Amazon Publishing is launching a new digital collection of science fiction by leading Black authors. The project, Black Stars, is the latest in a series of digital anthologies termed “Amazon Original Stories” and will be available on Kindle and Audible.

Black Stars, edited by Nisi Shawl and Latoya Peterson, features six writers exploring a wide range of futuristic imaginations in distinct settings. Among the six are Nigerian writers Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Nnedi Okorafor, and Zimbabwean author C. T. Rwizi.

The collaboration is Adichie’s second with Amazon Original Stories which also published her last work of fiction “Zikora: A Short Story”. Adichie is an author known for her realist fiction works. Remarkably, this short story will be Adichie’s debut science fiction story. Titled “The Visit,” Adichie’s story follows two men navigating a world now shaped by powerful matriarchy.

Read the blurb below:

One night in Lagos, two former friends reunite. Obinna is a dutiful and unsophisticated stay-at-home husband and father married to a powerful businesswoman. Eze is single, a cautious rebel from his university days whose arrival soon upsets the balance in Obinna’s life. In a world where men are constantly under surveillance and subject to the whims of powerful women, more than Obinna’s ordered and accustomed routine might be on the line.

Nnedi Okorafor’s “The Black Pages” tells the story of the rebirth of a four-millennial old being in Mali, exploring contemporary African life and ancient secrets.

Read the blurb below:

Issaka has returned home to Timbouctou and a devastating al-Qaeda raid. His only hope for survival is Faro, a stunning, blue-beaded supernatural entity who rises free from the flames of her imprisoning book as it burns. Compelled to follow Faro, Issaka is opening his eyes to their shared history and the ancestral wisdom of his own past.

C. T. Rwizi’s “These Alien Skies” follows two humans struggling for survival in the wake of a series of accidents in the African Union system that flung them to the far star gate.

Read the blurb below:

Copilots Msizi and Tariro are testing a newly constructed wormhole jump that presumably leads to unsettled habitable worlds. Then an explosion sends them off course, far from where they started and with little chance of ever making it back. Now they’re stranded on their new home for the diaspora. It’s called Malcolm X-b. But they’re beginning to wonder how many light-years from civilization they really are.

The other stories in the collection include “Clap Back” by Nalo Hopkinson, “We Travel the Spaceways” by Victor LaValle, and “2043…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” by Nisi Shawl.

Black Stars will be released on August 31st, 2021. The individual stories will be available for $1.99 each (the audiobook versions are either a credit or $1.39 each), and are included in the company’s Kindle Unlimited program.