Reading: Binti
Feb. 24th, 2018 02:49 pmNnedi Okorafor's Binti is another of the SF novellas Tor have been bringing out over the last few years, and won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novella. It's the story of Binti, a young woman from an insular minority culture who is the first of her people to be offered a place at a prestigious offworld university, and who runs away from her home to take up her place there despite her family's opposition.
I really liked the worldbuilding in this, and wanted to learn much more about Binti's culture, the other cultures she encounters and their tech (living spaceships 'closely related to shrimp'! Astrolabes powered by mathematics which fulfil the functions smartphones do for us!). I thought the plot felt a bit rushed and was resolved too easily, and at least in part by something that was rather too much of a deus ex machina, and none of the characters other than Binti got much in the way of development; it might have been better as a full-length novel rather than a novella.
I really liked the worldbuilding in this, and wanted to learn much more about Binti's culture, the other cultures she encounters and their tech (living spaceships 'closely related to shrimp'! Astrolabes powered by mathematics which fulfil the functions smartphones do for us!). I thought the plot felt a bit rushed and was resolved too easily, and at least in part by something that was rather too much of a deus ex machina, and none of the characters other than Binti got much in the way of development; it might have been better as a full-length novel rather than a novella.