Bulawayo, NoViolet
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
Pseudonym of Zimbabwean author academic and author Elizabeth Zandile Tshele (1981- ), in US from early adulthood; active from around 2010. Her first novel, the nonfantastic We Need New Names (2013), was widely acclaimed. Her second, Glory (2022), is a strongly Satirical Beast Fable on the lines of George Orwell's Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945 chap) [for Beast Fable see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. Though it would stretch traditional definitions to designate as Equipoisal with sf in its use of topoi, like the Near-Future-ish intrusions of a planetary Media Landscape here adduced, there is a clear sense that its expert and multiplex marrying of various registers of story out of contemporary Fantastika marks it, and not incidentally Afrofuturism in general, as a marker of how to explore and recognize the state of the world: long a central task of "pure" sf. The story itself follows the senile degeneration of Old Horse, whose long tyrannical rule over the imaginary African country of Jidada is reaching terminus; a potential successor begins to create havoc; a multifarious animal cast lives as best it can through the catastrophe. [JC]
Elizabeth Zandile Tshele
born Tsholotsho, Zimbabwe: 12 October 1981
works (selected)
- Glory (New York: Viking, 2022) [hb/]
links
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