Apex Magazine Issue 120: Apex Magazine, #120

By Jason Sizemore

Apex Magazine is an online digital zine of short fiction.

 

EDITORIAL
Our Audacity by Maurice Broaddus
Words from the Editor-in-Chief by Jason Sizemore

FICTION
Dune Song by Suyi Davies Okungbawa
Fugue State by Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due
N-Coin by Tobias S. Buckell
Pimp My Airship (novel excerpt) by Maurice Broaddus
Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good by LaShawn M. Wanak
When We Dream We Are Our God by Wole Talabi

NONFICTION
Let's Talk About Afrofuturism by Troy L. Wiggins

INTERVIEWS
Interview with Author Steven Barnes by Andrea Johnson
Interview with Cover Artist Godwin Akpan by Russell Dickerson

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apex Publications
• Release date: May 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201733629

Jason Sizemore

Jason Sizemore is a writer and editor who lives in Lexington, KY. He owns Apex Publications, an SF, fantasy, and horror small press, and has twice been nominated for the Hugo Award for his editing work on Apex Magazine. Stay current with his latest news and ramblings via his Twitter feed handle @apexjason.

Book preview

Apex Magazine

Issue 120, May 2019

Steven Barnes Tananarive Due Suyi Davies Okungbowa Tobias S. Buckell LaShawn M. Wanak Wole Talabi Troy L. Wiggins

Edited by

Jason Sizemore

Edited by

Maurice Broaddus

Apex Publications

Contents

Words from the Editor-in-Chief by Jason Sizemore

Our Audacity by Maurice Broaddus, guest editor

Dune Song by Suyi Davies Okungbawa

Fugue State by Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due

Interview with Author Steven Barnes by Andrea Johnson

N-Coin by Tobias S. Buckell

Pimp My Airship (novel excerpt) by Maurice Broaddus

(Apex) Pimp My Airship

Let’s Talk About Afrofuturism by Troy L. Wiggins

Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good by LaShawn M. Wanak

When We Dream We Are Our God by Wole Talabi

Interview with Cover Artist Godwin Akpan by Russell Dickerson

Contributor Bios

Maurice Broaddus

Our Audacity by Maurice Broaddus, guest editor

Afrofuturism is me, us, as Black people, seeing ourselves in the future. Being as magical as we want to be … We get to paint a different world, on our own terms. I get to be whatever I want to be through Afrofuturism.

Janelle Monae

It’s always a valuable exercise to take stock of who you are outside of the hot buzzwords of the day. I was asked recently to sum up my faith without using any Christian jargon. I said that what I believe in is a living hope. The idea of that being the core of my belief weighed on me because of how profoundly it resonated with me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that idea undergirds who I am not only as a person of faith but as a community organizer and as a writer.

Afrofuturism. Africanfuturism. Caribbean Futurism. Afritopia.

No matter what it’s called, it’s the intersection of the black cultural lens with art, technology, and liberation. It’s the African diaspora creating a framework to critique the past and dream of possible futures. As a bridge connecting the past to the future, Afrofuturism embraces the concept of Sankofa, a word in the Twi language (Ghana) that means go back and get it or it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.

As a part of my community organizing work, I host a monthly conversation called Afrofuture Fridays where we use Afrofuturist art to carve out room to dream about where we want to be as a community. It’s what black artists—black people, period—have always done, long before the term Afrofuturism was coined in 1994. Our art ponders the questions Where are we now? Where do we want to be? and How do we get there? It’s rooted in black people imagining a better future for ourselves, on our terms, as we design blueprints to find new ways to not only understand ourselves but the world around us.

We need images of tomorrow and our people need them more than most.

Samuel Delany

Which brings me to this issue of Apex Magazine. I could call it our Afrofuturist issue, but I think of it as an identity issue. The stories build awareness and raise consciousness, as identity stories do, as we explore who we are. They begin with a journey of self-discovery (like in Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Dune Song) and the importance of defining ourselves (as Troy L. Wiggins addresses in Let’s Talk About Afrofuturism). Sometimes it’s simply about our right to be and live (as in LaShawn M. Wanak’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good).

The stories allow space for conversations about race, our humanity, and the insidious nature of oppression that people often don’t know how to have. Be it critiquing the politics of today (in Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes’ Fugue State) or in mapping possible ways for us to move forward as a people (like Tobias S. Buckell’s N-Coin).

Most importantly, we dream. Together (thus Wole Talabi’s When We Dream We Are Our God).

Sometimes it’s an act of resistance just to portray ourselves with a future.

Tananarive Due

In doing community organizing, in any struggle to break apart systemic baggage, no matter where you find yourself or how you do it, what you’re up against can loom so large, the battle can seem hopeless. There are many dark nights of the soul, when you lay awake wondering what’s the point? and are tempted to give up. The only thing that keeps you going is a living hope. A radial (re-)imagining. Daring to dream of a better future, which is the first act of resistance. Our audacity.

There is more to life than just survival. Part of what it means to truly live is to have something to believe in. On the last day of Kwanzaa, the principle we celebrate is Imani, which means faith. It means to believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle. It, too, points to a living hope that informs and infuses us. Sometimes life is about imagining the possibilities of what could be. Believing in the promise of things that could be. Just as part of recognizing our humanity is realizing that we deserve to simply … be. No matter what that looks like. We deserve to live. And we deserve to dream.

Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Dune Song by Suyi Davies Okungbawa

4,600 words

Do not go out to the dunes, the Chief says to Isiuwa. You’d do well not to awaken the wrath of the whistling gods.

This does not stop Nata from trying to leave again.

Once the New Moon assembly is over, she slinks away to the community market. This early in the morning, the desert haze hangs heavy, and everything moves in stutters, like tortoises in the sand. The sun is out and warm, not hot because Isiuwa isn’t really in a desert; or at least, not like the deserts the Elders speak of when they tell us about the world before it was all dunes.

Isiuwa moves like a buzz, like sandflies in formation. The market is a manifestation of this, laid out in wide corridors of bamboo and cloth, a neat crisscross of pathways. Bodies scuttle along, dressed in cloth wrapped to battle every iteration of dust-laden wind. No one pays Nata any heed—no one ever does—as she drags a bag too big for her frame, folds of cloak falling over her arm multiple times so that she has to stop every now and then to wrap them again. Her hair is wild with fraying edges, and her eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, but Isiuwa does not notice.

First, she goes to the moulder. The bulk of what she has available for barter here is household jars and utensils she will no longer need. The man takes everything without a word and pays her in sugarcane, which is just as well because quenching thirst is the number one priority out there. Next, she takes Mam’s big old metal box, the one with which she used to make those contraptions for the village. No one in Isiuwa has tools like these any longer; strange, archaic, from the time before sand. It was the only thing Nata could salvage after Mam’s disappearance. It still contains all her tools for carving and repairing artifacts no longer here. When she places it in front of Isiuwa’s prime fruit merchant, he stares at it for a long time.

They will catch you, he says. Again.

Maybe, Nata says. Maybe not.

He nods and gives her brown sugar and dried fruit for it.

She leaves her most valuable barter for last. She hefts her flatwood under her arm and visits the woodworker, the same woman who helped her find the bulk of old tree Mam carved for her into this sleek, flat thing polished with paraffin wax. Wood is so scarce now, unlike in the early days of sand, Mam used to say. This could literally be Nata’s most prized possession.

The woodworker isn’t there, but her apprentices are, and they offer her a good amount of water in an earthen jar. She haggles and gets some bread and roasted termites thrown in before she lets them have it, staring as they discuss butchering it to barter in bits.

She remembers how she cried and cried to Mam that she must, must have a flatwood. One just like those in the books the Elders keep in the archives of artefacts before dunes, which only they, the Chief, and their novitiates are allowed access to (though Mam somehow managed to have that one). She remembers having hopes that one day, even if for just a day, she would go out to the dunes with the flatwood and slide down the up-flow like the children did in the pictures in that book. But it’s too late for that. This dream will belong to someone else now.

Nata leaves them without saying goodbye. Goodbye would mean that she is bidding positive farewell to Isiuwa, but no, she really isn’t. She hopes that the minute she steps out of the bamboo fence, the sun will lean down and slap the settlement with fire, for everything they have done to her, to Mam. She hopes that all the dunes will whistle at once, a harmony of dooming dissonance, and the sand will flow and sweep over all of Isiuwa like a great ocean so that no one will ever need to know pain like hers again.

But first, she must get Tasénóguan.

Do not go out to the dunes, the Chief tells Isiuwa. The gods will whistle you to death.

Isiuwa listens to a dune whistle about once every moon-cycle. Each time, the sand advances on Isiuwa, moving with a morose, flutelike song, the only sound to plant tears in their chest that does not come from a living being. A shrill, underlined by wind rushing through a tube. The Chief calls it the whistle of the gods and says it is the sound of an errant person being taken. Every time an errant person dares venture beyond their allowance and ends up taken by the dunes—as they always are—the dunes move towards Isiuwa. The whistle is a warning, a warning that those of the world before it was punished with sand refused to heed. The Chief tells a story of a time before the old world, when it was once punished in the same way, but by the gods of water. It is Isiuwa’s duty to preserve this order and bring forth the next world.

Isiuwa knows the Chief is right because he bears a cross on Isiuwa’s behalf, along with the troupe of Elders, sentries, and novitiates: the cross of going beyond the fence and seeking solutions, praying to the gods and asking them to stop moving the dunes closer. The troupe sometimes returns with strange things they’ve salvaged from the sand, things that look like they belong to another time, and the Elders keep them in the archive. The Chief reminds us that this is not a privilege but a burden, for it is impossible to look upon the face of the gods and live; and every time the troupe returns home intact is a blessing from the whistling gods. Isiuwa nods and remains behind the fence; remains grateful.

Not Nata’s Mam, though.

Mam was born stubborn. She said so often herself, that it wasn’t wise to take things that came from the mouth of man, which confused Nata because those words came from her mouth. Mam lived by this practice too. Nata knows how many times Mam disregarded Isiuwa and slipped out of the fence (five). The dry bamboo barricade wasn’t really what kept Isiuwa in, Mam said. Bamboo was easy to slip through. Words planted in the mind, not so much.

Mam was an expert at that, the slipping; slipping through the fence, slipping through time and space, slipping in and out of proper reason, so that many times Isiuwa forgot she was even there, that Nata was even there. Many times, Isiuwa were surprised when they appeared, struggled to remember where they were from, wondered why they were still here and had not been offered to the gods already as appeasement.

It was easy for Nata and Mam to fade from the mind, being shunted to the edge, living in the outermost corner of the settlement where scorpions abound and only those deemed unworthy were offered land to build shelter. Nata blamed Mam in the beginning, believing it was her fault, that she could’ve just stopped arguing with the Elders, telling them that there were no whistling gods, that the civilization under the sand