Mage of Fools

By Eugen Bacon

In the dystopian world of Mafinga, Jasmin must contend with a dictator's sorcerer to cleanse the socialist state of its deadly pollution. Mafinga's malevolent king dislikes books and, together with his sorcerer Atari, has collapsed the environment to almost uninhabitable. The sun has killed all the able men, including Jasmin's husband Godi. But Jasmin has Godi's secret story machine that tells of a better world, far different from the wastelands of Mafinga. Jasmin's crime for possessing the machine and its forbidden literature filled with subversive text is punishable by death. Fate grants a cruel reprieve in the service of a childless queen who claims Jasmin's children as her own. Jasmin is powerless—until she discovers secrets behind the king and his sorcerer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Meerkat Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781946154675

Eugen Bacon

Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She's a Nebula, British Fantasy and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in the Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick Award, and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen is an Otherwise Fellow, and was also announced in the honor list for 'doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction'. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a 'sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work'. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

It happens in slow motion. Jasmin runs inside the castle that stands atop a hill. She races up the winding staircase, hands moving along its mahogany rail shimmering with sheen. The Heidi dress she’s wearing, a flowing thing that plunges down her waist and touches just above her knees, rises and falls with her running. No belt, just front buttons going down, down. She lights up a flight, up another, up, up. She rises with such thrill, such rush, all the way to the nursery in the northeast tower of the marble-coated monolith.

She flings herself into the rotary room—it slowly moves, revolves: a sundial or a snail-paced merry-go-round. It’s a tavern with faint music in the background, an odd melody. The hiss of a snake, a soft clash of cymbals. Arched doorways, pillars rimmed with gold. Bracelets of orange-flamed candles at half-mast. Along the walls, dimly lit paintings inside veils of cloud, each with a version of the Garden of Eden: Eve leaning toward a behemoth serpent. Eve offering a glowing red apple to Adam. Eve and Adam running naked from an ash-haired god—a voluptuous woman full of breasts.

Jasmin catches sight of the children and her heart swells. Two-year-old Mia in her unicorn pajama set, tiny shorts and a T-shirt. Four-year-old Omar in his all-over flying dragon jammies. They lie on the floor, head-to-head, as the nursery spins.

My goatlings.

Mia puckers up at the sight of Jasmin. Omar’s eyes fill with reproach. Days and days of their mother’s absence. She drops to her knees, throws her arms wide. The children yank out of their moment, soar within reach, fall into her breast.

. . . Pause.

Pause for a moment because that’s not the beginning of the story. Rewind, back, back down the stairs. Jasmin tearing backward, down a flight, down another, down, down. Her rush, her thrill ebbing, as she moves away from the nursery, out of the castle with its white walls and white doors, mirrors everywhere. She walks backward along light-splashed lawns and their gardens full of bloodred flowers. She moves, not at a furious pace—just faster than slow. Back, back beyond the Ujamaa monuments of togetherness, sculpted hands of a village holding aloft a naked, black toddler with fat legs and plump cheeks. Back past the courthouse and its long windows, golden drapes in hourglass shapes, bound at the waist by melancholy ribbons. The courthouse splashed with lights from a trail of monster eyes hanging off the ceiling. A dais where the royals sit to give judgment. People go through the entryway peaked with spikes, they never walk out.

Rewind all the way to the egg shuttle—it has no wings—where you enter coordinates into the console and the vessel takes you for an intergalactic ride. The same shuttle that once saw the Neutral Zone, where you gazed at planets like Peridot and Tourmaline and they blinked brighter than jewelry. The shuttle that once lived in the land of Exomoon that had no shortage of xeriscape plants. Its wild blooms, cacti and succulents. Its sky of gargantuan rings by day, tiny moons by night. There, citizens changed color in more spectrum than chameleons.

Same shuttle that airlifts Jasmin to her execution.

Granite enters Jasmin’s stomach as the vessel glides to height, then bullets forward. As the starlit night stretches into the horizon, Jasmin is a prisoner in a silent egg in the sky. She looks down and sees the people of Ujamaa Village in a gather. They gaze up at the egg flickering with incandescent lights as it climbs higher into the skyline with its cargo. Jasmin wonders if, on the face of it, despite the crowd’s helplessness, some question what dies, what lives, and the power of a crowd. She wonders if, one day, a turning point will swing without warning in Mafinga. And when that happens if the same mob—that now stands with limp hands and gazes with bleak eyes at dusk and the egg soaring up the sky toward its scatter of stars—will reach the edge of its stupor, finally tremble and come to life in a murmur that lights to a roar.

JASMIN

1

Tuesday.

Outside the double-glazed window, a speck grows from the moonless night and yawns wide, wider, until its luster washes into the single-roomed space, rectangular and monolithic. One could mistake the room for a cargo container.

The space, one of many units neatly rowed and paralleled in Ujamaa Village, pulses for a moment as the radiance outside grows with its flicker of green, yellow and bronze. The cocktail of incandescent light tugs along a tail of heat. Both light and heat seep through the walls of the khaki-colored shelter, whose metallic sheen is a fabrication, not at all metal.

Light through the window on the short face of the house—the side that gazes toward Central District in the distance—rests on the luminous faces of a mother and her two young children, their eyes pale with deficiency in a ravaged world. It’s a world of citizens packed as goods in units whose short faces all stare toward the Central District that will shortly awaken in the dead of the night. The light drowns the toddler’s cry of wonder.

As sudden as the ray’s emergence, it evanesces and snatches away its radiance, leaving behind hoarfrost silence. A sound unscrolls itself from the darkness outside. First, it’s a thunderhead writing itself through desert country—because this world is dry and naked, barren as its queen.

The lone cry of a wounded creature, a howl or a wail reminiscent of the screech of a black-capped owl, plaintive yet soulful, rises above the flat roofs screening the wasted village. The cry is a dirge that tells an often-story of someone in agony, of a hand stretched out to touch an angel of saving but never reaches. A second thunderhead slits the sound midcry, nobody can save the mortally wounded one.

Jasmin closes her eyes. She needs no one to tell her. She knows.

Everybody knows—except the children. That King Magu’s guards—so few of them, yet so deadly—have found another story machine, and its reader.

2

Siyent yight, says two-year-old Mia. Her owl eyes—evolved to navigate darkness—gaze into Jasmin’s. But they are eyes that are also glows: they not only see but soak light to illuminate her world.

Jasmin does not speak. She’s unpacking the reality of what’s just happened. She is overwhelmed by an emotion that’s not yet rage. Her ears are ringing, a child’s sound toy, but there are no more toys in Mafinga. The country’s reality is cold, gray. Its wind vibrates with the dirge of a better yesterday. It’s a world gone dumb—must all be broken? The bones of the ancestors pop with metamorphic hymns of water that is ruler and land that is slave, as people degenerate into crustaceans.

Siyent yight, Mamm, says Mia again.

Jasmin’s fingers rest on Mia’s twin cornrows that end in pigtails.

Yes. The silent lights.

Someone hurt?

Jasmin is taken aback. She never imagined Mia understood.

The sirens are coming, says Omar in his grown-up voice. Even at four, he hasn’t outgrown the burst of curls on his head. His pale chocolate skin is still baby soft.

Soon, says Jasmin. You know what it means.

She glances at the children still hugged to her hips. They too are readers, partaking of the story machine, they just don’t know it yet. Each time she narrates from the device—

She closes her eyes, unwilling to fathom how much she has endangered them with her oral tales.

I bwashed my teeff.

Good, Mia. Now you, Omar. Make it happen.

He peels himself from gazing at the world out there.

Mia stays. Her eyes seek assurance. I good, Mamm, aight?

You’re always good, dear goatling.

The children know about goats. The goats from the stories Jasmin tells them. Tales of animals so calm, you think they are stupid, but their working minds sharpen with each bleat. Despite their odd pupil shape, how unsettling to a human eye, goats are intelligent beneath the horn.

Jasmin watches as Omar navigates the space between the unpartitioned living area with its metal-like seats and spartan table, its kitchenette with a tiny chiller and microwave, its multipurpose sink, the sleeping area with its floored mattress, its toilet—only a curtain for privacy. One wall is fitted with an automated screen that turns itself on, off at central command. You don’t flick channels to choose the news, sports, documentaries, music or entertainment. Pzzz. Pzzz. The screen comes on at a whim with the propaganda of the moment: sometimes it’s a choir of children in flowing pinafores and jester pantaloons singing slogans. Or the same children in sisal skirts and war paint doing a folk dance, chanting the Hau, Hau, Acha We song about decrying dissenters. Pzzz. Pzzz. The screen goes silent as it does now, momentarily asleep.

All units in Ujamaa Village are the same. They are metallic khaki in color. Everyone’s within a kick, right there, next door. But you never hear anything—except the outside. And, mostly, as just then, the outside world brings the sound of dying.

Once a week you get a pass to use the Ujamaa Facility. It used to have gendered showers: hot sizzles and soap dispensers, a luxury despite the blandness of their products. But there are no more men in the village. Now the sizzler showers and their weekly extravagance are for everyone. There’s no place for modesty.

Whoop. Whoop. The work siren goes.

3

Doors open, doors close.

The citizens of Mafinga respond in unison to the siren. They file out, headed to labor in Central District. Preallocated duties at Ujamaa Factory, Ujamaa Tech, Ujamaa Medico, Ujamaa Yaya and many other Ujamaas await them. The lucky ones, specially favored for an aptitude toward loyalty to the king, serve as guards and supervisors, and return home to snug two-roomers. The skilled ones, Solo and her mates, are also lucky. They live and work in the king’s mines—away from guards and supervisors, away from fear and indignity of day-by-day oppression. The skilled ones are entrusted with drilling mafinite, a gem equal in value to a diamond. But even they are not exempt from a major trait of the king’s paranoia: freedom. They are bound by location and need special permits to leave the mines.

When did it come to this? wonders Jasmin as she and the children exit the room.

They join the sea of bodies, a human march at night-break. Only a fool would leave shelter by day. But you had to see who died, how they died, in the sick bays of Ujamaa Medico to know it wasn’t a good idea to brave daylight.

It’s too dark to see who’s there, bodies clustered in compulsory obedience to community service. They are wrapped in thermals, scarves, threaded coats much thinned from nightly wind. Sometimes, as she walks, Jasmin makes out smells: fresh soap or unwash, but often it’s the stench of despair.

She firmly holds Omar and Mia’s gloved hands. She pushes with them, and a few other mothers and their small children, as they head, first on instinct and then guided by glimmer—the growing flicker of Mama Gambo’s unit. They plow toward the edge of the crowd.

Mama Gambo is a collector. She gathers the young ones, delivers them to a place past what was once an old church, now yawning cobwebs. She takes the children to Ujamaa Yaya. There, children learn slogans, as teachers filter out proclivity to loyalty (these make guards or supervisors), intelligence (these make the king’s miners) or a trade (these make workers).

Jasmin and the children are the first to reach Mama Gambo.

My little soldiers, the older woman says.

Don’t make warriors of my children, says Jasmin.

Mama Gambo doesn’t answer immediately. She smiles at Mia, then Omar. There’s kindness in the shape of her lips, the touch of her fingers. Her expression stays the same when, finally, she looks at Jasmin. Someone’s holding a fart.

More like constipation, says Jasmin.

I can see how that would make you sour. Now an enema . . .

Is a luxury that’s an enemy of the state.

The king and queen live in luxury up the hill.

How is that equality?

Be careful. People are coming. Mama Gambo lowers her voice. It’s treason to simply speak of those slayers.

They are worse than slayers.

But you can’t cut a thorn tree with a twig. Patience. Mama Gambo looks at Mia and Omar. For these ones. Otherwise all we give them is regret.

I thank your kindness to the little ones. Jasmin’s voice is gentler.

She turns to the children. Be good, my goatlings.

Aight, says Mia.

Mama, says Omar. It doesn’t take much to see we’re not baby goats.

You certainly aren’t, my lambs.

Please, Mama.

She knows she’s wrong to call him a lamb. He’s not meek, never quiet, but he is gentle. The word is an endearment for his innocence and sweetness.

On my way, then. But she doesn’t leave.

Mia is picking her nose and sucking her forefinger. Jasmin doesn’t snap at her to stop, as she normally would. Instead, she touches the crowns of her children’s heads as if each was embossed in braille. Her heart is lacerated, torn each night, every moment she must leave them. She’s always known their destinies remain uncertain, still even now she strains to read with her fingers the nonfiction of their tomorrows.

But their eyes gazing into her own tell a different narrative that is too deeply etched into their cores for fathoming. Their stories needle and wheedle into her anguish, her longing. She seeks to prophesy better fortunes for them but, right this moment, her vision is impaired.

She reads nothing in the imaginary bumps and cells in the cornrows and curls, just words in her own head that swirl in a language of Babel, a deliberate confusion of the gods. There are no allies or mentors, just tricksters and shifters, enemies and ordeals that dangle death, never rebirth. There’s no road to resurrection, nothing that lifts with the precision of genetics, just her sweat-drenched fingers from the crowns of their heads.

Go. My daughter, says Mama Gambo.

But she’s not your daughter . . . begins Omar.

Not now, it is not the time for words, says Mama Gambo.

Jasmin smiles through her tears. She hastens to join the workers on their way to Central District and thinks of Mama Gambo. The older woman has seen death. Much death, way before the sickness that took men. Mama Gambo is

[richardderus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the dystopian world of Mafinga, Jasmin must contend with a dictator’s sorcerer to cleanse the socialist state of its deadly pollution.

Mafinga's malevolent king dislikes books and, together with his sorcerer Atari, has collapsed the environment to almost uninhabitable. The sun has killed all the able men, including Jasmin’s husband Godi. But Jasmin has Godi’s secret story machine that tells of a better world, far different from the wastelands of Mafinga. Jasmin’s crime for possessing the machine and its forbidden literature filled with subversive text is punishable by death. Fate grants a cruel reprieve in the service of a childless queen who claims Jasmin’s children as her own. Jasmin is powerless—until she discovers secrets behind the king and his sorcerer.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Lyrical prose...maybe sometimes too lyrical for its own good...telling a tale of monopoly, abuse of power, an apartheid of haves and have-nots, that not coincidentally resembles the modern technological world metastasizing across the agrarian peasantry of Africa and keeping its fruits entirely apart from those who feed them.

The worldbuilding is *stellar*, the narrative drive does not let up, and the plot speaks to my Social Justice Warrior soul. So what happened to that fifth star, you wonder. The story is told in eight parts, each of many chapters, and in almost as many viewpoints. I get that this is a choice made to facilitate the slightly seasick sense of the story’s walled-off world, where nothing is shared, nothing is given away, and the walls that enclose you form strict limits that are transgressed at the greatest possible risk to life and limb. When we learn that technology emanates from actual aliens, it comes less as a surprise than as a peek over a wall...not, for this reader, the best way to induce full investment. The upside of the structure for me was that I was always in a state of readiness for the next shift, the next magical revelation, and the horrors that always lurk where magic and technology collide. But I was always riding along, moving forward, keeping up...never getting to know anyone well enough to feel deeply with them in their tragedies, not even Jasmin.

In a time where the tsunami of Information is drowning the wisdom and the guidance humans need by replacing stories with infotainment, this book’s lushness of both imagination and prose, its demand for you to pay attention to where you are, who is speaking to you, and what they want you to know, is very evocative. It summons darkness, it rings the feeding bell for the monsters implicit...even inherent...in totalitarian systems. Learn what those who least want you to resist least want you to know if you plan to live instead of exist.

Resistance is not, in fact, futile.

Costly. Dreadfully painful. But never futile. Villains can, and must be, fought at every level and with every atom of one’s being. The price is awful, but the price of submission is even worse.

[nooiniin · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A parable about abuse of power and the ultimate victory of the individual. As AngelaJMaher already said: Powerful prose fitting short fiction rather than a full-size novel, where it made for a rather strenous read. The world building defied suspension of disbelief, torture and murder scenes were over the top. What with the message being rammed home with a sledge hammer, I could not bring myself to finish.

[angelajmaher · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A dystopian story of struggle and mystery. Wonderfully strange and original.
And yet, I struggled with it. The literary style is masterful but doesn't lend itself to extended reading. Mostly I could only tackle one chapter at a time. The descriptive prose is wonderful, but overwhelming when used to this degree in a long work.

[linda.a. · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Alchemy can be defined as the process of taking something ordinary and transforming it into something extraordinary and, in a nutshell, this captures the essence of Eugen Bacon’s totally enthralling storytelling. Since first being introduced to it when I read Claiming T-Mo (her 2019 debut novel) and then my subsequent reading of various collections of her short stories and other novels, I’ve come to enjoy and appreciate her eloquent, lyrical and passionate use of language, her portrayals of convincing, memorable characters, her ability to create stories within stories, to seamlessly blend genres and to inexorably draw me into her fictional world-building.
These previous experiences meant that not only was I feeling excited about reading Mage of Fools, but that my expectations were already high! So, I’ve been delighted to discover that not only has she lost none of her magic touch, but I think that this is her finest novel yet. As I think the publisher’s synopsis gives enough clues to intrigue potential readers, I don’t want to risk introducing spoilers by going into too much detail about how the story unfolds so will focus my reflections on what made it such a rewarding, and enchanting, a read for me.
The story is divided into eight sections (Prologue, Jasmin, Ujamaa [the omnipresent corporation which controls all aspects of life for the citizens of Mafinga] The Royal Household, Atari, The Resistance, Denouement and Epilogue) and each of the main sections is divided into short chapters. I found that this construction worked very effectively to tell Jasmin’s story through a gradual portrayal of the background to the horrors she, her children and fellow-citizens are facing in the dark, dystopian world of Mafinga. Although it’s clear from the beginning of the story that Atari, the mysterious sorcerer, is an all-powerful, malign character who wields enormous influence over the king, it isn’t until more than halfway through the story, that the reader discovers who he is and how he ended up in Mafinga. In less confident hands this sudden switch from sections which had Jasmin at their heart, to one in which she didn’t appear, could have felt disruptive but instead felt perfectly timed.
The tension-inducing two-page prologue begins at a future point in Jasmin’s story before pausing to rewind and offer snapshots of what has already happened and what is yet to come. This powerful and intriguing introduction immediately drew me into her world, the remaining chapters kept me there and, finally, the one-page epilogue served as a reminder that good stories can never truly end because the reader will continue to wonder what the future holds for the characters.
Brave, resourceful Jasmin is a wonderful character who, even though she struggles to remember what life was like before, and is still mourning the loss of her husband Godi, is determined to continue using his now forbidden story machine to remind herself, and tell her much-cherished children, stories of a better world. I loved all the literary allusions which threaded their way through the storytelling, the blend of contemporary literature with ancient folklore providing a reminder that storytelling is ageless and serves many functions. The descriptions of her interactions with four-year-old Omar, in his ‘all-over flying dragon jammies’, and two-year-old Mia in her two-piece unicorn ones, provided not only some delightful moments of lightness, but also served as a reminder of the lengths a mother will go to protect her children.
Although the author’s dystopian world of Mafinga is an imaginary one, much of the power of her story lies in the fact that, with its depictions of a totalitarian regime which pays lip-service to equality whilst practising menticide (be warned, some of the descriptions of the brutality employed to control the population and discourage rebellion are truly horrific), of the devastating effects of climate change, of the inequalities in society (most of the citizens are living in shipping-containers whilst a small, elite group enjoys a life of palatial luxury), it is a depressingly recognisable one.
The marketing categories are listed as ‘Afrofuturist, fantasy, dark fantasy, science fiction and dystopian’ but whilst it’s true that there are elements of all these genres in Eugen Bacon’s novel, it’s the creative skill with which she weaves them together which make this such an affecting story to read. Yes, it’s dark and disturbingly brutal at times but it’s not without moments of humour, hope and a belief that a better future is possible and I have no hesitation in recommending it. If you’re already familiar with the author’s writing you’ll need no persuading but if you aren’t, I think Mage of Fools would make good introduction to her captivating storytelling.

[suebaldwin12 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

couldn't finish, the use of adjectives was over the top and incredibly irritating, when a simple description would do the author pads it to the point of silliness, every sentence seems to need major elaboration, when it actually doesn't - she needs a good editor.

[tinac1_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I’m not sure if I started reading this when I was too tired but this story hasn’t grabbed me, yes the language and how it is put together is interesting but I found no joy or hope in the first few chapters so in the end I gave decided not to finish it, a rare occurrence for me.

[viennamax-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ujamaa is not only a strange place to live in. It's a place where the sun is deadly and freedom to the uttermost eradicated. Why? Well, Atari from Exomoon - a strange guy who had a really poor childhood - has landed the spot and transformed it into a communistic bunch of sociopaths. Enters Jasmin meeting the Queen...

Sci-Fi at its best mixed in with very poetic language. Good stuff for every freedom fighter!