here is a saying we have “Haraka haraka haina Baraka”—“Hurry hurry has no blessing.” Slowness is a value in Swahili cultures that I wanted to bring to the forefront, a value that offers more space for concepts like play to be prioritized. And of course, there is a critique of the exploitation of capitalism which shows up often in my different pieces of work.

One significant sticking point was where I had to stop to figure out enough of what warp drives did when turned on to present a valid threat to Va’s life at the end—with something like that, I couldn’t cheap out and invent something out of technobabble.

It was also fun to subvert the portal fantasy trope with that diasporic lens and think about how a kid who’s grown up in Wonderland would find Wonderland normal, and find their “human world,” which they don’t remember, the actual fantasy land.

The original inspo stems from a drunken debate about what makes Scarlett Johanson so appealing to casting directors for science fiction movies of a certain type, and how she must feel about it. What would it be like to be idealized for a form you didn’t choose?

How did “A Sojourn in the Fifth City” originate? What inspirations did you draw on? In the broadest sense, this story is a version of the science-fantasy novel that I started writing when I was fourteen years old, wrote and rewrote many times over high school and early college, but never managed to turn into […]