The Memory Librarian: A dystopian short-story collection set in an Afrofuturistic world Paperback – 27 April 2023

With a sheer originality and thought-provoking impact that I've only experienced once before; when reading Octavia E. Butler. You need to read this.A speculative fiction set in the future where the all-powerful New Dawn rule over vast cities, collecting, altering and erasing their population's memories through their Memory Librarian. Social horror.I was gripped by the concept of this book, built on an Afrofuturistic world created in Janelle Monáe's album, Dirty Computer. We experience this reality through four separate, yet interconnected, novellas. All of the main characters are black, almost all are LGBTQ+; the intersectionality is fantastic, including a transwoman experiencing transphobia within a 'safe' LGBT community, and a non-binary child expressing themself through visionary art. There are rich and diverse underground subcultures, and rebel communities on the outskirts.The audiobook narration is excellent and adds a lot of personality. The only downside was that I couldn't highlight any quotes - and there would have been many!TML explores so many concepts and themes, my mind is still reeling weeks later. It made me think of when I first watched The Matrix, but this is so much richer, deeper, more diverse. To name but a few, it explores: memory, censorship, erasure, family and found families, social control, tokenism, community, homophobia and racism, imprisonment, spirituality, the importance of the arts and visionaries for the future, especially of minority communities... I found the discussion of time theft from Black communities especially thought-provoking.One of my stand-out reads of 2022. Prepare to have your mind-blown.*Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Voyager for the audiobook ARC.

Rating 3.5/5I’ll be honest I was first interested in this book because I think that Janelle Monáe is very talented and I was curious to see if it was across the board, when I read more about this book I discovered that it further explores a theme that was started on one of her albums, Dirty Computer, and that there was also an ’emotion picture’ created around this world. I watched the emotion picture, which you can find on her YouTube channel, and I loved it, then I downloaded the album too because the songs were just amazing. When I got to the book I realised that I would have found it quite hard to get into had I not taken the route to it that I did.The Memory Librarian is a collection of five stories, each with a different co-writer, that are based in the world created in Dirty Computer, as they are set in an already established world as a reader you are pretty much thrown into what is happening in the lives of the characters, without too much explanation of the overall context. As I said because I had already immersed myself into the world that Monáe created I was able to pick up the context for the story pretty quickly but I think if this book was being approached on its own it might be harder to connect with.I have to say I love that Monáe has created a concept that has translated so well to so many different forms of media, and that it carries the same important themes throughout. I do think that the stories in the book didn’t flow together quite as well as I would have hoped, and of course, there are always some that I liked more than others, but they managed to draw parallels to issues and ideas that we face in the world in an imaginative and engaging way.Listening to these stories definitely helped them come to life, Monáe and Bahni Turpin did an excellent job narrating, effortlessly portraying the diverse array of characters that live in this dystopian world. My only criticism is that the stories could have been broken up a little better for this format, some of them were very long with no easy places to pause and as I was listening when I could, I often had to skip back a little to pick up what was happening when I resumed listening.Standing on its own I think that The Memory Librarian is a wonderful collection of stories that explore identity and relationships, the impact of this is definitely more profound if you experience the rest of the work set in this world, which I highly recommend that you do. I would be very interested to see what other stories Janelle Monáe will come up with if she dips back into the literary world again, to say I am in awe of her talent for world-building feels like a massive understatement.

It took me a while to get through this book because I usually read short stories in between the novels that I read. This is a great contribution to the Afrofuturist genre. I read anything Sheree contributes too. I loved every story as they were so different from many things I read. Other great science fiction black female authors include Leah Vernon, Nicky Drayden, NK Jemison , Nnedi Okarafor…I loved diving into the universe the book created…

Humans as dirty computers - what an intriguing premise to explore! And intriguing and fascinating it is. Well-written, and totally captivating, the stories draw you in immediately from the first pages, and each integrates seamlessly with the previous one. This is a delight to read and draws thought-provoking parallels with current world issues without blatant naming or comparisons. A captivating book, and one that I will read many, many times over.

amazing book love reading amazing authors

quick delivery, good price. arrived in perfect condition

Written in collaboration with some amazing co-authors this book is a series of short stories, each set in the same world but not sharing characters. But even so the stories inform each other, craft a creative and haunting vision of the future and the future’s future. Hope in the face of what could easily be a dystopian vision is a powerful thread in these stories. As is being true to yourself and accepting of other’s authentic selves.These stories also read as if they are part of a large project, as if they are echoes from an ongoing real place with language and references that seem to be assumed to be known even as they are introduced for the first time in the text.I’m a fan of Janelle Monáe’s music but not so serious a fan as to know her lyrics by heart (I’ve even had the fortune of getting to see her perform years ago for a very small private crowd at a tech industry party in SF) but I suspect that having read this I’ll catch echoes and references from her songs in this book.Highly recommended as a powerful piece of collaborative art and as a collection of visions of a better future, one we may just be able to build together if we can maintain optimism and hope and our unique authentic selves in the face of pressure to forget and to conform.