Chisom is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. His short stories have been featured on Omenana, Apex, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2023, African Ghosts anthology, Isele, Mythaxis, ZamaShorts, and elsewhere. His short story, “Ancestors’s Gift” won the 2024 Tractor Beam short story contest. He was a finalist for the Seattle Worldcon Short Story Contest, longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Awards, and is the winner of the 2025 Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Fiction Short Story.

1) Which Nigerian city do you live in, and what is it like?

I live in Lagos and it’s quite an interesting city. It wants to be everything at the same time, so it has its hands in many places. Some parts of the city are quite urban and there are houses in estates that run into millions of dollars, but there are also shantytowns with houses built from corrugated sheets. Also, there are churches in almost every street corner, but someone can pick your pocket right in front of one if you’re not careful. Lol. It’s a jack of all trades and master of many.

2) I know relatively little about African science fiction, but I get the impression that Nigeria has a particularly lively and growing SF scene. Would you agree? If so, what do you think accounts for this growth, and how does the Nigerian scene compare with those in other African countries?

I agree with you that it has a growing speculative fiction scene, “growing” being the key word. Most people who come to literature and writing in these parts usually do so through the literary fiction and (more recently) romance route. Nigerian writers have broken a lot of ground in those areas so they’re the most popular. Genre fiction over here is still picking up steam and trying to catch up. Longtime torch bearers like Nnedi Okorafor, Wole Talabi, Tade Thompson, and others, have helped spread the word through their extensive works, but a new crop of writers are finding their voices too and doing magic. Look out for the works of folks like Pemi Aguda, Uchechukwu Nwaka, Plangdi Neple, Somto Ihezue, Osahon Ize-Iyamu, Gabrielle Emem Harry, amongst many others, and you’ll see exactly why the genre is on the rise here. I think some other things that are also driving this growth are social media, genre literary magazines, and the prospect of writers getting paid for their works. Social media has helped us find outlets willing to platform our writings, and the knowledge that we can earn something from that is enough to keep some of us writing. I think something similar too is happening across other African countries. These little fires are spreading everywhere.

From Across Time (2024)

A woman discovers a hidden message from a time-traveling lover who erased their love story to save it. No one remembers it, no proof remains except a video, and she decides to build a time machine to find her.

3) In your story From Across Time, the heroine Adaeze experiences the emotional consequences of a relationship she cannot remember. What interested you in exploring the emotional impact of a relationship that only one person bears memory of?

The thing that got me thinking about this story, like I usually say, was a short story by Vajra Chandrasekera titled Peristalsis. In the story, he used a concept that involved the two main characters watching a movie of themselves on TV. They hadn’t seen this movie before and thus didn’t know how it was going to play out, so they were keen on following it. The story moved between the characters in the real world and the version of themselves in the screen, and this interesting technique got me thinking: What if one character was on the other side and was trying desperately to communicate with the other who didn’t remember them again? Then, because I love exploring themes around time travel, I asked, again, what if they were distances from each other in time?

4) Is the woman in the video being selfless by preserving the memory of their love, or selfish by forcing Adaeze to live with a loss she would otherwise never have known?

I think it’s a bit of both. She feels terrible for taking away the memories of their beautiful relationship from Adaeze, so she wants to make up for that by telling her about it. In this way, we can say that she’s selfish. She’s inflicting memories on someone who would have otherwise lived her life perfectly without them, just to assuage her guilt. But she’s also giving Adaeze a gift, one Adaeze herself isn’t sure she’d have given back if the option presented itself, because that information is precious to her.

5)The ending suggests that the heroine values knowing the truth over the comfort of blissful ignorance. Was that an important theme you wanted to explore?

Not really. That ending just came to me as I was drawing close to completing the story and it just felt like the most natural place to leave things off.

Prerequisites for the creation of a possible world (2025)

When a futuristic simulated World's Fair unexpectedly begins to malfunction, an undercover employee must navigate the collapsing digital past while a major technological crisis threatens the entire enterprise.

6) What interests you about the futures people imagined in the past, especially those that never came true?

The present we are living now is largely as a result of the imaginings and postulations of people who lived in the past. Someone imagined humans flying like birds through the air and got to work on the idea, and today the skies are filled with airplanes. Someone once imagined communicating with someone else far away from them wirelessly, and so they began to manipulate radio waves. Today, we have cell phones. Things we have now began from past predictions, and so will things in the future. But there are also tons of things people thought about that never came to fruition; technologies (flying cars come to mind, at least for now), societies, and all. I like to think about them too, and that’s how I came to the idea of the story.

7) Why is belief in a prediction one of the four prerequisites for recreating a possible world? What role does belief play in this process?

Because I believe that the level of conviction a creator has in their idea, amongst other things, contributes greatly to whether the idea would eventually be brought to fruition. In the story, a giant AI simulator builds photorealistic worlds that people from different planets can come and take tours in. These worlds are the imaginations of earth people from the distant past. They’re predictions of how things would look like, but were ultimately wrong about. So these future people in the story then use this AI to create that world just to connect with the people of old. But the AI can only proceed to create such a world if there was sufficient evidence that the people who predicted them believed in them completely, even though it never came to pass. It’s one of the prerequisites that the AI demands, because without that, it doesn’t think that world would be believable after building it.

To the Death (2023)

A man's feud with his sister's abusive police boyfriend moves into their dreams, where the officer tries to kill him every night.

8) Your story To the Death suggests that understanding someone's deepest fears can be a powerful way to defeat them. Do you think this kind of psychological insight is a form of power?

I think so. Think of the ways big tech companies go to lengths to obtain private data of their customers. The way they use that information to eventually force their users to stay glued to their platform like zombies, eventually divulging more data. This isn’t exactly what happens in the story, but it’s a version of it. The protagonist used information gathering to access his adversary’s weaknesses, and used that in a spiritual warfare against him.

9) When the protagonist and the policeman fight in their dreams, are they experiencing lucid dreams? I've had a few myself, and I find the experience fascinating.

Would have been interesting too if they were lucid, but I just wanted to set these dreams in the actual dream realm to add to the spookiness of the story. I don’t know how well I achieved that eerie feel though. I just hope readers find the story interesting enough.

10) To conclude, what are you currently working on?

At this moment, I’m writing a story for the volume 2 of the Applied African Speculative Fiction anthology. It’s a collaborative project between speculative fiction writers and experts in different fields. So I’ll be working with a renowned expert to deliver a scientifically accurate and grounded story. On the longer term, I’m still hoping to put together my short story collection. Hopefully I manage to achieve that in the nearest future.

#shortinterviews #umeh #nigeria

Adedapo Adeniyi is a promising 20 yo abstract SF author from Ilorin, Nigeria.

Disclaimer: you should read The Dilemma of the He and His House, House? then Mosquito Farm before reading the interview.

Which Nigerian city do you live in? Can you describe it for us?

I live in Ilorin, it's in Kwara State. I think Ilorin is great, I've lived here all my life, it's claustrophobic and surreal, simultaneously very big and very small, like it's breathing, there's also an eerie air here that a lot of the artists that live here can attest to. My favorite part about it is that we're in what I like to call Ilorin's renaissance era, where the youth are becoming more sensitized to art and exploring themselves in relations to the emotions and mindspace of the city.

In your Abstractism Manifesto, you mention God multiple times. What is God, from your perspective, and what role does He play in your life?

(note from SFSS: Abstractism is a term coined by Adedapo, defining it as a genre/philosophy that functions as an amalgamation of solipsism, surrealism, psychedelia, psychology and the subjectivity of reality; he proposes the dissolution of form into true abstracts.)

I like to think of God in many ways, of course as the ultimate entity, divine, the creator of all, and also as an expression of our true selves.

I grew up Christian, I'm still Christian. I have a very different relationship with God now where I'm constantly asking who He is in me, and not just who. He is like I'm trying to study Him.

Gemini's synopsis of The Dilemma: This is a story about a man who is confused about his identity. It discusses his house and its origins. The man tells others the story of the house, but he cannot remember it. He eventually realizes that he is the house.

In your story The Dilemma of the He and His House, House?, that we'll call The Dilemma for brevity purpose, you write at one point: “I will stop trying to encompass it in words. It is the truth”. What do you mean by that?

I like to think that there are certain symbols or aspects of my work that can't be expressed through familiar language, because there are no words to use to describe them, they're otherworldly, true, void of the taints of this reality.

What does “void of the taints of this reality” mean?

A psychedelic trip, an orgasm, a feeling of being possessed by the Holy Spirit. There's a lot of ways you could try explaining how they feel, but the language we know doesn't have all the words to express these feelings, these experiences. They're religious.

In The Dilemma, the hero is being told: “You are closed to the knowing, you should open yourself”. Is this a reference to the word Ephphatha in Mark's Gospel? Can you explain what this means to you?

(Note from SFSS: Ephphatha, which means open yourself, was said by Jesus to a deaf-mute man in the book of Mark)

Huh, I had no idea what that meant, I just googled it, funny how these things work. When the main character, The He, is told that phrase, it's because he's still in doubt that he's the God figure in the story, and for him to realize that, he has to kill the doubt and start thinking in maybes and what ifs.

It's solipsism logic, open yourself to the knowing that all exists because of you and it becomes so, close yourself to it and you remain oblivious all your life.

Adedapo's synopsis of Mosquito Farm: Mosquito Farm is a story set in futurist Nigeria about Jomi, an enforcer who after making a grave decision, descends into insanity and faces the conflict of the fact that he's been living a lie.

Mosquito Farm reminds me of Philip K. Dick stories. He's an influence of yours, right?

Yes, PKD is my favorite writer, I love how he revolutionalized paranoid fiction and the idea of subjective reality in science fiction, so Mosquito Farm is in a sense a product of that, but with Nigerian sensibilities.

Funny how you mention “air addicts” in Mosquito Farm. I always thought that my addiction to oxygen was healthy

I'd say it's healthy right now, but when we consider pollution and the amount of toxins we're exposed to every day, it isn't far off to say that the air we're breathing casually now can in decades become toxic and hallucinogenic.

I think it's my duty as a sci-fi writer to consider worst case scenarios in the future over best cases.

At the beginning of the story, two characters have a simultaneous thought. This happened to two friends of mine (one of them was my best friend and died last year)

Oh I'm so sorry to hear that.

The idea of simultaneously having a thought with another person came from my belief that us humans are evolving towards telepathy, it's happened multiple times to me with people very close to me.

Of course, the root of the thought they're sharing is revealed at the end of the story as a shared obsession amongst people in Eko Futura.

Your description of people addicted to air and hallucinating reminded me of people I know who suffered from mental illness as a result of Covid lockdowns

The story definitely grew from my perception of a post pandemic world and how it affected consciousness.

With us being in lockdown for almost a year, it affected our mental health, and that was us not interacting with infected air, I flipped that and made the insanity air borne.

At one point of the story, one of the characters say: “Thank God for Western medicine”. I don't know how Western medicine is perceived in Nigeria, but in the west there is for sure a growing mistrust for it, especially since the Covid vaccines

There's a growing mistrust for it here as well, but the idea of the story was that the people in Eko Futura have a complex against the infected people living outside the utopia, and when they say “thank God for Western medicine,” they're thanking God for its accessibility to them.

At another point of the story, someone has to decide whether he should kill a child or not. I know an Irak veteran (not the vet I interviewed here, someone else) who had to do it, he got PTSD

Oh yeah, the blueprint of the story is this fast-paced PTSD, where what he's done starts to haunt him as soon as he does it, just because he's never been confronted with something as grotesque as killing a child before.

In your story, a character makes a prayer. Here is how I pray: I talk to God spontaneously, and it helps me clarifying what I'm living/doing

That's kind of what he does too, he asks God for clarity.

At the end of the story, the hero has to make a tough choice. I think he'll make the right one

I guess we'll never know.

I have trouble understanding abstracts, that's why I didn't really understand The Dilemma. I understood Mosquito Farm, though, because it's much more concrete

Mosquito Farm is definitely more accessible, but The Dilemma was the first story I wrote after the manifesto and it perfectly encapsulates abstractism ; Mosquito Farm leans more towards Africanfuturism and paranoid fiction with abstract sensibilities.

On your X account, your pinned tweet says death to poetry. However, I think that this story is full packed of poetry

I grew up around calculative, systematic poetry, my work is a rejection of that.

What are you currently working on?

Well, I finished my first novel a couple months ago. I'm currently doing research for my next one and learning how to make short films and experimenting with visual language.

Where can we buy your novel?

It's not out yet, sadly.

A lot of my readers are atheists. What would you say to them?

I don't think anybody's really an atheist, I think we all have a strong connection to some entity, albeit ambiguous, but yeah I think I'd ask them what they think is out there, or who.

If you had one Nigerian tune to share, what would it be?

You're very gifted, please keep practicing, one day you'll be famous, maybe

Thank you for this. I really believe it too. I want to reinvent literature and cinema as a Nigerian, always been my future.

Thank you for this interview, Adedapo

Thank you as well, Guy.

#adeniyi #shortinterviews #nigeria

WOLE TALABI is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. He is the author of the nebula and BSFA award nominated novel SHIGIDI AND THE BRASS HEAD OF OBALUFON (DAW books/Gollancz) one of the Washington Posts Top 10 Science fiction and fantasy books of 2023. His short fiction has appeared in places like Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Africa Risen and is collected in the books CONVERGENCE PROBLEMS (DAW books, 2024) and INCOMPLETE SOLUTIONS (Luna Press, 2019). He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, BSFA and Locus awards, as well as the Caine Prize for African Writing. He has won the Nommo award for African speculative fiction and the Sidewise award for Alternate History. He has edited five anthologies including the acclaimed AFRICANFUTURISM: AN ANTHOLOGY (Brittlepaper, 2020) and MOTHERSOUND: THE SAUÚTIVERSE ANTHOLOGY (Android Press, 2023). He likes scuba diving, elegant equations, and oddly shaped things. He currently lives and works in Australia. Find him at wtalabi.wordpress.com and at @wtalabi on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky and Tiktok.

1) According to you and apart from the number of words, what is the main difference between a short story and a novel?

I think a short story is primarily asking one question or exploring one idea or illustrating one theme and as such it has just enough of what it needs (character, plot, etc.) to execute that effectively. A novel may have multiple ideas or questions or concepts, or even if it has on one main one, it will typically have others that it touches on, in service of that larger, main idea of theme and it carries as much as it needs to explore them fully.

2) What's your favorite short story?

The impossible question. There are far too many to list. So instead I'll just mention three stories I love. The ones that come to mind first right now. Those would be Exhalation by Ted Chiang, Spider The Artist by Nnedi Okorafor, and A Walk In The Sun by Geoffrey Landis.

3) What's your favorite short story written by you?

The second impossible question. This is like asking a parent to choose a favorite child. So instead I'll change the question to one that's different but has the same spirit. Which 3 of my short stories do I feel illustrate my writing the most? I'd say:

1. When We Dream We Are Our God
2. A Dream Of Electric Mothers
3. The Regression Test

4) How does your African heritage influence your science fiction writing?

Well I grew up in Nigeria which is a fascinating place. The blend of languages, cultures, philosophies, religions, beliefs, economics and so much more all existing side by side is dizzying. And the modern country, especially in large urban centres like Lagos, full of young, eager people, tends to have a chaotic energy that’s hard to describe, something I try to capture in most of my fiction. I am also more specifically ethnically Yoruba and Yoruba culture has an intricate traditional belief system that includes a rich pantheon, complex philosophies and technologies, intricate rituals and so much more. While I grew up urban and Christian, I have always found Yoruba traditional belief and history fascinating and complex, and I try to incorporate as much of it as I can in my work right beside any scientific and technological development, I envision using my engineering interests. Sometimes I build my imagined future technology on a scaffold of Yoruba spiritual beliefs. This is because as much as I consider myself a “logical and scientific minded” person, I grew up in Nigeria where often the physical and spiritual are presented side by side seamlessly with no separation. In addition, I also acknowledge the vastness of what is not yet known in the universe and all the different ways in which people have filled those gaps. It is in the spaces between our knowledge or in the ambiguity of our perceptions that I try to fit the spiritual elements of my stories. Humans have had magical and spiritual beliefs since we formed societies and I believe we will continue to do so, therefore the blending of both seems natural to me, even when speculating about the future. So readers shouldn't be surprised to find some almost mystic-leaning elements in my science fiction, even in my so called “hard-SF” stories.

5) What themes or issues specific to Africa do you explore in your science fiction?

I'm particularly interested in application of the often ignored traditional African philosophies and sociocultural practices as frameworks for thinking about the future of humanity.

6) What are you currently working on?

l have two short stories coming later this year. One called “Encore” – a sequel to the first story in my collection CONVERGENCE PROBLEMS. Its about an AI-artist set 3 million years in the future and is one of my favorite stories I have ever written. It will appear in Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, edited by Indrapramit Das, from MIT Press in October 2024.

Also in October, I have a horror-fantasy story coming from Subterranean Press called “Unquiet On The Eastern Front” which takes place across Africa during World War II as a British soldier comes face to face with the horrors of colonization, war, his own family legacy, and a stalking, terrifying creature. It will be available to read for free.

I'm also working on my second novel – a science fiction novel which is simultaneously a near-future thriller and a meditation on the nature of memory, legacy, and connectedness featuring assassins, aliens, AI, ancestral memory, and a lot more. No publicly available title yet, but I’m excited to finish this story I’ve been mulling over for years.

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Interviews

• Patrick Abbott
• Adedapo Adeniyi
• Neal Asher
• Misha Burnett
• Travis Corcoran
• Cory Doctorow
• Lewis Shiner
• Wole Talabi
• Marie Vibbert
• Peter Watts