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The Best Fiction Books » Science Fiction

The Old Drift: A Novel by Namwali Serpell
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The Old Drift: A Novel

by Namwali Serpell

Recommendations from our site

“This came out in 2019, and it was a phenomenal debut – it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. It’s set in Zambia. It’s organized as a set of multiple stories following different people, members of several families with intertwining stories, over three generations: the grandmothers, the mothers, and the daughters…What makes it science fantasy to me – and I don’t think that phrase was used to describe it at the time very much, but I’m applying it – is that this book commits very deeply to both the fantastical and science fictional devices in these different narratives.” Read more...

The Best Science Fantasy

Vajra Chandrasekera, Novelist

“Some people might prefer to call this type of book speculative fiction rather than science fiction. I’m not really here to have those kinds of arguments, but it’s brilliant to have this book on a science fiction list, because that means that we’re going to find a lot of new audiences for this book and we’re also pushing at the boundaries of what people (and publishers!) might consider to be science fictional. And it’s certainly a book that was being talked about within science fiction circles, even if it wasn’t necessarily branded that way.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2020

Tom Hunter, Journalist

Other books by Namwali Serpell

The Furrows: An Elegy by Namwali Serpell

The Furrows: An Elegy
by Namwali Serpell

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