Nnadi Samuel

Dec 9, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Nnadi Samuel |Corey Farrenkopf |Michelle Koubek |Catherine Baker

gravity ropes a shark upside down as if destined for hanging. the glissading wind, scissoring mushrooms off the hard scale of its body—laid in acrobatic display. the spectacle hunts the small kingdom of man. Its practised weight, silvering the atmosphere in marigold worship. I roam the length of this world, wasteful with minutes,positioning to catch a glimpse of its dorsal fin making an ocean of air. It swam the Mississippis of its lives, indifferent to hurt.

Dec 9, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Michelle Koubek |Corey Farrenkopf |Nnadi Samuel |Catherine Baker

The universe is dying. I can tell by how the stars are flicking off like lightbulbs. But that’s why I’m here, electrician to the sky,R5-70, a nanobot with 3,000 siblings. We crawl through the dim space like cave explorers,poking, twisting and tightening the stars that have turned off. And as they blink back on memories scorch uslike solar flares from the Sun,burning, because the past is angry for being forgotten. Here is one, I see my daughter,chicken wing arms and jalapeno eyes.

Dec 9, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Catherine Baker |Corey Farrenkopf |Michelle Koubek |Nnadi Samuel

Beginning to read any speculative fiction story means piecing its world together from the words the author gives us, one by one. What kinds of being live here, what spaces they inhabit, what laws their physical and social worlds must follow, what common sense they have that we do not, what technologies they know and how supernatural the cosmology will be—all come piece by piece as we interpret the words. And especially the names.

Nov 5, 2023 | sundresspublications.com | Nnadi Samuel

“I: asphalt glory. Color riot, in ways that put coffins out of fashion, snithe the threading to come clean as shorelines.”Nnadi Samuel’s prose glimmers between lines of captivating poetry in his chapbook Nature Knows a Little About Slave Trade. The impacts of the Transatlantic Slave Trade are felt in our world, with pain and blood seeping into the soil and making a home in the earth.

Sep 15, 2023 | strangehorizons.com | Rawad Alhashmi |Rebecca Schneider |Lydia O’Donnell |Nnadi Samuel

Here Is a Body revolves around an authoritarian regime, and sit-in protests against it in “the Space.” Homeless boys—Rabie al-Mahdi, Youssef, Emad, and Saad, among many others—are abducted from a garbage dump by the titans, who work for the general and the System. The children are brought to a rehabilitation center, but in reality, it is an army training camp. They are deprived of their names, and instead, they are all called Bodies, whereas the titans are called Heads.