powerthroughandprogress

[blackaquokat]

Having finally read Lucas on the Line by Suyi Davies, I'm going to say a thought I already had, but has now been amplified by a factor of 50 after reading this amazing and important installment:

Lucas deserves to call out what shitty friends Mike and Dustin were to him Freshman Year. As a treat.

[reading-writing-rebellion]

Artistic Linage Part 2

After a few busy days I had the time to continue Suyi Davies’ exercise on tracing your artistic linage. 2) Catalysts: What stories (or aspects of stories/storytelling) have you since actively enjoyed, and have spurred in you the desire to write yours? If you have, over time, become drawn to specific styles/kinds of stories, try to articulate why in writing. Are there any specific aspects of…

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[asexualbookbird]

Have You Read My TBR? Round Eight!

I think this one was recommended to me on tumblr? That or an impulse buy, because I feel bad going to my indie bookstore and not buying anything. Nothing's been keeping me from reading it, the timing just hasn't been Right.

[tinynavajoreads]

Currently Reading: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

I had this checked out from the library a couple weeks ago, and just now getting around to reading it. And it is so good so far!!! It's the movie Snowpiercer and Mira Grant's Rolling in the Deep combined and it's terrifying and I love it! Just need to know what happens next and who/what the Children are.

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

[geekcavepodcast]

"The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda" to Novelize 2018 "Black Panther" Comic

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Daniel Acuna's 2018 run of Black Panther placed a man called T'Challa in a cosmic rebellion and introduced the Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda. Now Suyi Davies Okungbowa is adapting the storyline in to the novel Marvel: Black Panther - The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda. The novelization will be published through Penguin Random House.

Across the expanse of space lies a Wakanda vastly different than the one on Earth. This Empire of Wakanda rules over five galaxies with an iron grip and steals the memories of its slaves. One Nameless man trapped in an imperial mining camp has visions of a woman urging him to "Come back to me." This man will fight the oppression, leading him to a band of rebels called the Maroons, who seek to destroy the Empire and restore the memories to the Nameless. The man's skill causes the Maroons to give him the name T'Challa - a title of hope, promise, and responsibility.

"As T'Challa's reputation amongst the rebels and ordinary citizens spreads, whispers of hope begin to swirl. Could this be the true T'Challa of old, the Avenger? The one Who Puts the Knife Where it Belongs? As all eyes turn to him, T'Challa must decide if he will embrace a future of responsibility as their savior or pursue the mystery of his true past." (Marvel Comics)

Marvel: Black Panther - The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda goes on sale on April 29, 2025.

(Image via Marvel Comics - Cover of Marvel: Black Panther - The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda)

[shadow-words]

Book Review: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

_Book Review: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa_ a post apocalyptic fantasy taking place in a handful of high rise apartments that are all that's left of Lagos after the second deluge. @bookstodon@a.gup.pe #books

Lost Ark Dreaming is a post-apocalyptic fantasy taking place in a handful of high rise apartments located in what used to be Lagos Nigeria, which has been drowned along with most of the world in what’s referred to as a Second Deluge. Our three protagonists are an analyst named Yekini, an engineer named Touya, and a mid-level administrator in the Office of the Pinnacle Leadership named Ngozi.…

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Lost Ark Dreaming

By Suyi Davies Okungbowa.

[nzbookwyrm]

[rangurs]

lucas sinclair netflix tv series by stu coming to you 2024.

[reading-writing-rebellion]

Artistic Linage

Wow, that is blurry! Even the full size picture is blurry. Great way to promote something, BN. Anyway, I recently bought this journal from Barnes and Noble. I fell in love with it. You can’t tell by the picture but it’s it’s a pale grey and the renderings of the zodiac signs are pretty cool. It’s clothbound and textured. The paper inside is even quality. Had no idea what I was going to do with it…

[lilithsaintcrow]

"...algorithms are machine choices determined by people's choices, made by those who have decided that the costs of tailoring social media to our own needs and desires—especially when that goes against the platform’s economic goals—must remain high."

[rhetoricandlogic]

Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

May 25, 2024 Gary K. Wolfe

The idea of social stratification enforced through architecture – in other words, high-rises with the rich living at the top – has been a staple of SF imagery at least since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and it’s been extraordinarily useful as a way of exploring everything from overpopulation to Ballardian alienation to urban dystopia to – more recently – the hazards of climate change. A few months ago, I noted that these megastructures showed up in a couple of stories in Wole Talabi’s Convergence Problems, and now a giant tower called the Pinnacle – rigidly segregated into Up­pers, Midders, and Lowers – is the setting for Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming. This led me to wonder if the idea might hold particular resonance for urban Nigeria, and Okungbowa does offer some very chilling observations about the possible future of Lagos. While the novella’s main action is set in a long-inundated Nigeria in an indeterminate future, several interchapters present documents from as early as 2012, and one of these notes that ‘‘about two in three Lagosians live in slums, and a significant number of these communities reside dangerously within reach of the shore.’’ Rather than try to protect these com­munities, the document explains, the governor simply evicted them, citing precedents dating back to colonial times and, in particular, an actual 2016 eviction that displaced some 30,000 people. ‘‘Often, the lands seized in these grabs are then offered to capitalist ventures and investors who gentrify them for more economic purposes from which the government benefits.’’

That, in a nutshell, is the setting and history for the problem that confronts Yekini, a mid-level analyst for a police-like agency called the Commission for the Protection of the Fingers (the ‘‘fingers’’ are five high-rises originally built to house the population above the floods, although only the Pinnacle is still inhabited). Together with a higher-level bureaucrat named Ngozi, she is assigned to investigate a potentially danger­ous breach in one of the lower levels – below the level of the surrounding waters – which she suspects may be not just a leak, but an incursion by creatures called Yemoja’s Children, aquatic dwellers who might recall the creature from the Black Lagoon to Western readers. Joined by a resourceful lower-level foreman named Tuowo, Yekini and Ngozi begin to learn not only about the true nature of the Children, but about the extent to which the elite upper levels might go to protect their own safety and hegemony.

One of the flaws of much dystopian fiction is the failure to credibly map a path from here to there, offering instead half-baked backstories involving convenient catastrophes or violent coups. This is fine as long as the dystopia is to be read as purely metaphorical, but as speculative SF it omits a lot of connective tissue. A striking feature of Lost Ark Dreaming is how those interchapters map directly on to the central narrative, showing how a combination of inevitable climate disaster, predatory capitalism, and chronic inequality can lead credibly from our own present to a society like that of the Pinnacle. The story of an idealistic cop uncovering and then fighting against a cor­rupt system is hardly new, of course, and later the story takes a mystical turn, involving a godlike figure named Queen Conch, that vaguely recalls elements of Rivers Solomon’s The Deep. But Okungbowa’s clear-eyed look at present dangers and the compassion and conviction of his charac­ters as they come to confront the dark realities of their society lend the tale a memorable and even heroic resonance.