One college-bound young woman's very bad time in space

"Binti" by Nnedi Okorafor
Recommended Grades: 9-12

Binti is a young woman who’s a prodigy in mathematics and communication, living in a future time when humans from all cultures of the world have access to space travel, and are in contact with several space-faring alien societies.

She is the first woman of her people, the Himba of Namibia and Angola, to be invited to study advanced mathematics at a prestigious university in another star system. She is the first in her family to even want to leave the village they live in long-term, let alone the planet. Full  of hope, she leaves earth on a spaceship.

Everything goes horribly wrong in space. She will have to use her wits, the knowledge that her elders taught her, and her incredible communication skills to survive conflicts with a jellyfish-like alien race that seeks to destroy her new university home.

The worldbuilding and technology in this story is so much more creative and groundbreaking than any science fiction television show or movie of today, even though the book was published almost 10 years ago now. Its centering of the way of life of a culture that has, by the futuristic setting of this book, stood up to the assimilative efforts of Eurocentric colonial capitalism for many centuries is remarkable on its own, but that’s just the beginning of its originality.

Binti’s Himba culture isn’t just a costume for her character. It forms core parts of her characterization and of the plot. This reliably places this series into the science fiction sub-genre of Afrofuturism.

The action is exciting and fast-paced, and the plot is compelling. I found myself not wanting to put it down before I reached the end.

The themes of the story revolve around coexistence with cultures that one doesn’t share. This could fit into larger unit about cross-cultural understanding.

There is some brutal violence in this story. For this reason, I recommend keeping this book, and the rest of its trilogy, available for all science fiction enthusiasts older than 9^th grade, who don’t mind a little violence.

Word count: 330 Words

Content Warnings (contains spoilers): 

Brutal alien violence, blood, imprisonment, body horror. Note that the violence is the most brutal for just one sequence near the beginning, so if readers are uneasy about it, but can get past that, they could be encouraged to continue without undue fear.