The librarian

The magazine of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror field with news, reviews, and author interviews.

New Dawn is a place of the Those at Pynk are dirty computers as far as New Dawn is concerned, and a few Pynk residents have decided some of their siblings are too dirty to fit in their refuge. Even before the Dawn, we lived in a nation that asked us to forget in order to find wholeness, but memory of who we’ve been – of who we’ve been punished for being – was always the only map into tomorrow. My favorite of the anthology is Lore’s, ‘‘Nevermind’’, about a group of women and a nonbinary person living in a safehaven called Pynk. Scouts from New Dawn have tracked them down and the only way to survive is to stand their ground. This anthology may be speculative, but the reality of her words can be seen every day. the room to have these complicated conversations by focusing on the exquisite diversity of the Black diaspora. In Ewing’s story, two women living in an era before New Dawn takes over discover the pantry in their new apartment exists outside of time, while in Thomas’s, a group of children living in the lands outside New Dawn, build a portal that shows them alternate futures. A divide erupts between the TERFs and everyone else over Neer, a nonbinary AFAB engineer. We are introduced to the world of Dirty Computer through Johnson’s ‘‘The Memory Librarian’’. Seshet is the titular character, a woman who enforces the authoritarian goals of the New Dawn by harvesting and erasing memories. ‘‘Save Changes’’ by Delgado is about two sisters dealing with the aftermath of their dirty computer mother being cleaned (think reeducation but worse). Amber and Larry carry the burden of their parents’ rebellions. That is absolutely not the case with Janelle Monáe’s The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer. Monáe and her contributors – Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, Eve L. Ewing, Yohanca Delgado, and Sheree Renée Thomas – have produced a vivid, visceral text with as much of a hook as the album the stories were inspired by. Each story in the anthology covers different characters and moments in time in this alternate version of our world.