Wole Talabi, award-winning author, editor of five anthologies including Africanfuturism: An Anthology, and one of the most decorated voices in African speculative fiction, has been busy off the page too. Last Sunday, Talabi completed a half marathon, finishing 21 kilometres in just over two hours. It was his first in six years: he ran his debut half marathon in 2018 on a dare, struggled through it, and clocked three hours. This time, a full hour faster, and for considerably higher stakes — his run helped raise $1.6 million for charity.

It is the kind of achievement that feels very on-brand for a writer who does not appear to do anything by halves. His debut novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon was named one of the Washington Post’s top ten best science fiction and fantasy books of 2023, won the Nommo Award for Best Novel in 2024 and the Ilube Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel 2024, and was nominated for the Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards.

And if you needed more reason to celebrate him this week: The Fist of Memory will be officially out on October 27, 2026 from DAW Books in the US, Gollancz in the UK, and Masobe Books in Nigeria and West Africa. It is a first-contact thriller in which a non-communicative alien spacecraft appears in the sky and throws global powers into turmoil, centring on Tope, a principled Nigerian assassin whose routine assignment goes wrong at exactly the wrong moment, and Itumeleng, a South African astronomer plagued by mysterious dreams; two people who must come to understand how they, and all of humanity, are connected to the craft before it lands and the world changes forever. One early reader has already called it an Africanfuturist answer to The Three-Body Problem.