The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe

Janelle Monáe has built worlds throughout their musical career: expansive, Afrofuturist science fictions that pull from the literary and cinematic genre. Through “emotional pictures” and concept albums, Monáe has been an android, a bot and, most recently, a dirty computer – an outsider whose gender, race and sexuality are perceived as “dirty” and in need of “cleaning”. 

The Memory Librarian is Monáe’s debut literary offering and, from an artist who draws on Blade Runner, Metropolis and the novels of Octavia Butler in their futuristic pop, an exciting prospect. This anthology of stories is co-authored with five writers and set in an authoritarian dystopia in which the all-seeing New Dawn persecutes those considered “dirty” – almost always Black, queer women. Monáe and their co-authors draw on familiar canonical tropes to create New Dawn: bureaucracy, weaponised technology and mind-control stimulants feature, as do forbidden love stories, repressed memories and secret rebel communes. 

While The Memory Librarian presents five different windows into this world, the stories offer frustratingly little depth. The collection aims for the epic in world-building and emotional heft, but often falls into sci-fi cliché. There’s no backstory to the surveying state – other than a generic intolerance – and characters operate with meaningless motivations. Timebox, co-authored with Eve L. Ewing, about an out-of-time pantry, is the stand-out story: a self-contained exploration of spaces and psyches. It’s a shame that not more of this rich originality is injected into The Memory Librarian’s stale world. 

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HarperVoyager, out now, £20
harpercollins.co.uk