Secret Insurrection: Stories from a Novel of a Future Time

In the far future, on a spaceship orbiting a gas giant in a distant solar system, the ship’s owner, Lydia Ehemwah, announces to her small crew, clones Lydia 2 and Lydia 3, that she is retiring from her two-decade business of prospecting and trading space commodities and going back home to Earth. The home world is an ecological paradise reclaimed from the global warming and other disasters of the ancient past, and Lydia Ehemwah’s wealth would ensure a life of pleasure and leisure for her.

Earth is also a world where her two clones, raised with her as siblings, would be her property by law, with none of the rights accorded to “originals.”

The younger clone, Lydia 3, has always accepted her place as a clone; what her “big sister” wants is all that matters. However, Lydia Ehemwah’s announcement upsets Lydia 2, and a lifetime of resentment and bitterness between the elder clone and her original leads to a confrontation with a disastrous outcome. The consequences lead to disturbing decisions, incriminating secrets, broken relationships and lives that are changed forever.

Secret Insurrection is an unpublished science fiction novel manuscript. This book contains two self-contained excerpts from the novel that have been previously published in these online anthologies of speculative fiction by people of African descent: The Future of Us: An Anthology (Charlotte Bailey & Florence Okoye, editors, Afrofutures_UK, 2016) and Jalada 02: Afrofuture(s) (http://jaladaafrica.org, 2015).