer and a long time artist. So even though there’s only so many hours in the day, I’ve decided to start publishing a scifi novel, one chapter at a time.

The end goal is to publish it and distribute myself because I know the demand from publishers for satirical African SciFi is probably low. Most publishers are too busy looking for the next Angels & Demons to notice. It’s a shame because the sale of Manga, pirated DVDs (when distributors don’t make them available legally here) and comic books is on the rise across the continent. Eventually, publishers with power will notice this burgeoning market. But as the writers, thinkers and creatives of Africa we have to prove the existence and validity of our audience.

I gave myself three rules for writing this story…

• It had to take place largely in Africa
• I wouldn’t sacrifice my own literary tastes
• It had to look forward

The reason for the last being that most literary works about Africa look back at what’s been, what went wrong, who caused what. The historians of African are literally writing the past for the continent and subsequently the rest of the world. In my opinion, there’s not enough dreamers. I want people to come here and let their minds wander about the possibilities of what could be. It’s my personal philosophy that if Africans don’t look ahead to what is potentially in store, they may find themselves in much more dire times in the future.

The novel is called Muxtionary, it takes place in the near-future. Not thousands of years from now…not a long-long time ago in galaxy far away…a date many of us will see in our lifetimes. Circa 2030. In many scifi novels you get the story of utopian or dystopian societies; full of action adventure, green women with large breasts and handsome men with big guns. This novel is about the other people in those worlds. It’s about the people left behind by rapidly advancing world…. It’s meant to be a satirical, cautionary tale about where society could be headed if people don’t change. At the same time I feel that I can offer a unique perspective on the continent sci-fi loves to forget.

My own inspirations are books like Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; William Gibson’s Neuromancer; the 1982 film Bladerunner and contemporary fiction on TV like Battlestar Gallactica and The X-Files. All say as much about the times they were published in as the non-fiction and non-fantasy stuff published during the same periods.

About the book. Muxtionary is about a nomadic teacher who travels the African continent sharing technology, knowledge and skills intended to help Africa ‘catch-up’ with the rest of the world. First world countries have been reformed by advanced technologies and have simply severed ties with anything that disturbs their utopian societies. It paints a picture of a continent that remains bitterly stagnant while the world around is quickly changing.

One liberating thing about publishing this way is that it reminds me of the days of radio drama serials and saturday morning cartoons. I can formulate ideas and get instant feedback from whoever happens to be paying attention. Each day I’ll also use Twitter to publish faux news reports of what’s going in the fictional world of our protagonist. I don’t know if I’ve got an audience for this type of thing or not but it’ll at the very least be there for the people interested.

I’m doing this to encourage all the other aspiring African writers out there to publish their work, their novels, their short stories, their poems, through whatever means you have available whether that be blogs, forums, or websites.

Make noise.