Short Fiction
- Flash fiction presented as an investigative report of what happened when a spaceship, The Ungu-ugnu, unknowingly ventured into a region of space and went missing.
“Descent” (A Sauútiverse Story) – Published in Clarkesworld Magazine, May 2025.
- A novella that follows a young explorer as he makes a deal with a power broker and attempts to map the lower, unexplored regions of the planet in a desperate bid to prove his mother wrong.
Nebula Award Finalist for Best Novella
BSFA Awards Finalist for Best Shorter Fiction
- It is 1940 and Kenneth Lockwood is a Lieutenant stationed in Southern Nigeria. When World War II breaks out, he and his men are deployed to halt the Italian aggression in East Africa but they encounter the horrors of colonization, war and a terrifying creature known only as the Ngoloko.
“Encore” – Published in Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, MIT Press, October 2024.
- A sequel to “Debut”. It takes place 3 million years in the future and follows an interstellar nonhuman artist embedded in a shipmind as they receive a mysterious new commission.
Reprinted in Omenana Magazine, April 2025
Reprinted in The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories, June 2025
Translated to Chinese and reprinted in Science Fiction World
Translated to Czech and reprinted by The Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Locus Award Finalist for Best Novelette
“How To Win The G’idiidigbo Challenge: A Practical Guide.” (A Sauútiverse Story) – Published in 99 Fleeting Fantasies, February 2024.
- A Sauutiverse story. “The only way to win the G’idiidigbo challenge is to be prepared. The only way to be prepared for a fight is to get into one”
Reprinted in The Years Top Tales Of Space And Time, 2024.
“Blowout” – in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July 2023.
- A Nigerian astronaut must find a way to save her estranged brother during a mining disaster on Mars.
Reprinted in The Years Top Tales Of Space And Time, 2024.
Winner, 2023 Analog Analytical Laboratory award for Best Short Story
Seiun Award Finalist for Best Translated Short Work
“Saturday’s Song” – Published in Lightspeed Magazine, May 2023.
- A “Weekdays” story about revenge against small gods, a fraught mother-daughter relationship, and Nigerian spirit possession told from the point of view of personified days of the week.
Locus Award Finalist for Best Novelette
Long-listed for the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) award.
Translated into Finnish and published in Tähtivaeltaja, Nov 2024.
Reprinted in The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction Anthology Volume 3.
- Hugo award nominated novelette set in an alternate history where Africa was never colonized and where Ifa has merged with computer technology, a woman consults with an artificial intelligence constructed from the minds of the ancestors to determine her nation should go to war.
Winner, 2023 Sidewise Award For Alternate History
Reprinted in Tor.com, March 2022
Translated into Chinese and reprinted in Future Affairs Administration, 2023
Reprinted in Sahara: A Thousand Paths Into the Future
- What would happen if companies start trying to not just optimize their operations, but their people too?
“An Arc of Electric Skin” – Published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 2021.
Reprinted in Apex Magazine, April 2022
Reprinted in Forever Magazine, May 2022
Reprinted in The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2022.
“Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application For An Eternal Spirit Core” – Published in Clarkesworld Magazine, March 2021
- A man applies for a patent to restore his mother back to life.
“Tends To Zero” – Published in the Nowhereville: Weird Is Other People anthology, December 2019.
- A dissolute young man spiraling into depression is confrontated by the personification of Lagos city.
“Abeokuta52” – Published in Omenana Issue 14, October 2019
Reprinted in The Big Book of Cyberpunk (Vintage, 2023)
- The arrival of aliens comes with economic growth but at what cost?
“Debut” – Published in Overseas Magazine, March 2019.
- An artificial intelligence system designed to study and analyse art gains sentience and sets out to create art of its own
“Drift-Flux” – Published in AfroSFv3, December 2018
Reprinted in Spacefunk!, 2024
- Orshio and Lien-Adel, genetically engineered space transport crew members, are drawn into conspiracy and a race against time when they come across a sabotaged spacecraft.
“When We Dream We Are Our God” – Published in Norwegian as “Når Vi Drømmer, Er Vi Selv Gud” in the 10 Investigations: All Borders Are Temporary anthology, April 2018
- A father explains to his son why he has chosen to join a collective hive intelligence in response to the appearance of a sentient artificial intelligence system.
First Appeared in English in Apex Magazine, May 2019
“The Harmonic Resonance Of Ejiro Anaborhi” – Published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), March 2018
Reprint and Audio version published in Escape Pod, February 2019
- Ejiro, the pre-teen daughter of a Niger-Delta activist in Warri, comes across an alien artifact, and changes her reality and perhaps the world.
“Nneoma” – Published in Space and Time Magazine, August 2017
- A man out on the town meets the wrong woman, who may not be a woman at all. Introduces the eponymous co-protagonist from Shigidi and The Brass Head Of Obalufon.
“The Regression Test” – Published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), January 2017.
- An elderly woman in a futuristic Nigeria is called in to help test the artificial intelligence based on the mind of her mother, a brilliant thinker, after an update. A philosophical story about human minds and what makes a person who they are.
2018 Nommo Award Winner, Best Short Story
Reprinted in The Manchester Review, July 2017
Reprinted in Black Sci-Fi Short Stories, June 2021
Reprinted in Computing and Technology Ethics: Engaging through Science Fiction, from MIT Press, February 2023
Translated into Chinese and reprinted in Science Fiction World, January 2018
Translated into Italian and reprinted in Futuri Uniti d’Africa, May 2021
“Home is Where My Mother’s Heart is Buried” – Published in FIYAH! Magazine of Black Specula
Arin wants to go home to Earth, and Tinu wants to let go of her Earthborn memories. In this story, we explore the true meaning of family and belonging.
“The Last Lagosian” – Published in Omenana Issue 8, November 2016.
- In a post-apocalyptic Lagos after aliens have taken almost all of the planet’s water and most of humanity has died off, a man comes across another survivor with a technology that could save them both but will they survive their fear and mistrust of each other?
Translated into Spanish and reprinted in The Word For World is Story, March 2020.
“I, Shigidi” – Published in Abyss and Apex, October 2016.
- Meet Shigidi, nightmare god. Drunk, depressed and dissatisfied with his life, until he meets Nneoma, the succubus and his world changes.. The pair take on gods, other supernatural entities, and the business of belief. A taster of the novel Shigidi and The Brass Head Of Obalufon.
“Necessary And Sufficient Conditions” – Published in Imagine Africa 500, June 2016.
- In a future where Africa has become the technological center of the world, a man seeks vengeance against the famous professor that helped bring about this revolution – and finds much more than he bargained for.
Reprinted in Apex Magazine, February 2019
“If They Can Learn” – Published in Futuristica Vol. 1, June 2016.
- A cyborg cop has just shot an unarmed young man on one of the most upscale streets of Nigeria and has no idea why. A fixer for the company that makes the tech is sent in to find out.
“Wednesday’s Story” – Published in Lightspeed Magazine, May 2016.
- A “Weekdays” story. A story about stories. What happens when Wednesday, one of the storytellers, tries to change the tragic story of Solomon Grundy. Nominated for the Caine Prize.
Winner of the Royal Overseas League Readers Choice Awards 2018
Nominated for the 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing
Reprinted in the Event Horizon 2017 anthology, March 2017
Reprinted in Redemption Song and Other Stories, June 2018
2017 Locus Recommended Reading List
“Nested” – Published in SciPhi Journal, February 2016.
- Flash fiction about what happens when we die, reality loops, and things inside of things.
“Parse. Error. Reset.” – Published in Terraform, August 2015.
- In a world driven where people can have copies of themselves go places on their behalf, what are the boundaries of the self?
2nd Place Prize, AMC Network and Motherboard’s Post-Humans Story Contest
Reprinted in the Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn anthology, August 2022
“A Short History of Migration in Five Fragments Of You” – Published in Omenana, Issue 3, June 2015.
- From Africa to the Americas and to the stars, this is the story of a family told in five moving vignettes.
Long-listed for the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) award
“Crocodile Ark” – Published in Omenana, Issue 1, December 2014.
- A tale of revolution against a pentecostal Theocracy on a Generation Ship, and how, like all revolutionaries, even we can become the thing we fight against.
“A Certain Sort of Warm Magic” – Published in These Words Expose Us: An Anthology, September 2014.
- A story about a relationship. About the ocean outside, and the larger ocean within. About love.
“The Human Thing” – Published in TheNakedConvos, December 2011.
- About a non-human intelligence. About the sun. About freedom and what it means to do the human thing.
Reprinted in Sub-Saharan Magazine, October 2015.
“Silence” – Published in BellaNaija Prose, November 2013.
- A lyrical love story. A man must learn to accept the decisions of a woman he considers the love of his life.
Reprinted in These Words Expose Us: An Anthology, September 2014.
“The Million Eyes of a Lonely and Fragile God” – Published in Stupefying Stories, October 2016.
- As his spacecraft breaks apart, an astronaut muses on his life and the relationship he left behind.
“The In-Between Places” – Published in Klorofyl Magazine, The Nomads Issue, July 2015.
- Some of us exist in the places between state and another.
“Lights In The Sky” – Published in TheNakedConvos, December 2014.
- Enter the mind of a far-future space commando sent to a battle on an alien planet as he tries to survive and remember who he is and why he signed up to become a cog in the machine of endless war.
“Thursday” – Published in The Kalahari Review, December 2014.
- A “Weekdays” story. Seven siblings tell stories that define all the experiences of humankind. They tell a particularly dark story of abuse and madness and man’s-cruelty-to-man. A prequel to “Wednesday’s Story”.
“Liar” – Published in Wazi, June 2015
- Whatever you do, don't believe anything our narrator tells you. Except, of course, one of his lies is true.
“Eye” – Published in Liquid Imagination, Issue 24, February 2015.
– What would you do if you could see the future?
“Zombies” – Published in Klorofyl Magazine, The Tomorrows Issue, April 2014.
- A cloned human child deals with bullying the only way he knows how.
“Transmission” – Published in BellaNaija Prose, November 2012.
- A young autistic boy may be the key to understanding an alien transmission.
“Gamma, Or, Love in the Age of Radiation Poisoning” – Published in The Kalahari Review, April 2014.
- Two young kids find love in a radioactive wasteland.
“Connectome, Or, The Facts in the Case of Miss Valerie DeMarco, (Ph.D)” – Published in TheNakedConvos, December 2013.
- The story of the first, experimental brain upload, partly inspired by ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ by Edgar Allan Poe
Coming Soon
“Finale” – Forthcoming
“Perpetual God Machines Of The Ancestral Kind” – Forthcoming.
As Editor
Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology, November 2023
Nominated for the BSFA award for best anthology.
The Sauútiverse is the first anthology of stories set in a fictional shared world based on a blend of African cultural worldviews.
Contemporary African Speculative Fiction vol. 1: Tales From The Coming Night and vol. 2: Chiaroscuro Tales (African Speculative Fiction Translated into Bengali, in Two Volumes), January 2023 and June 2023
Lights Out: Resurrection, October 2016
These Words Expose Us: An Anthology, September 2014