We are delighted to reveal the cover for Hadithi & The State of Black Speculative Fiction, an Academia Lunare project by Eugen bacon and Milton Davis. The artist is Hillary Wilson.
The release is set for the 6th of October 2020, and pre-orders will open in August.
Reviews are already coming in.
"Eugen Bacon and Milton Davis have written a groundbreaking account of Black speculative fiction enlivened with their own exceptional stories. Part one, an essay, consolidates recent critical study of Black speculative fiction while arguing for genre-bending and transcending demographic. Part two comprises seven short stories. These are rich, strange and compelling. In their own distinctive voice and inventive language, each author builds places and times that are unfamiliar yet strangely familiar; places that we recognise not by their landscapes, customs, behaviours or objects, but by the topographies of the human heart. Deftly looping back to the essay, each story offers a genetic and generic footnote.
Hadithi is just stunning. You won’t see the world in the same way again."
-- Award-winning author and distinguished scholar Dominique Hecq, MA, Dip Ed, PhD
About the project
Hadithi [n. fable, story] is a new hybrid birthed from the collaboration of two writers with heritage in the African diaspora. It features seven short stories - three original - of ancestry, soul, continuity, discontinuity as well as steampunk, cyberfunk and a dieselfunk superhero story set in the '20s, together with a scholarly dialogue on the global state of black speculative fiction. Hadithi offers the kind of afrofuturistic diversity you might expect from a duality of curious writers unafraid to cross the borders of normalcy.
Meet the Authors!
Dr Eugen Bacon is African Australian, a computer scientist mentally re-engineered into creative writing. She is a board director of the Australian Society of Authors. Her work has won, been shortlisted, longlisted or commended in national and international awards, including the Bridport Prize and Copyright Agency Prize.
Eugen is a recipient of the Katharine Susannah Prichard (KSP) Emerging Writer-in-Residence 2020. Her creative work has appeared in literary and speculative fiction publications worldwide, including Award Winning Australian Writing, AntipodeanSF, Andromeda, Aurealis, Bards and Sages Quarterly, Meniscus, The Victorian Writer, Text Journal and through Routledge in New Writing. Recent publications: Claiming T-Mo, Meerkat Press. Writing Speculative Fiction, Macmillan. In 2020: The Road to Woop Woop & Other Stories; Black Moon; Inside the Dreaming.
Eugen is originally from Tanzania, grew up in Kenya, lived in the UK and now resides in Melbourne, Australia with her son, who—like his mother—is many, betwixt, a sum of cultures.
You can follow Eugen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/EugenBacon
Milton Davis is an award-winning Black Speculative fiction writer and owner of MVmedia, LLC, a small publishing company specializing in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Sword and Soul. MVmedia’s mission is to provide speculative fiction books that represent people of color in a positive manner. Milton is the author of nineteen novels; his most recent is the post-apocalyptic adventure Gunman’s Peace. He is the editor and co-editor of seven anthologies; The City, Dark Universe with Gene Peterson; Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology and Griot: Sisters of the Spear, with Charles R. Saunders; The Ki Khanga Anthology, the Steamfunk! Anthology, and the Dieselfunk anthology with Balogun Ojetade. Milton’s work had also been featured in Black Power: The Superhero Anthology and Rococoa published by Roaring Lions Productions; Skelos 2: The Journal of Weird Fiction and Dark Fantasy Volume 2, Steampunk Writers Around the World published by Luna Press; Heroika: Dragoneaters published by First Perseid Press, and Bass Reeves Frontier Marshal Volume Two.
Milton Davis and Balogun Ojetade won the 2014 Urban Action Showcase Award for Best Script; Milton’s story ‘The Swarm’ was nominated for the 2018 British Science Fiction Association Award for Short Fiction.
Luna Awards: Nominated for the BSFA Awards 2017 for "The Swarm" in Steampunk Writers Around The World - Vol I.