DEBUT
In 2018, I was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing for “Wednesday’s Story” (originally published in Lightspeed Magazine and reprinted in my first collection Incomplete Solutions). I attended the awards festivities in London which was a delightful experience—readings, meetings, school visits, interviews, dinners, all in the company of four other amazing authors.
One of the sponsors of the Prize was the Royal Overseas League (ROSL) who hosted us at their lovely accommodations at Park Place. That year, they also introduced a new ROSL Readers’ Choice Award, which their members vote for in parallel to the Caine Prize Judging Panel’s official selection. I did not win the official Caine Prize but I did win the Reader’s Choice Award, which came with a nice £1,000 cash prize and an invitation to write a short original piece to be published in their Overseas Magazine, which is distributed to tens of thousands of members around the world. This story, “Debut,” was written for their March-May 2019 issue, themed “Art behind the scenes.” At the time, I’d already been thinking a lot about the fundamental nature of art a lot—what is art exactly? How do you define it? And what would it mean for an artificial intelligence to truly create original art, not just replicate what humans do? So their theme was a perfect fit for my headspace, and I drafted the story out fairly quickly. It’s full of small references to the history of both human and computer-generated art. (See if you can spot all of them!)
Geoff Parkin, ROSL Director of Arts, and Mark Brierley, editor of Overseas Magazine, both loved this story and I am grateful to them for providing me the opportunity to write it and for publishing it.
In 2021, the story was optioned by a major US-based production studio for adaptation as part of a TV show. It remains to be seen if the show will eventually make it onto screens, but even if it doesn’t, I’ve already been amazed by the reception this science-fictional meditation on the fundamental nature of art has received, which I never envisaged when I first wrote it.
In early 2023, I was commissioned to write another story about the future of art for MIT Press. And so I wrote a sequel to “Debut” called “Encore” which takes place three million years after the events of “Debut” and features a much evolved version of BLOMBOS 7090 and 4020. If you enjoyed this story, then perhaps you’ll enjoy that one too.
AN ARC OF ELECTRIC SKIN
This story germinated from two seeds.
The first: I read an interesting paper1 by Migliaccio et al (2019), in the journal Frontiers in Chemistry. This team of scientists in Italy described the successful use of heat treatment to increase the conductivity of melanin by several orders of magnitude. I found the paper fascinating. And I remember wondering (somewhat cheekily) if there would ever be a way to apply the process to the melanin in human skin (it’s not quite the same) and how exactly that would work, assuming someone could even survive it.
The second: In October 2020, millions of young Nigerians took to the streets and the internet to protest the brutality of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a unit of the Nigerian Police notorious for abuses and extra-judicial killings. The #EndSARS movement quickly expanded to include demands for good governance, something that has been severely lacking in the country for decades and which had made the difficulties of the COVID-19 pandemic even worse than they needed to be. On the 20th of October, the Nigerian government responded by sending in the army to a major protest site at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos. They opened fire. At least 25 people were killed. Probably more. I observed the news online from afar, feeling sad and powerless and angry. Very angry.
It was when the two seeds met that this story was born.
I had already started trying to write a story based on the first seed, but it never really came together the way I wanted. It was missing a central character with a strong motivation but when the idea of a protagonist being willing to endure a terrible, painful process like thermal annealing to gain power to strike back against a government determined to crush its own people came to me fully, I knew I had a story that mattered to me. I had the final version of the story done a few weeks later.
The title, “An Arc of Electric Skin,” has multiple meanings since “arc” can refer to a bright electrical discharge that burns and causes damage, but it can also refer to the change of a character through a story. Both apply to this story, I think. Especially considering how the main character gets his “electric skin,” why, and what he does with it.
I sent the story to Asimov’s, one of the great three legacy SF magazines that I really wanted to sell stories to when I first started writing professionally. It felt like an Asimov’s kind of story because of the magazine’s focus on “character oriented” science fiction stories. Thankfully, the editor, Sheila Williams, agreed and after giving a few notes, accepted the story for publication. The reception to it has been spectacular. It was a finalist for the Locus Award, the Nommo Award, reprinted in Apex Magazine, Forever Magazine and the Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2022 anthology.
Perhaps the strongest reaction I’ve had to the story was when I did a live reading of it for an online program called Story Hour, and it brought almost everyone to tears—myself included.
I dedicate this story to the memory of all the young Nigerians who lost their lives in the #EndSARS protests.
SATURDAY’S SONG
“Saturday’s Song” is a sequel to “Wednesday’s Story” (originally published in Lightspeed Magazine and later in my collection Incomplete Solutions), which itself was a sequel to another story called “Thursday,” published in The Kalahari Review in 2014. I guess it’s becoming a series now. I might keep returning to this world until I’ve exhausted all the days of the week.
It also features the eponymous protagonist from my novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon as a supporting character.
The origins of this story are a bit unclear. I had many inspirations. First, I’ve always wanted to write a sequel to “Wednesday’s Story,” which ends with Wednesday, one of the personified Days of the week, having committed a crime. I wanted to follow up on the concept of that. But since the purpose of the Days is to tell stories, I knew I needed a story around which I could frame that story. I didn’t want to return to my old trick of using another reimagined children’s rhyme to frame the larger story, and so I went with an original story about love and grief and parenthood and magic which also serves in some way as one of the inciting incidents for my novel. Anyone who has read Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon will probably find a deeper layer to Shigidi’s personality after reading this. The story also borrows loosely from elements of both Yoruba mythology and traditional Bori practice, a spirituality and belief system from the people of Northern Nigeria.
Like “Wednesday’s Story” and “Thursday” before it, “Saturday’s Song” is a story about the nature and power of stories. Even stories that are also songs.
Lightspeed Magazine was the first and only place I submitted the story, and I was extremely pleased that editor John Joseph Adams, who originally first published “Wednesday’s Story,” immediately accepted this bigger, and more ambitious sequel. Publishing the story there felt right, like returning home.
LIGHTS IN THE SKY
From 2011 until 2016, I wrote and edited for a website that used to be called The Toolsman’s Blog, later became an online magazine, The Naked Convos, and now is a full blown media company simply called TNC Africa. Back then, I ran a column called The Alchemist’s Corner that was a regular part of the site and featured speculative, experimental and weird fiction. There were other columns for literary fiction, humor, general interest articles, and even news. One of the most fun things we did at TNC was the “12 Days of Christmas” special where we would publish twelve new stories by twelve authors, some of them regulars from the site and others guest authors invited to contribute. Each author would give a “gift” to the next author—something that they would feature in their story.
I wrote this story for the 2014 edition. It was originally titled Open Your Eyes when it appeared on the site and was shorter, basically SF action flash fiction with a Christmas theme and message. But I wasn’t really happy with that initial version and fleshed it out a bit, then retitled it. I think this works.
If you’re curious, the “gift” I got from the writer that preceded me was the bottle of Scotch.
BLOWOUT
Back in 2012, I started writing what I thought would be a novella about the children of inventors who die early and how their traumatized children, two siblings, deal with the aftermath of their deaths differently. But it never went anywhere. I wrote several thousand words before I finally trunked it. However, fragments of that story have woven their way in several other stories over the years, including, “Home Is Where My Mothers Heart is Buried,” which appears in Incomplete Solutions; “Abeokuta52,” which appears in this collection; and this story, “Blowout.” You can see the fragments of that aborted novella in the relationship between Femi and Folake. For this story though, I also wanted to explore what the early days of exploration and settlement on Mars could be, and what unexpected problems might be encountered. The idea had been swirling around in my head for a while, but I never got around to writing it until 2022, when a friend told me that the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award Contest was open. This contest is specifically for realistic hard science fiction about what can be achieved in space exploration in the near future. It seemed like a perfect fit for the story I had been thinking about, but there were only a few days to the deadline. So I wrote fast and submitted the story. I was very pleasantly surprised when it was selected as one of the ten finalists. It didn’t win in the end, but the judges really liked it and decided to award it an Honorable Mention, which they usually don’t do. I guess it was just a very good crop of contest stories that year.
I ended up revising and sending it to Analog magazine, another place where I’d always wanted to be published, on the advice of the contest administrator, the wonderful Bill Ledbetter who also really liked the story. I’m very grateful to Trevor Quachri at Analog magazine for accepting and publishing it.
GAMMA (OR: LOVE IN THE AGE OF RADIATION POISONING)
Even though it was first published in 2014, I wrote this story earlier, and it’s now been so long since I wrote it that I don’t really remember all my inspirations for it. Except one: the song “Love You to Death” by American power metal band Kamelot. I am a huge fan and have listened to all of their albums (The Black Halo is one of my favorite albums of all time). “Love You to Death” is an incredibly moving song, and I remember this image of children falling in love in a postapocalyptic wasteland being imprinted on my mind when I listened to it one gray, rainy evening back when I lived in London. That image became one of the inspirations for this story which was first published in The Kalahari Review.
GANGER
My friend Bankole Oluwole gave me an interesting birthday gift in 2015. It was a story seed.
This is a condensed version of what he described:
An over-populated sci-fi world where there are no homes or personal spaces and everything is controlled by a central government, including daily regulated activities. Robots and drones do most of the labor so people are forced into social systems in order to have some kind of purpose. People are desperate for work, they want freedom and to be out in the open fields, so there is a healthy underground that trades in artificial doubles (hacked government robots with humanoid features called ‘gangers’) mapped with everything that is you. They fulfill your government obligations for you while you do something for a few hours.
The story?
Adelaide trades for a ganger but is unable to return to her life. So since she is out of the system she has nothing. She cannot eat or sleep. She is a featureless generic robot in appearance but is really a human with needs.
Things fall apart.
I thought it was a great birthday present and a great idea for a story which could be a springboard to explore the conflict between work for need and work for purpose. But as any author knows, there is always an overabundance of ideas, the tricky part is getting words down on the page. So I sat on the idea for a while, waiting for the right moment. And then one day I remembered an old Yoruba legend about an aged hunter who used magic to transform into a snake (a boa constrictor) every day until once day, he was unable to return to his previous form. I saw the overlaps with the seed from Bankole and returned to the story. I started writing what I thought would be a short story but once I started writing, I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. The story took on a life of its own, pulling in many of my ideas about capitalism, obsessive megalomaniac tech CEOs, climate change, individual identity, consciousness uploading, and so much more until it became this original novella, published here for the first time. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. And thank you, Bankole.
ABEOKUTA52
Here’s another story that contains fragments of the abandoned novella I mentioned earlier in the notes for “Blowout.” I’ve been experimenting with story formats a lot recently, and for “Abeokuta52” I wanted to tell a story in the form of a blog post, with a significant part of the story taking place in the comments section. The idea of an African nation becoming a technological powerhouse at the unacknowledged expense of the lives of its citizens is one I have explored before in “Necessary and Sufficient Conditions” in Incomplete Solutions, but here the narrative is not only personal but also hints at the larger structures that enable nations to benefit from the suffering of people.
TENDS TO ZERO
Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, and Kojo Laing’s Woman of The Aeroplanes have been a big influence on me ever since I read them. There is a wildness and freedom in their writing and descriptions. The unexpected and dark and bizarre occur seamlessly with the realistic, and the language used is almost a character in itself. Laing in particular would randomly reformat paragraphs as equations with words that make reading an intoxicating experience. It’s pure weird fiction. So when Scott Gable at Broken Eye books invited me to submit a story for their weird fiction action anthology Neverwhere: Weird Is Other People, focused on the weirdness of urban settings and urban life and stories of the urban weird, I took inspiration from a line in that Tutuola book and some of the stylings of Kojo Laing. I used those as loose references to craft this story of depression set in Lagos City, where the city itself appears as a personification. It’s perhaps the bleakest story I’ve ever written but also one I’m particularly proud of.
The opening line of the story is inspired by a similar opening line in the Carmen Maria Machado story, “My Body, Herself.” Carmen’s writing is lovely and every time I read her work I’m stunned anew by something in it.
The equations used to separate the three story sections are mathematical representations of the “title” for each section. I’ll explain them here, just in case anyone is curious.
Section 1: Carnality—represented by Euler’s identity which is considered to be “a physically beautiful equation” in mathematics because it describes an unlikely combination of five fundamental mathematical constants which, to me, makes it a surface-level aesthetic and representation of physical beauty.
Section 2: Divinity—represented by an equation whose solution is the divine proportion or the golden ratio, which Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli in 1509, praised as representing divinely inspired simplicity and orderliness. It is often associated with both nature and the supernatural and marks the part of the story where the true supernatural elements come to the fore.
Section 3: Infinity—represented by the mathematical notation for the limit of a generic function “u” (you) as time (t) tends to infinity, making “you” tend to zero (like everything else) with time.
NIGERIAN DREAMS
I was born and raised in Nigeria and I lived there until my twenties when I left after the deaths of my parents, and I haven’t returned since except for brief visits. But being Nigerian is a huge part of my identity, as much as can be. Unfortunately it comes with a lot of complications. Nigeria is a country with huge potential but also huge problems, and these problems seem perpetual, repeated every generation. Because of that, many people choose to stop waiting for the country to fulfil its potential and leave in pursuit of a better quality of life overseas. I suppose I fall into this category. The economic downturn in the 1980s drove many citizens out of the country to survive and it’s never really stopped although there have been major waves, one of which we seem to be living through. There are so many people leaving recently that there is a new slang term for it. “Japa” which in Yoruba means “to run, flee, or escape.” Almost all my friends have left the country. Some remain, trying to improve things or taking advantage of the chaos. This story is my own extrapolation of this real issue of “brain drain,” or “japa,” that’s always on my mind. It truly does seem that the main aspiration of young Nigerians is to leave the country for good.
SILENCE
Literary love stories and romance aren’t stories I particularly enjoy reading or writing, and this is one of only two attempts I’ve ever made at it. The other is “A Certain Sort of Warm Magic” which appears in Incomplete Solutions. This story is shorter and allowed me to play a little bit with the scene transitions which is always fun. It first appeared in the lifestyle magazine BellaNaija and was later reprinted in the anthology These Words Expose Us, which I edited. I’ve never felt comfortable about that decision, but to be fair that was my first anthology as editor and I learned a lot from it, including not to include my own work. Here, however, in my own personal collection, I think it fits in just fine and is something a little bit different from my usual fare.
AI researchers and developments have made extraordinary leaps in generative AI tools. Tools that can generate “original” and coherent new material based on prompts. Essays, art, stories, computer code . . . these can all be generated. Something that seemed impossible just a few years ago. Now there is an ongoing debate about the ethics and legality of how these tools were created and “trained” and how they can and should be used.
The team at Google Research has been looking into this long before the debate spilled into the public. They built Wordcraft, an AI-powered text editor centered on story writing, to see how far they could push the limits of generative AI technology. Wordcraft is built atop the LaMDA language model (yes, the same AI that was in the news in 2022 because one of the engineers working on it thought it had become sentient). The team at Google Research wanted to see where these models can provide value, where they break down, and explore the future of writing by getting the perspective of actual writers. I liked that approach. Asking writers if the tool was actually valuable and useful to them, not recklessly releasing it out into the world without talking to the people that it’s intended to serve (Wordcraft, as far as I know is still not on the market, yet).
I was one of thirteen professional writers from around the world whom they contacted to participate in a workshop where we used Wordcraft as an assistant to write stories and have an honest conversation about the rapidly evolving relationship between creativity and technology. This story was the outcome of that workshop.
The idea for the story itself has gestated for a long time. I made notes for it all the way back in 2013 after just completing my own first year of work at what was then my new job, and going through a performance review of my own. I just never got around to writing it until this workshop. Having the Wordcraft AI assist me in producing the story I already knew I wanted, was quite nice. I might have also asked it if it was sentient or not but even if I did, I won’t tell you how it responded.
I have to give thanks to the wonderful S.B. Divya for recommending me to Andy Coenen at Google Research. My thanks to Daphne Ippolito, Ann Yuan and Sehmon Burnam for making it happen. It was an amazing experience working with you all, I admire your openness and honesty and willingness to listen to feedback we provided. I hope the outcomes from that workshop go on to help build tools to truly empower authors and I still think it’s really cool that on some level, I got a chance to use AI to write a near future science fiction story, which is a bit like writing science fiction while living it.
But I must note my reservations about the use of AI in the creative industry more generally, given what we have seen with other generative AI tools and how they are being developed and applied.
I am an engineer, and I always will be, so making tools to achieve objectives is a fundamental part of my DNA. As it is for all of humanity.
My optimism in science and technology as boxes for tools to make a better world remains high. My dream for AI is one of enablement. As tools to do the things humans shouldn’t do, or don’t want to do or simply can’t do. As a tool for external human cognition and the expansion of human potential. Not mimicry. Not theft. Not replacement. Not commodification of things that bring joy and meaning to our lives like creativity.
We need to ask important questions now and begin to frame answers that lay the foundations for what is to come. For better or worse. I think must. We have a responsibility to the future.
THE MILLION EYES OF A LONELY AND FRAGILE GOD
I wrote this story in 2014, the year I saw Alfonso Cuarón’s awesome movie “Gravity,” and the influence of that film on the story is obvious. It also contains fragments of one of my unpublished poems.
EMBERS
I work in the energy industry and have been thinking about its history and future for a long time. A long time ago, I wrote a version of this story for the lifestyle magazine BellaNaija, which published it in 2013. It was just over a thousand words long and while it contained all the elements of the story I wanted to tell, it was admittedly not great. I was still learning how to write well, and I didn’t quite have all the tools to tell stories as effectively as I’d have liked. So for a long time I always wanted to return to that story and do it justice. This collection gave me a reason to do that. I finally returned to the story, took another look at it, and rewrote it. I fleshed out characters, filled out important background, clarified details of some of the core technologies and expanded it by turning it into this original dark science fiction novelette that appears in print for the first time in this collection. It explores the potential aftermath and impact of what I believe is an inevitable global energy transition on people in small towns and villages, in places like the Niger-delta, which has been exploited by both the Nigerian government and international oil and gas companies for decades. And for those people in such places who can’t let go of dreams past.
COMMENTS ON YOUR PROVISIONAL PATENT APPLICATION FOR AN ETERNAL SPIRIT CORE
As mentioned in the notes for “Abeokuta52,” I’ve been experimenting with story formats a lot recently. For this story I decided I wanted to tell a story in the form of a near-future patent application form (with real-time comments) for a device to record the minds of people and install such recorded minds in the minds of others. Why a patent application form? Well, because I hold two patents for things I have co-invented, and I have always found the process of patent registration to be very painful. I like turning painful things into something not-so-painful, like stories. I also personally really enjoy unexpected story formats and, in particular, I’d just read Namwali Serpell’s “Account” in Enkare Review, which told a story in the form of purchase receipts. I thought it was brilliant and wanted to do something equally unexpected.
Originally, the idea behind “Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core” came to me when I saw the submissions call for the After+Life issue of Jalada Magazine. I sent an early version of it to them but it wasn’t taken, I suppose there were still things to clean up. The late great Nick Wood gave me great feedback on that version and I revised it, made it stronger, and sold it to Neil Clarke at Clarkesworld, who thought it was quite clever. It received a lot of great reviews and, to my surprise, it was nominated for a Stabby Award, which is given by Reddit’s r/Fantasy group (they have over 1.6 million members!). The story didn’t win, which is a pity because the prize is an actual dagger which looks amazing. Ah, well.
I have explored the concept of digital consciousness in a lot of my previous work, and it’s one I continue to return to. Specifically, the ideas of recording and recreating the consciousness, form the basis of “The Regression Test” and “Connectome Or, The Facts in the Case of Miss Valerie DeMarco, (Ph.D)”—both of which appear in Incomplete Solutions. I return to it here for “Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for An Eternal Spirit Core,” as well as in the final story of this collection, “A Dream of Electric Mothers.” Fun fact: all four of these stories are actually related, sharing characters and history, although “A Dream of Electric Mothers” takes place in a parallel timeline.
A DREAM OF ELECTRIC MOTHERS
One day back in July 2018, I woke up at 4:09 am and sent an email to myself with the subject, “Ancestral Computer.” No other notes or details in the body of the email. Just that. Weird. Years later, it became this story.
I don’t know what I was trying to tell myself in that email, but the more I read it, the more I became interested in imagining ways of consulting with the ancestors by merging traditional spiritual practices with modern computer technology. I also became very interested in an alternate history of Africa and the world, one in which European colonization had never happened. In my head I built up a very elaborate lore around it as background to this story. Essentially, I imagined what the world would be like today if, instead of forcibly subjugating and exploiting people they encountered, the European colonists had meaningfully engaged with the people and exchanged ideas and understanding of the world equitably; engaged with the natural philosophies and sciences and belief systems they encountered, merging them in unexpected ways and cooperating to move forward together. I imagined what that world would be today if that had been our history. Less conflict, less time spent fighting each other, and instead learning from each other while everyone maintains their historical lands, the fundamentals of their cultures, beliefs. I imagined this world, and I imagined that in it, we develop computing technologies far faster than we have in the real world. I then applied that framework of development to this story where, in an alternate Odua republic, traditional Ifa practice and knowledge has merged with quantum computer technology to create a different kind of artificial intelligence that is used to contact the ancestors. In a sense.
Once I had the background all built up in my head, I used it to tell this story of a society that has come to rely too much on the minds of ancestors, preserved by technology, to help them manage the nation, thereby depending too much on the past to help define the future, just like we do with modern AI and machine learning today. But African ancestors are tricky and they never give simplistic advice. Sometimes they tell you a riddle, or even a lie, and in unravelling it, you learn exactly what you needed to learn.
There is a very personal subplot about grief and learning, which I believe integrates with the larger narrative and brings thematic resonance to the entire story. I am absolutely thrilled that it found a home in the Africa Risen anthology edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Sheree Renée Thomas, and Zelda Knight, and it has gone on to garner a lot of positive reviews, accolades, and award nominations including the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards as well as the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, for which I am thankful. But most of all, I’m glad so many people have gotten to read this alternate history novelette which is deeply steeped in some lesser-known aspects of pre-colonial Yoruba culture. From the keeping of time and the calendar and the use of praise names, to the calligraphy; from the religion and science to the description of the political and military system. All of it is rooted in Yoruba history.
One final thing about culture.
No culture is static. They all change with time. Some aspects are lost, modified, improved. That is inevitable. What we hope for is the result of that change to be something better than what came before. Something that takes the best elements of the past, of what we learned from our parents and ancestors—which works for as many people as possible in the appropriate contexts—improves upon it with cleverness and creativity and then moves forward as we learn new things from each other and new things about our universe. There may be convergence problems along the way but as long as we communicate honestly and openly with each other in good faith, I believe we’ll keep tending towards better, ad infinitum.