Gay Rebel Scum

Posted by Eugen Bacon

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Illustration by Akintoba Kalejaye

The Sauútiverse is an Afrocentric shared world inspired by the Swahili word “sauti”, which means voice or sound. This project was initially conceived alongside the Syllble base framework and has now thrived as its own entity. Together with a creation myth, this fictional civilisation of five planets orbiting a binary star, has a framework for collaborative worldbuilding based on a blend of African perspectives, histories, biologies, and inspirations. 

The federation of planets draws from real-life languages, cultural practices, rituals, and beliefs, and settles on the power of rich and complex sound magic as the pivot for cross-genre storytelling. A story bible keeps track of the realm, and offers a baseline for new contributors seeking to create in the Sauútiverse. Revelling in our first anthology, the award-shortlisted Mothersound: A Sauútiverse Anthology, founding members are on track for a second anthology Sauúti Terrors—an odyssey of perils: from legends and folktales to inheritances, gods, ancestral spirits, sacred prey, sentient creatures, beings of unreality, sonic storms, solar flares, and meteor strikes. 

As a founding member of the Sauúti Collective, also co-editor of the upcoming Sauúti Terrors, I offer a discourse on how this Afrocentric intergalactic world with its space travel, humanoid and non-humanoid creatures, artificial intelligence and intricate magic system based on sound, oral traditions, and music is finding momentum in a transformative global arena.  

Speculative fiction: It all connects

Speculative fiction is an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy and horror, and its subgenres, and the nature of it can enable responses to global racial, gender, environmental, and other crises, by offering a cosmological timeframe and perspective. In its qualities of non-realistic fiction, speculative fiction offers a safe space with which to explore realistic constructs that may be tougher to tackle or relate to in their fuller constructs or reality, for example: racism, sexuality, social injustice, dysfunction … in a form of subversive activism.

As part of a collective of African writers who have created an Afrocentric Sauútiverse of five planets, two suns, and a spirit moon, a world of science and fantasy, where there is no written language, we play with technology and sound magic to scrutinise the world as we know it, and use speculative fiction as a response to our world. 

Our stories engage with difference, for example empowering women—in my short fiction “The Mystery of the Vanishing Echoes,” a multiverse story published in Sherlock Holmes Is a Girl, Sherlock Holmes is a woman, Shaalok Ho-ohmsi, and her ward Watson is an orphaned child, Wa’watison—in short Wa’wati. 

In another story, ‘Sina, the Child with no Echo,’ published in Mothersound set in the planet Ekwukwe, where everyone has an echo, I empower a disabled child born without echo, yet his neurodivergence becomes a gift and he finds himself a beast hunter, where beasts are very sensitive to echo but they cannot detect him.

The power of the word in the Sauútiverse is captured in the origin story “The Song of Our Mother” by founding members Wole Talabi and Stephen Embleton: 

Khwa’ra. [It is acquired.] 

Ya’yn. [It is uttered.] 

Ra’kwa. [It is released.]

Mothersound, our first Sauútiverse anthology, comprised mostly stories by members of the collective, and a handful of newcomers. 

We’ve written flash fiction, short stories, novellas, and novels in this universe. “Listen, Don’t Touch” by Cheryl S. Ntumy is a cautionary science fiction tale about technology gone amok, available free in Mythaxis Magazine Issue 42.

Xan van Rooyen’s “Heretic Harmonic,” published in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine Issue 94, combines sound magic with music and queer characters. 

My flash fiction “Epistles to Our Mother,” free online, offers a cosmological timeframe and perspective about what it means to be human, and it appears in Text Journal, in a special issue on writing from the fringes.

In novellas, Cheryl S. Ntumy’s Songs for the Shadows is a lyrical, immersive story of time, life and grief, while Wole Talabi’s Descent follows a team of explorers sponsored by kartels down to the planet’s surface, where they try to capture energy from an incredibly powerful sonic storm using new technology that has just been developed and is yet to be tested. 

In novels, Crimson in Quietus is the very first in the Sauútiverse, an inaugural novel that spans across the deepest parts of the five-planet Sauútiverse orbiting a binary star. This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, Australia, as part of the University of Tasmania’s Hedberg Fellowship. The three-month residency helped me crucially research and write the novel, borrowing from Tasmania’s rocky outcrops, natural caves, cascading waterfalls, rivulet trails, and swimming holes, woven into the Sauútiverse and encapsulating my African Australian heritage in a new kind of literary mystery where the investigator is not a detective, but a sound magic scientist. 

Excerpt: Prologue: Crossing to Eh’wauizo

THE CROSSING to Eh’wauizo, the spirit realm, is in the backwaters of a black river. Put a pinch of shadow and blood salt in your pocket, or sew it in a hem. Slip a button, a tooth, a chicken bone, a crystal or a small, shiny thing under your tongue for Ze-ne to collect. The ear of a ghost orchid, or the twig of a dragon-no’s blood tree is also good. It will ward off omens.

Tie a blindfold with a spotless garment—ebony or crimson—and listen for light. You will see silver specters in nondescript shapes turning to wine colors. Don’t mind them. Tend away from echoes and negotiate towards ripples of gentler waters whose lick at your calf then your waist then your chest then your neck especially frightens you as you submerge. Keep treading underwater even as your lungs swell.

Resist an urge to scream. Don’t struggle or hold your breath, even as your arms and legs begin to feel laden with rocks. Relax your body, think of the potential. Your chest is tearing, everything inside burning, but it isn’t. Your head will feel light, lighter still as you recognize the approaching Ze-ne-nazala, dear Ze-ne—the demigoddess of death—who will float you to a place of no fear.

This is Eh’wauizo, the dimension of our ancestors.

Through a different kind of writing, unique worldbuilding, we cultivate inclusive worlds and characters and explore our place in the universe. We engage with difference, subversive activists tackling racism, sexuality, social injustice, dysfunction… in a form of subversive activism. 

Finding continuum

From Mothersound, we have opened the world and expanded it with invitations to others to write in the Sauútiverse, as a pathway to feeding the continuum. 

We share with them our Story Bible, ask them to send a pitch that we review for alignment with the Sauútiverse, and give them a contributor’s contract, and they can write and publish stories in our Afrocentric universe. We are publishing more Afrodescendant newcomers in Sauúti Terrors, our newest anthology.

In the Sauútiverse, as we interrogate our world and imagine unlimited futures, we are finding ourselves and the “other.” Our Black speculative fiction is not exclusive, but inclusive—it’s an invitation that extends to you, the reader: “Come and see our world.” 

Through collaboration with other descendants from Africa, we are creating a continuum of storytelling in shared voices. 

See our Sauútiverse FAQs on how to create with us. 

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/spec-fic-and-the-politics-of-identity/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58647