Fables and Spells by adrienne maree brown

(AK Press, 2022)

Reviewed by Susan Peak

adrienne maree brown (she doesn’t capitalise her name) is a Black American woman writer who has attended a Clarion workshop. She is active in healing (social and sexual) and restorative justice work in the US, is a doula, and has written several books. These are mainly related to her activist work, e.g., Emergent Strategy, a sequence of books about sustainable social change where adrienne’s view is that social change should be pleasurable and not solely work (this emphasis on a different approach to social issues has faint echoes of New Wave science fiction). She has combined speculative fiction, where she has been described as an Afrofuturist writer, with her activism, e.g., when co-editing Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Combining these concerns and interests is very evident in Fables and Spells, one of the Emergent Strategy sequence, which contains a mixture of short stories and poems.

The book has a good sense of structure, interweaving the poems and stories. It is divided into sections, and the selection of poems and stories reflects each section, e.g., Fables and Spells for Love.

The book opens with a poem: ‘radical gratitude spell’, which I find also acts as a greeting to the reader. Like all her poems, it is in free verse, and it also has a chant or song-like quality The next two poems, about trust and love, set the scene for the first story, ‘The River’, which has a mythical quality and where the river is a character in itself, acting on its own initiative. This mythical quality is evident in many of the stories here. This story is the one for which adrienne maree brown is best known; I found it both powerful and lyrical—her prose writing has a poetic quality to it. This story is then followed by two others which feature water, maintaining the river theme, then the scope opens up.

The other stories in this book range widely. In one, a goddess is conjured up, makes love to the witch who cast the spell, then starts to fulfil the witch’s wish, causing upheaval. Another story is set on a different Earth, where the protagonist visits the original Earth. A further story—‘Bubbles’—plays with the nature of reality and consciousness as does ‘In Parallel’ which also has aliens. In many of these stories, a major theme is that of America’s deeply racist past, and ways in which this can be healed in the present—or in the future. In all these stories, the location supports the story, so the science-fiction element can be almost incidental. It certainly isn’t the story’s main focus.

The poems are often intensely personal, and also often addressed to the reader, or to a ‘you’. They very much feel that adrienne is speaking from and about her personal experience to ‘you’. They have a strongly sensual quality as well as this personal tone. Her poems are very easily read aloud (they can also be experienced as prayers), and this intensifies the personal quality. I particularly liked ‘spell for grief’ or ‘letting go’ which reads initially like a list of ingredients, but the comments on this comprise the poem. It’s also the only poem I have read which has a bullet point list! And I liked her selection of haiku, some are one-offs, and some are in a sequence.

This book does have an other-worldly, perhaps utopian, feel to it, with its focus on pleasure and on reconciliation. But it is also realistic in its recognition of the racist wrongs which have to be reconciled. I found this book to be very good and very appealing and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who is interested in world SF.

For anyone interested in exploring world SF further, I would recommend Lavie Tidhar’s world SF anthologies.

Review from BSFA Review 21 - Download your copy here.