Binti
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4.4 • 381 Ratings
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
Nnedi Okorafor's Binti is the winner of the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novella!
Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs.
Knowledge comes at a cost, one that Binti is willing to pay, but her journey will not be easy. The world she seeks to enter has long warred with the Meduse, an alien race that has become the stuff of nightmares. Oomza University has wronged the Meduse, and Binti's stellar travel will bring her within their deadly reach.
If Binti hopes to survive the legacy of a war not of her making, she will need both the gifts of her people and the wisdom enshrined within the University, itself — but first she has to make it there, alive.
The Binti Series
Book 1: Binti
Book 2: Binti: Home
Book 3: Binti: The Night Masquerade
PRAISE FOR BINTI
"Binti is a supreme read about a sexy, edgy Afropolitan in space! It's a wondrous combination of extra-terrestrial adventure and age-old African diplomacy. Unforgettable!" — Wanuri Kahiu, award-winning Kenyan film director of Punzi and From a Whisper
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Okorafor's sci-fi novella tackles sprawling ideas with little satisfactory resolution. Binti is a teenage girl from Earth, a member of the marginalized and disrespected Himba culture, and the first of her people to attend the prestigious Oomza University, located on a distant planet and home to the galaxy's finest academic minds. Midway through the voyage to the university, her ship is attacked without warning by Meduse warriors, and Binti must draw upon her unique strengths to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Okorafor draws from her rich knowledge of cultural warfare to craft nuanced commentary on how we mock "alien" peoples at our own peril; however, the plotting and characterization suffer from lack of authorial attention. Abstract concepts are introduced without warning and rarely defined to any satisfactory degree, while fascinating objects receive only the briefest descriptions, if any at all. For example, Binti's ship, a living being related to shrimp and the novella's primary setting, is never described from the outside and only vaguely on the inside. This overstuffed novella introduces too many concepts to process in a small space, muddying its otherwise laudable message.
Customer Reviews
Interesting.
Science-fiction setting & descriptive expectations.
Fantasy magic in SF trappings, honestly. A little like Andre Norton in that respect, but taken even further and in a divergent direction. (Much less use of Norton's good/evil SF-magipsi tropes, but definitely magitech in spades.)
Fairytale genre expectations. This is very important.
Content-warning for a violent scene. Until you accept the fairytale genre expectations as the frame, some of the protagonist's reactions to it won't make sense and may feel like a flaw. Realize that the expectations are for something different than either science fiction or this era's fantasy, and it works better.
I'm part-way into the sequel and I think the style is also evolving and improving. Always good when authors grow! (There's more humor in the next one, too.) I'm still going to keep my fairytale expectations in place, though.
Underwhelming
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor is an Afro-Futurism book powered by an unfettered imagination. Okorafor exploits the young and naive protagonist first person point of view to visualize a fantasy world akin to Star Wars. Our author is clearly a dreamer and her world building reflects that.
That said, trying to maintain interest in Binti’s storyline was not without struggle. What was a swift and promising start loses steam and becomes too predictable near the end. There was a lot of opportunity for ever more expansive world building that never materializes. I wonder if the first person perspective hindered this story more than it helped.
This was also a time when the brevity of the book was a problem. Often a novella reads swiftly but is packed with meaning between each line. There was none of that density of meaning in this one. I suppose Okorafor’s goal is to establish a violent and perplexing space journey that sprawls over multiple books in the series. I can’t find a reason to pick up the others in the series though.
Good but could use more razzle dazzle
The story is pretty good but moved really quickly. I would have appreciated more development for all the characters and more description of the surroundings.