Wonderful Beautiful Nepal | Nepal Travel, Culture & Food

One year ago during the Storymoja Festival, I launched my book, A Killing in the Sun , a collection of short speculative stories, featuring African science fiction, fantasy and horror. The reception of the book has been, surprisingly, warm, at times awed, and at times an outright 'oh wow! Unbelievable!' I did not expect this. I thought it would be only me sweating it out to sweet talk people into buying it, but somehow the book has marketed itself. To celebrate a year in print, here are a few of the reviews, some from renown African writers like Binyavanga Wainaina, Zukiswa Wanner, and Beverly Nambozo. "...punchy and awkward and well worth reading." K. Kamo, in Strange Horizons Me, at the launch in Storymoja Festival 2014 "perfectly poised between the robustness of genre fiction and the more literary concern" Mark  Bould, in LA Review of Books "From the first page of the of the first story, I felt that surge of anticipation of the possibility of s...

African writers are traumatized. They forever have to defend their work. If it’s not someone questioning why they are not tackling the problems of their societies, it’s someone wondering why they only write about misery and gloom in the continent. When they discover that African writers are churning out stuff like speculative fiction, they say ‘copycat’. Or something worse. The something worse happened to me. Shortly after my book came out, a Ugandan living in the UK asked; ‘Are you really Ugandan?’ I said yes, and she said, ‘But your names….’ And I said Is your name Margaret (anonymised) more Ugandan than mine (Dilman is Asian, Dila is Luo/Nilotic)? And her next question, ‘But surely, you didn’t grow up in Uganda. No one who grew up in Uganda can write such stories.’ I stopped responding. A muti market in Durban, South Africa, where you can buy any charm. In recent years, there has been a burst of activity with regard to SFF in Africa. Some liken it to Afrofuturism, but I don’t like ...

In September of 2014, during Storymoja Festival in Nairobi, I launched my first collection of speculative short stories, A Killing in the Sun , which features sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres. A few weeks later, I got an invite to present a paper in Paris, at a workshop title Manufacture/Domestication of the Living in Science Fiction, at Le Cube , Center for Digital Creation. The  organizers  had chanced upon the book, and were impressed with the stories that tackled manufactured living beings. Below is a version of the talk I gave, last Friday. In Paris, reading the sci-fi story, Lights on Water Many African communities are technologically dependent on richer nations. Some governments, like that of Uganda, plan to boost technical capacity by promoting science subjects in schools. Already, there is a private initiative to promote the study of robotics in secondary schools in Uganda, by FundiBots. But critics of these initiatives say they are more or less copy-paste...