Image from Wole Talabi’s Twitter.

As part of its Harvester Series, a publication programme for collections of old and new stories plus bonus material, the Scotland-based indie press Luna Press Publishing released Wole Talabi’s debut short story collection Incomplete Solutions in June. In October, it will release Nick Wood’s Learning Monkey and Crocodile. Below are details of both books.

Incomplete Solutions by Wole Talabi

DESCRIPTION

From the bustling streets of Lagos to the icy moons of Jupiter, this debut collection of twenty stories from the vivid imagination of the award-winning Wole Talabi explores what it means to be human in a world of accelerating technology, diverse beliefs, and unlimited potential, from a uniquely Nigerian perspective. For fans of Tade Thompson and Nnedi Okorafor.

REVIEWS

Tade Thompson, Nommo Award-Winning author of Rosewater and The Murders of Molly Southbourne:

These are amazing narratives which show assiduous reflection on science, emotion, mysticism and philosophy. With such careful consideration, impeccable science and interesting characters, each story is prose that gently tickles the forebrain. Recommended.

Lauren Beukes, author of Zoo City and The Shining Girls:

Fierce and urgent – a remarkable new voice.

Geoff Ryman, Nebula Award-Winning author of The Child Garden, Was, and Air:

Wole Talabi mixes literary skill with speculative SF abilities to make him one of the spearheads of the African revolution in speculative writing.

Tendai Huchu, author of The Hairdresser of Harare and The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician:

A wonderfully eclectic showpiece of hard science fiction and fascinating speculation. The stories in this collection will blow your mind.

Wole Talabi. Photo source: unknown.

Wole Talabi is a full-time engineer, part-time writer and sometime editor from Nigeria. His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omenana, Terraform, The Kalahari Review, the Imagine Africa 500 anthology, and a few other places. He edited the anthologies These Words Expose Us and Lights Out: Resurrection and co-wrote the play Color Me Man. His fiction has been nominated for several awards including the Caine Prize. He won a Nommo Award in 2018.

Book Release Date: 4 June 2019

Price: £9.99

Extent: 270 pages.

Learning Monkey and Crocodile by Nick Wood

DESCRIPTION

“Nick Wood’s short stories are powerful, impassioned visions of worlds and worldviews remade by way of redemptive engagement with the spirits of the earth and the earth of the spirit,” writes Nick Gevers. “Joining ancestral wisdom and transformative technologies, combining searing self-scrutiny with joyous awareness of the Other, Learning Monkey and Crocodile is a book for all of us.”

REVIEWS

Ursula K. Le Guin:

I read Bridges with much pleasure… Chilling and fascinating.

Strange Horizons:

Wood’s characterization is excellent.

Sarah Lotz on Azanian Bridges:

This is a gut-puncher of a novel; original, brilliantly written, and a page-turner of note.

Ian Watson on Azanian Bridges:

Politically acute and powerful, with its heart in the right place… in many ways a ‘textbook story’, because it’s so well done.

Nick Wood. Image from press.futurefire.net.

Nick Wood is a Zambian-born, South African-naturalised clinical psychologist, with over twenty short stories previously published in international venues, including AfroSF and AfroSF 2, amongst others. He has a YA speculative fiction book published in South
Africa entitled The Stone Chameleon, as well as a debut novel Azanian Bridges, which has been shortlisted for the Sidewise Award for alternative history, the Nommos Awards for African Speculative Fiction, the BSF Award, and the John W. Campbell Award.

Wood has completed Water Must Fall, a solar-punk thriller currently looking for a home. It is set in a near future in which drought devastates Southern Africa and California and new ways of living are sought in the struggle to survive the squeeze of both climate change and global capitalism.

Book Release Date: 18 October 2019

Price: £9.99

Extent: 218 pages.

To buy the books, or for more information on them, please visit Luna Press Publishing’s website.