Synopsis

A strange alien spacecraft suddenly appears in the sky in this electrifying, action-packed first contact novel set in near-future Nigeria from award-winning author Wole Talabi

A hard science-fiction novel featuring an assassin-for-hire, a witchdoctor, and an astronomer, this fast-paced thriller is perfect for fans of Arrival

When a non-communicative alien spacecraft suddenly appears in the sky, global powers are thrown into turmoil.

But for Tope, a principled Nigerian assassin with a talent for lethality in the employ of the mysterious witchdoctor known as “Baba,” it’s all just business as usual. At least until a job goes wrong, and Tope is caught in the scramble—a high stakes game of power and politics for the future that is to come. Joined by Itumeleng, a South African astronomer plagued by mysterious dreams, they must find a way to survive, navigate their complicated pasts, and come to understand how they, and all of humanity, are connected to the alien craft before it lands and the world changes forever. But it won’t be easy. There are sinister forces marshalled against them, including a strange assassin obsessed with a single memory.

The Fist Of Memory is a first contact thriller unlike any other; a meditation on the nature of reality, memory and connectedness.

Amazon * B&N * Bookshop * Astra Publishing House

Excerpt

Sutherland, South Africa

Itumeleng

Blue is the color of harmony. Of the clear, cloudless sky over the Karoo.

Itumeleng Sefako is standing in the shadow of the white, domed ATLAS3 building, his feet crunching dry soil and rocks be neath, a cigarette lazily burning between his lips as he stares out to the horizon. Blue sky gradually transforms into a fuzzy filament of white where it meets the crown of mountains in the distance. White is the color of peace. But Itumeleng’s mind is not in harmony, and he definitely doesn’t feel at peace. The space in his head has been in tur moil ever since his grandmother Nolwazi died two weeks ago.

Since her funeral, he’s been haunted by dreams that bring strange voices and visions. The susurration of millions, perhaps billions, of voices. Visions of strange planets, red skies, and the vast, star‑ dappled emptiness of space. Against the dream‑ tapestry of the starlit void, he sees the oval face of a woman he doesn’t know. Her head is shaved, her cheekbones wide and well‑ defined in high relief. Her eyes glint like a pair of captive stars, giving her a hard and focused look. The voices and the visions make his sleep restless. He wakes anxious and uncertain. In one part of his mind, the rational part that took him from the village to his current place as astrophysicist with the South African Astronomical Observatory, he knows that dreams are just the subconscious processing information in unexpected ways. That these dreams reflect some aspect of his grief over the loss of his grandmother and his guilt over denying her wish for him to return home and succeed her as iSangoma so he could spend his time healing, counseling and interceding with the ancestors on behalf of their community instead of gazing at stars. But in the other part of his mind, the part that she’d tried to teach to listen for the voices of the trees and the land and the water and spirits of those that had come before, he suspects there is more to his dreams. But he does not want to engage with that part of himself. It has been a long time since he prayed the way Gogo Nolwazi taught him all those years ago.

“It is them. Amadlozi. The ancestors. You know it is,” his aunt Nhlakanipho had said a week ago, when he finally spoke to her of his dreams. She’d inherited the position of iSangoma when he refused it. “Itu, come back home and let me take you to the lake, submerge you in water so that you can see clearly. You may have turned your back on our ways, but they have not turned their back on you. They call to you even now.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“It doesn’t matter what you believe. You are a scientist, aren’t you?” She’d clucked. “Why deny the evidence of your own spirit?”

“Because the spirit is not real. Not measurable or quantifiable. None of it is.”

They’d argued for half an hour after that, a slightly different iteration of the same argument they’d had multiple times since he’d left home.

Calling Nhlakanipho was a mistake, because after their argument, his dreams had only become more vivid. That night he woke up at 3.a.m, fear, cold, and uncertainty crystalizing his anxiety into something new and even more persistent. With dawn came a new complication. The dreams began to bleed into his waking hours. Burning red star. Endless black space. A babble of voices. The woman with stars in her eyes. He saw and heard them like augmented reality projections. And now, this morning, a new vision of a stone cylinder being lifted into a strange green sky by a multitude of hands, like a geometric offering to an unknown god.

Itumeleng takes another drag of his cigarette and the glowing end races towards his fingers. He lets out the smoke from his lungs and it rises, wispy and dreamlike, dissipating into the air like a memory being forgotten. The sun is a nearly perfect orb of white, climbing to ward noon. A smattering of refraction rainbows dance in the corners of his glasses. It is quiet outside the observatory. Deathly quiet. Except for the faint, persistent howl of the wind. That’s one reason Itumeleng likes to be here. The quiet. It usually helps him think, organize his thoughts. It’s why he volunteered to come up and perform the inspection for the housing of the ATLAS3 telescope despite not really needing to. He wanted to take the opportunity to work from here for the rest of the day even though most of the time he does his job from Cape Town. All the telescopes at the Sutherland facility are auto mated, constantly streaming and analyzing billions of data points. Performing calculations, cross‑ referencing them against several trillion other data points held in shared databases. The system only flags anomalies and exceptions for him to follow up on, which he can do from anywhere. But there is something special about actually being here, surrounded by an array of artificial eyes cradled in their rounded white towers, watching the sky. Gazing out into distant stars and galaxies, receiving information traveled from the past at the speed of light, deep in the heart of one of nature’s most unique and beautiful places where the past, present and the future press against each other like siblings sharing a room.

Today though, his thoughts are too loud and visions too persistent to enjoy being out here. They pound in his head and clash against each other, threatening to drown out all else, even the wind. Out in the distance, against the perfect pale blue, he sees the stone cylinder from his dreams. He knows he is imagining it, that it is not real, but that does not change the feeling it induces. Anxiety. It looks like a negative afterimage, faint and unclear. Itumeleng’s fingers are shaking. He can’t clear his head. Even the cigarette, an indulgence he allowed himself today despite trying to quit for the last fourteen months, doesn’t help. He puts it out, pressing the stub into the flat black top of the cuboid trash disposal panel and activates Maloti, his Neuranexus AI with a thought.

Time? He asks.

[Two minutes past eleven.]

Right. That means new data to review. He can try to focus on work, on filling his head with the lovely white noise of characterizing the cosmos.

About the Author

Wole Talabi is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. Author of the critically acclaimed Shigidi And The Brass Head Of Obalufon which was named one of the best books of 2023 by The Washington Post. He has hopped around the planet quite a bit but right now lives in Australia. He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, the Caine Prize, and has won the Sidewise award for alternate history. Talabi’s work has also been translated into 7 languages. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, Clarkesworld, and is collected in the books Incomplete Solutions (2019, Luna Press) and Convergence Problems (2024, DAW Books).

Website