Convergence Problems

by Wole Talabi, Ben Arogundade (reader)

Convergence Problems is a new short story collection from award-winning, Nebula-nominated Nigerian author Wole Talabi

Containing brand-new stories, rewrites of early work, and a few previously published pieces, Wole Talabi’s new collection, Convergence Problems , consists of sixteen short stories and one previously unseen novella. All of the stories in this collection are set in, or relate to, Africa, and investigate the rapidly changing role of technology in our lives as we search for meaning, for knowledge, for justice; constantly converging to our future selves.

In Lagos, Nigeria, a roadside mechanic volunteers to undergo a procedure that will increase the electrical conductivity of his skin by orders of magnitude. On Mars, a woman races against time and a previously undocumented geological phenomenon to save her brother. In Nairobi, a tech support engineer tries to understand what is happening when an AI system begins malfunctioning in ways that could change the world.

Genres: Short Stories, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Africa, Audiobook, Anthologies

1 pages, Audio CD

First published February 13, 2024

About the author

Wole Talabi is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. He is the author of the acclaimed fantasy novel SHIGIDI AND THE BRASS HEAD OF OBALUFON, which was nominated for the Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards; and the sci-fi thriller THE FIST OF MEMORY. His short fiction has appeared in places like Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and The Africa Risen anthology and is collected in CONVERGENCE PROBLEMS and INCOMPLETE SOLUTIONS. He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nommo, BSFA, Sidewise, Ignyte and Crawford awards, as well as the Caine Prize for African Writing. He has edited five anthologies. He likes scuba diving, elegant equations, and oddly shaped things. He currently lives in Perth, Australia. Find him at wtalabi.wordpress.com and at @wtalabi online.

Reviews

[Netanella]

Happy Publication Day!

One year, one month later, I finally read and write my review of this amazing collection of science fiction fantasy stories that can collectively be called Afrofuturism, as Talabi is a renowned and award nominated Nigerian author. I first encountered this author with his amazing Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon novel, which I very much enjoyed, but have been sitting on this Netgalley ARC for way too long, as I have been struggling with the short story format for too long now.

How wrong I was to allow this collection to be laid aside! So many of these stories were simply excellent, in my opinion, and all of them exhibited Talabi's talent with the written word. My favorites include "Lights in the Sky" and "Ganger", one of the shorter and longer of the stories, respectively.

I look forward to Wole Talabi's continued talented writings. Kudos on a great collection!

[Sofia]

This is an excellent short story collection about grief, family, sense of self and artificial intelligence. The stories were all great (16 in total, some longer and some shorter), though there were some definite standouts.

My favorites were:

- Saturday's Song, about seven mysterious siblings named after the days of the week who chronicle humanity's stories and also about the story Saturday asks them to tell, which is about grief and revenge and duty and the terrible things we do for them.

- Ganger, one of the longer stories in this collection, this is alternates a Yoruba folktale about an old hunter who gains the power to transform into a jaguar and the story of Laide, a young woman in a dystopian society where everything is provided for her but where basic freedoms are denied, who finds meaning in her life when she gains the ability to transfer her consciousness in the body of a robot.

- A Dream of Electric Mothers. The last story in this collection, this was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula, and for good reason. A young minister pushes for the consultation of the "Electric Mothers", an intelligence comprised of all the consciousnesses of the dead citizens of her country, while she deals with the loss of her own mother.

These three were my favorites, but all the others were fantastic as well. Absolutely recommended!

I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

[Jen]

This book was SO GOOD. I enjoyed every short story in Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi. They’re afrofuturism sci fi. Some take place in the near future, and some are far from the present day. This collection grabbed me from the very first story, about AI making their own version of art that is different from ours. It had one of those really great endings that make you think I can’t wait to read more by this author. He writes beautifully, and he really knows how to end a story. With so many of them, I finished and thought, wow, that was just right.

There’s one story that’s only a handful of pages, but in that time it’s so intense and manages to crush your heart (Lights in the Sky). There are other stories that made me smile, or made me think. Make sure you read the author’s notes about each of the stories at the end. It was interesting. And I learned that some of my favorites have related stories that I need to seek out now.

This collection was so amazingly good that it’s hard to pick favorites. I mentioned the first story in the book (Debut). There’s one that has the seven days of the week all taking turns to tell a story (Saturday’s Song) that weaves in folklore. There are stories about love between family, siblings, and partners. There are stories about hard choices being made to survive or get by. There’s a story told in the form of comments on a patent application (Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core), which is so unique! There’s a story about what companies of the future could demand from workers that is quite frightening (Performance Review). And there’s the novella that left me hoping the author would turn it into a book, but also not, because the ending was *chef’s kiss* (Ganger).

It’s no surprise that this author’s work has been nominated for numerous awards. I absolutely need to read more by him! I highly recommend this book. Thank you to DAW Books for the review copy! I loved it.

[Anurati Srivastva]

There is NO bad story in this wondrous tech-fi magical realism anthology. In even the best anthologies, there are some standouts, a few mediocre ones, and a couple of bad eggs. The Convergence Problems defies this rule. Talabi plays with forms, media and genres, experimenting with several storytelling formats. There is a story written completely in the form of a public forum and comments and there's one written as a patent application form! Even if I might forget the plots and characters of a few of the stories, I thoroughly enjoyed them all. Talabi goes up there next to Ted Chiang and Ken Liu as my favourite sci-fi authors who center human relationships and ideas through their stories.

1. Debut: 5/5 ⭐️
What if AI starts making art on its own will?
2. Electric Skin 4/5⭐️
Human electric conductivity and history of struggles and protests.
3. Saturday's Song: 4/5 ⭐️
This is a sequel to Wednesday's Story (the author's notes describes the seed and shape of each of his stories). Read/listen to it on Lightspeed Mag. I read this, went to its prequel and then returned to enjoy it much more. It's about 7 siblings who tell stories, each with their own narrative strength and poetic devices.
4. Lights in the Sky 3/5 ⭐️
5. Blowout 3.7/5 ⭐️
The second half of the story is especially moving, the relationship between the two siblings and how trauma of their inventor survivor parent has impacted them differently.
6. Gamma 3.7/5 ⭐️
I don't particularly enjoy his love stories much..
7. Ganger 5/5 ⭐️
What is freedom? What is control? Is the body a vessel or much more?
8. Abeokuata52 4/5 ⭐️
Written as a forum board. Wish it was longer.
9. Tends to Zero 3.7/5⭐️
One of the depressing ones, but the city's personification is well done.
10. Nigerian Dream 5/5 ⭐️
Wow! Some beautiful sentences. Highly relatable as an Indian.
11. Performance Review 4.5/5 ⭐️
Corporate productivity meets pharmaceutical trials.
12. Silence 3/5 ⭐️ Romance not a strong suite..
13. Embers 3/5 ⭐️ Read too dramatic to me. However, the premise was interesting: impact of the change of sources of energy.
14. The Million Eyes of a Lonely and Fragile God 3/5 ⭐️
15. Comments on your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core 4/5 ⭐️
Enjoyable, wish it was longer.
16. A Dream of Electric Mothers 4/5 ⭐️
About collective consciousness of ancestors and grief.

Recommendations from the author's notes:
Neverwhere: Weird is Other People
Thursday - Talabi
Kojo Laing - Woman of Aeroplane
Account by Namwali Serpell

[christinac_reads]

16 afrofuturistic science fiction short stories exploring and providing commentary on the potential challenges we might face in either the near future or in alternate realities. I was blown away by so many of the stories but most especially:
Saturday’s Song (7 god-like siblings chronicling an entirely human tale and learning from it), and
A Dream of Electric Mothers (Nebula-nominated novella featuring border disputes, a sentient AI formed from the collective consciousness of the deceased citizens of the country.)
(+) Nigerian author, Black cast of characters, some stories featuring QPOC characters

[Saige]

THIS is what I mean when I say that we need more person-first science fiction. All of these stories have cool technology or new ideas, but at the core they are focused on characters, interpersonal relationships, and emotion. Characters grab me so much more than scientific ideas. I was also very pleasantly surprised that a male sci-fi author has so many multifaceted, truly well-written female characters. And not just as love interests. Women in this book are leaders, scientists, lovers, villains, gods, and often just ordinary citizens doing their best. Talabi even acknowledges the struggles that women often face in the world. His characters reflect on their own gender and the difficulties that they have to deal with because of it. Women chase pleasure as much as men. There were even a few lesbians! That may feel like the bare minimum, but it is actually so rare in sci-fi written by men. Some of these stories were hopeful but most were bleak. With great characters, sharp endings, and interesting set-ups, I think this collection deserves so much more international attention.

[Ai Jiang]

There are some books that turn your mind inside out, push your thoughts past limitations, expand and broaden what you know, what you think you know, and what you are still struggling to comprehend. That's the kind of collection this is, and I suggest everyone to pick this one up whether you are a fan of sci-fi or stories that explore humanity and science/evolution through a philosophical lens while never losing the emotional core of the characters. I have so many thoughts after reading this collection that it'll take me a while to gather them all together, but the full review will be forthcoming!

Favourites:
"Ganger" — novella
"Performance Review" — short story
"Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core" — experimental format short story
"A Dream of Electric Mothers" — novelette

[Yev]

This is Talabi's second collection of short fiction and it didn't go as well for me this time. There are two main reasons for that. Almost half of the stories are about doomed love, which I dislike reading. The other is that several are his early writings or reworkings thereof. I know that because at the end Talabi provided notes for all of the stories. For whatever reason I also seem to not prefer the stories that do best for him in terms of popularity and awards. If there's a throughline to his work, I'd say it's that the Nigerian government has consistently failed in many ways as has their traditional culture.

Debut (2019)
If AI were to create art for other AI, would humans be able to recognize it, let alone appreciate it? Despite being from only 7 years ago it feels outdated. It may be that the context has changed so much.
Ok

An Arc of Electric Skin (2021)
A man voluntarily undergoes excruciating pain for medical science research that unintentionally allows him to wield electricity. Democracy has fallen and he takes it upon himself to purge the system of corruption. Talabi stated this was dedicated to those who lost their lives in the #EndSARS mass protests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_SARS
Meh

Saturday's Song (2023)
The anthropomorphized days of the week tell the revenge story of a gay woman who condemns all involved in the death of her lover.
Meh

Lights In The Sky (2024)
A man on an alien planet fights an unspecified enemy. It doesn't matter because all war is the same. He hopes that orphaning his daughter will let her have a better life. Intrusive thoughts of Christmas dominate his mind. This story is told from the second person perspective. It's a reworked version of his 2014 story, Open Your Eyes.
Meh

Blowout (2023)
A drilling operation on Mars suffers a blowout and only she can save the miners by remote controlling a vehicle to rescue them. That alternates with family drama flashbacks. The dialogue in this one brought it down for me, especially at the end, where it's meant to be emotional, but came off as ridiculous.
This is the revised version of his 2022 submission to the Baen Memorial Short Story Award Contest.
Ok

Gamma (or, Love in The Age of Radiation Poisoning) (2014)
Everyone without a radiation suit is dying of radiation poisoning. Two children fall in love, but one of them is soon to die, because radiation.
Blah

Ganger (2024)
Legba City is a fortress in a world where an attempt to remove carbon dioxide from the air went awry and made it unbreathable. Legba-6 is the AI system that monitors the migrant residents of Isale. Their every thought, feeling, and sensation they experience is data to analyze and act upon. They exist to support Loke, the other part of Legba City where the citizen-investors live. However, nothing is expected of them and most residents simply exist. Laide cannot accept this and does anything and everything to assert her autonomy and freedom. A young man offers her a way to escape her body, a way to be free, but at what cost?
I enjoyed this, though it really does read like the first part of a novel that Talabi simply didn't continue because what would follow didn't need to be written. It reminds me of Saad Z. Hossain's work.
Enjoyable

Abeokuta52 (2019)
On November 16th 2026, Abk52_Warrior posts an opinion piece by Bidemi Akindele from The Guardian website to the Nairaland forum. The article details the fallout and all suffering, including the personal experiences of his family, that resulted from the alien technology that crash landed in Nigeria. He argues that there isn't sufficient acknowledgment or anything else really because people only care about the prosperity it brought. The forum users then discuss the article. Their bantering is amusing, but it's not quite enough.
I've copypasted what I wrote from its inclusion in the Big Book of Cyberpunk, which apparently mistitled it as Aboukela52.
Ok

Tends to Zero (2019)
This first person story may have the best voice of anything Talabi has written. It's psychotic depression told through magical realism, or at least something close to that. I have a love/hate relationship with stories that indulge in self-pity and wallow in melancholy. If it weren't for the ending, this would be in contention for my favorite story from Talabi. I'm amazed how by how he's taken so much that I dislike and made it into something that I can accept and even enjoy.
Enjoyable

Nigerian Dreams (2024)
In the future all people live in supercities because to be outside is a death sentence. The Nigerian dream for many is to leave Nigeria. Even if they do, are there dreams anywhere else, or has the entire world become a nightmare?
Ok

Performance Review (2022)
An existential horror story of a humiliation ritual that dehumanizes both reviewer and reviewed. The corporation has developed metrics for every aspect of their being. How much must be sacrificed to become the ideal employee?
Talabi notes that he was one of the writers that Google contacted to test out their AI-powered text editor, Wordcraft, and he wrote this story in it.
https://magenta.withgoogle.com/wordcr...
Enjoyable

Silence (2013)
A second person flash fiction story about the maddening and comforting role that silence plays in a romantic relationship.
Ok

Embers (2024)
A local prodigy in his stubbornness refuses to adapt to the changing times. He becomes ever more resentful, delusional, and misanthropic. Eventually, he suffers a complete psychotic break.
I really don't know what to think about this. This too is a revised story, first published in 2013.
Ok

The Million Eyes of a Lonely and Fragile God (2016)
A man dying in outer space ruminates on how everything went wrong while his lover screams at him in despair over comms.
Blah

Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core (2021)
A flash fiction story told in the form of a patent application and the comments from the person it was sent to. This could be considered a horror story about the lengths someone will go to out of grief.
Enjoyable

A Dream of Electric Mothers (2022)
The electric mother is the combined entity of all citizens who have ever been uploaded into digital conscience. Their default state is individual existence, but when the government seeks advice they combine into one. The protagonist, the defense minister, also wishes to consult with a specific individual consciousness. She wants to resolve both international and personal troubles at the same time. Depending on your perspective, the story either shows the limitations of emotionless cognition or emotions impeding optimal function.
Ok

[Eliane Boey]

CONVERGENCE PROBLEMS takes you from future Nigeria, to Mars, by asking the questions we're not always comfortable encountering. His stories are tight and pack a lot of thought with a light-handed wry realism that doesn't lose the message for the world, and the story for the message. The Nebula-nominated "Dream of Electric Mothers" is a clear favourite, and I also loved "Ganger", a story about the difference between surviving, adapting, and thriving; and "Nigerian Dreams". Excellent collection, and a powerful follow-up to Talabi's SHIGIDI.

[Kate]

I am not a sci-fi guy, but am floored by this short story collection. Rarely do I read a collection of short stories where I love every one. I wish “Gange” was a whole book.

[David Wilson]

Very rarely does a collection by a single author maintain the clarity and quality Talabi manages in Convergence Problems. From the very clever and very worthy theme embodied in the title of the collection, to the engineering detail and uncanny application of just enough detail that unfamiliar places and concepts feel real, this is a masterwork. Too often authors take all the short fiction they have, toss it into a book with a table of contents and send it into the world without direction. This book has a constant theme running throughout... futures and societies where things that seemed so close to perfect, or correct, are not quite accurate, or are violently skewed by the application of reality.

I have some clear favorites in this collection:

"Saturday's Song," offers a group of storytelling siblings finding new ways to reach old truths in a series of very interesting, intertwined tales. "Gangers" confronts a slew of psychological and societal issues, while peeling back the sometimes-stubborn onion we call freedom a layer at a time.

“Nigerian Dreams” is a story that, and I assume this to be at least part of the purpose, sent me down a small rabbit hole of research on the history of that country, trying to get a full grasp on the two very separate opinions on what would constitute the Nigerian Dream.

Some of the works, like “A Dream of Electric Mothers,” need no new comment from me, but I was both amused and somewhat concerned for the world while reading "Debut," where - very similar to the misconception authors have previously presented - that aliens, if they visited Earth, would communicate with us as we do with one another, visits the notion that if AI ever actually created something unique and meaningful, it would not be so to us - but would be targeting other forms of AI.

This is a powerful collection. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by the talented Ben Arogundade, who was the perfect voice, cultured and smooth and able to lend the proper emotion, while perfectly comfortable with the engineering and technical aspects of the prose.

Highly recommended.

[Leah Dunbar]

Wow, what a cool collection of stories. Really interesting premise both overall and for each story. I wish a few of them were longer and some characters more developed, but the whole collection was such a fun and wholly interesting read (even though it became eerie to finish setting up a new phone while also finishing a book about our technological overlords)

Favorites: Debut, Ganger, Abeokuta52, Dream of Electric Mothers

[Kaia]

4.5 stars. This is a very solid collection of speculative fiction with many strong stories. The author's notes at the end are great, too. My favorite stories were:

-"Debut"
-"Saturday's Song"
-"Blowout"
-"Ganger"

[draxtor]

Superb SciFi stories! Not too hard, not too soft!
Wole is too talented, damn it!
I read a few in the virtual realm (Second Life Book Club Island #2 I think?) = https://youtube.com/live/XcLOWNrbUsc?...

[Denise Ruttan]

I have a new favorite writer... review to come. 🥰

[Jeremy]

This was an incredible set of short stories focused primarily on Afrofuturistic sci-fi, but with some fantasy elements also. Several stories resonated with real-world problems so well that I felt like Wole was developing solutions in his stories. In An Arc of Electric Skin, the pain of a people who have been beaten down from within the systems is felt, and the anger surrounding this shines through the main character’s decisions.

“He’d realized then that he’d been so focused on surviving the system that he hadn’t ever truly been alive, that he was doing nothing but dying slowly and had been doing so for a long time.”

Saturday’s Song strikes so many good emotional notes and is a sequel to a previous short story that he wrote for another collection that I really need to track down now.

“The look of someone who had seen the worst of the world had stared into the dark heart of humanity but had survived and resolved to live, love, and laugh freely despite it.”

Ganger, the longest of the stories contained within COnvergence Problems, captured a bit of how I’m sure a lot of us feel sometimes about the world:

“The opposite of happiness isn’t sadness or anger. It’s hopelessness. It’s feeling like your life has no meaning.”

After reading Greatest Hits by Harlan Ellison, I wasn’t sure when I would be reading sci-fi/fantasy short stories again, yet here we are and I feel like Wole Talabi is able to not just write as well or better than Harlan Ellison, but he is able to put even more emotion and impact into his words.

FOUR AND A HALF STARS

The stories are so damn good and I’m glad that DAW Books was so kind as to send me a copy!

[Johan Haneveld]

9 Wole Talabi is now confirmed (with this, his second collection) to be one of my favourite (if not the favourite) short story SF-author. We live in an age where there is an abundance of great short fiction available, and even more enjoyable: short fiction not only from the US and the UK, but from all over the world. I love reading anthologies with stories from other cultures and continents. So far, I find I like the African SF (a broad term of course) most. And Wole Talabi is a great example of that new (and old) tradition, that has in it the power of rejuvenate the SF genre (and speculative literature as a whole). I hope to discover many more authors like Talabi and stories like these.
What makes these stories so good? Well, they're well written of course. They're not overly complicated and not verbose, but the author plays with his style and with the structure of his stories, in some stories featuring a group of story tellers named for the days of the week, in another story comparing and contrasting a SF-tale with a folk story and writing stories in surprising shapes: like a blog post or a patent application (with comments). The joy of story telling is on show here. But also as an engineer Talabi gives these stories a great technical background. The futures he describes feel plausible and like the best of 'old SF' most stories are about a technological innovation and its consequences. In a way I feel Talabi manages to combine the old school hard SF with a very modern approach and I like that. This also takes care that the stories do not devolve into 'slice of life' stories or observations of character without plot. (Which is not wrong, as many people love these stories in a more literary style - I think of Lavie Tidhar for example, but it's just not my preference). But - and an important but - Talabi makes the stories about the characters anyway. Technology is not enough - it's always about its effect on people - and here we are not talking about the hyper individualized people of some western SF-stories, living solitary lives, searching for pleasure and not wanting to be bound by responsibility (I of course generalize). Here we have people being part of complex social structures: families, communities, countries, belief systems. These people still have a sense of belonging to something that is larger than them. The traditions past on by previous generations, while sometimes keeping them repressed (as in the story where a mother wants to get her grieving son to her pastor), at other times give them power to resist dehumanization - as in the very powerful story 'Ganger'. I find it refreshing that in these stories religion is not something to be derided or made fun of - as it is in many western SF-stories - but it is seen as an important part of the identity of communities. The world is not simply a mechanism running down, but it has a spiritual life of its own. And whether or not the gods are really there, they are important to tell stories about, because we are stories. And when we tell stories that are too small, that are just about individual wish fulfillment and not about meaning and purpose, we ourselves will become too small. Reading these stories I feel like I'm reading stories that are realy about important things. Stories that remind me what it is to be human. That all makes it sound too grandiose. I also simply enjoy these stories for being at the forefront of technology and still being well told by a master storyteller. I for one will look forward to new short stories by Wole Talabi and I hope more readers will find these collections and enjoy them as much as I have.

[Runalong]

An absolutely fantastic varied and exciting collection of SF and Fantasy tales. Lots of interesting ideas and situations explored - strongly recommended

Full Review - https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/bl...

[LeeAnn]

Scifi short stories at their peak, from an up-and-coming African author with a distinctive voice.

"People are made of stories too, but only the versions of their stories that they tell themselves."

Meet the women of Wole Talabi's science fiction crew:

Ng'endo, high-ranking tech supervisor, who discovers AI is making art by itselves.

The unnamed doctor, who teaches her lover to channel lightning.

Saturday, whose stories are told through the voices of her siblings (with a nod to Shigidi from Talabi's first book).

The mother & daughter whose memories fuel Kalu, the soldier in the story "Lights in the Sky," written uniquely in second-person point of view.

Folake, a scientist monitoring Mars from her orbital space station, desperately trying to understand if being a hero or being family is more important.

"Gamma: Love in the Age of Radiation Poisoning" and the unnamed narrator who tells her brief love story.

Laide, with brain technology and societal interference, that cause her some... difficulties. And a scathing satire of Apartheid.

"Sometimes the only way to be free is to go deeper into the prison."

Stella, the scientist mother who inspires an alien investigation.

Lagos, and the city, she who is alive and dying and reborn.

Nneka, experiencing on-the-job pressure and experimentation.

B, the giver and receiver of Silence.

Tinuke, the astronaut at Europa Exploration Station.

Emeko, inventor of eternal spirit memory electronics, whose documents with her brother tell a chilling story.

Dolapo, the government committee military leader whose REM sleep journey into thoughtspace.

[Derrick Contreras]

3.5 stars
The first third of this book is a little stale. The stories weren’t holding my attention and I almost DNF’d. Then it started to pick up and then I got to the Novella “Ganger” which was incredible. And then from there on I loved pretty much all of the remaining stories. This collection is almost 300 pages long and I think it would have been a solid 4 stars if they had cut some of the earlier stories and kept it at 200ish. If you start this and it’s not for you I’d recommend to keep going. It’s all sci-fi with Nigerian characters. So you’re exposed to a lot of Nigerian culture as well as just great sci-fi stories.

[Steph | bookedinsaigon]

Ted Chiang is my favorite author, so I am always in search of other diverse speculative short story collections. While CONVERGENCE PROBLEMS fits the bill, it lacks a little something extra that would elevate it into an emotionally moving and memorable read for me.

First, the good. I love the Nigerian-ness of this collection. Many of Talabi’s stories are set in a future Nigeria that explore how global developments in AI, technology, climate change, and human migration will affect Africans/Nigerians. I particularly liked stories that felt like they could only have happened to Nigerians or Africans, such as:

- “Ganger”, a novelette about an AI-run super-city that houses millions of refugees of environmental disaster but in a way that kills free will and individualism

- “Nigerian Dreams”, a simple yet powerful story about how, sadly, the dream of all Nigerians is and continues to be to leave Nigeria forever in search of better jobs, healthcare, environment, and education

The stories that played with form were also enjoyable for me, in particular “Abeokuta52”, a subtly chilling story that plays out in a blog post and the comments underneath.

Unfortunately, I did find CONVERGENCE PROBLEMS somewhat lacking as a cohesive collection. 16 stories is a lot to fit into a 300-page book. Many of the shorter ones (under 10 pages) did not feel like they did anything new or memorable with the genre. I understand that this book collects stories that Talabi has published elsewhere, but I really wished there had been fewer stories, and the stories that were included more fleshed out. There were a lot of good ideas that were only briefly shown before we were moving on to the next one. Unlike with Chiang’s collections, and even Ken Liu’s, I had more difficulty understanding who Talabi is as a writer and thinker, and what concepts and values matter most to him.

I’d still recommend CONVERGENCE PROBLEMS to lovers of speculative fiction, short stories, and diverse reads. I think I just went in with my expectations too high.

[Antti Värtö]

3,5 stars.

I loved Incomplete Solutions, and that's why I'm a bit harsh critic here: I was expecting similar greatness from Convergence Problems, but the book didn't deliver. It was good, but in this case "good" is a disappointment. I didn't pick up this book to read a "good" collection of stories! I wanted to read an all-stars collection without any misses! Like Incomplete Solutions!

But unfortunately, there were quite many misses. Especially in the first half of the book there were several stories that felt like they were second drafts: yes, you could publish them, but they didn't feel quite done yet. They were too short, too rushed, the central idea wasn't interesting enough.

In general, I found the shorter stories in this collection to be on the weaker side. Like "Nigerian Dreams", a five-page story about a man wanting to emigrate from a future Nigerian supercity. It was... okay, but the SF setting didn't really bring anything new to this story, you could've written this as a contemporary literary fiction instead, and the SF elemens felt tacked on.

But on the other hand, I don't think this book had any really bad stories, either. Even the worst stories were "okay". The best (like "Lights in the Sky" or "A Dream of Electric Mothers") were really good. If this was the first book I read from Talabi, or would've lwft me intrigued to read sinne more from him. Alas, I read the better collection first, so the experience was downhill for me.

[Laura]

In his introduction to this collection, Wole Talabi writes that in mathematical modelling, convergence is “bringing an approximate (simplified) solution close enough to a true solution, within a given tolerance during an iterative procedure;” he notes that while this is often needed, “there are often difficulties in converging to a solution.” Convergence Problems, then, is a collection of stories about problems that arise in imagined futures, even apparently desirable ones; Talabi notes that such problems are not always bad and can “expose poor logic or inconsistent assumptions.”

Inevitably with a short story collection, some stories will stand out to each reader more than others. For me, “Saturday’s Song,” “An Arc of Electric Skin,” “Abeokuta52,” and “A Dream of Electric Mothers” are all standouts, but there is no filler here – this is a fantastic, thoughtful, wide ranging collection. I averaged out the star ratings I gave to each individual story and came out with a number over four, and I’m more than happy to round up. The inclusion of Author Notes at the end situating the influences and publication of each story is a nice inclusion. I definitely recommend this collection.

Content warnings: homophobia, war, violence, gun violence, accidental injury, fire injury, classism, terminal illness, suicide attempt, death, murder

[Jacqueline Nyathi]

I consider Wole Talabi a master of literary futurism. Perhaps because of his background as an engineer, and certainly because he was an early reader of sci-fi, his work is conceptually dense with wonderful, very believable ideas—like, in one of the stories in this collection, Debut, AI makes art on its own. And although I’m not a fan of African fantasy, Talabi may make a believer of me yet; as he has said, he doesn’t feel constrained by genre when he writes, and many of his stories are a blend—a “continuum of the fantastic” (see this fantastic talk with Gary K. Wolfe https://www.crowdcast.io/c/ohatr6v1q6ng).

Convergence Problems is a collection that displays Talabi’s literary philosophy to full effect. Apart from the enchanting Debut, included in the collection is the wonderful, and yes, dreamy, Hugo- and Nebula Award-nominated novelette, A Dream of Electric Mothers, which blends African belief in consulting ancestors with technological means of doing so, in an imagined alternate African future. But Talabi is not all about imagined futures; he keeps his eye firmly on the present, too, with stories like the excellent Nigerian Dreams, which examines migration, and Abeokuta52, where Nigerian citizens pay a high price for Nigerian development (hints of neocolonialism here). Abeokuta52 is my favourite of the two hermit crab stories in the collection; the other story is Comments on your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core. Ganger imagines a post-apocalyptic Nigeria with people divided by class into arcologies and villas under a dome; I look forward to reading the eventual novel about revolution.

There’s much more in the collection, including Saturday’s Song, which references the nightmare god Shigidi from Talabi’s wonderful BSFA-nominated and Nebula Finalist debut novel, Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, and the Gravity (movie)-esque The Million Eyes of a Lonely and Fragile God. And the heartbreaking Embers, another of my favourites in this collection, about a man stranded in time when the world moves on from oil. Although I will rate Talabi as one of my favourite African writers, he is properly placed on the world stage as one of today’s most exciting SF writers.

Thank you to DAW books and to NetGalley for early access.

[Lindsay]

3.5 rounded up

A series of short stories that range from absolutely compelling and thought-provoking to those more difficult to stay immersed and invested in.

There’s no denying that Talabi can write, and has deep insights about where our society is going in the future with AI, climate crisis, and how our lives and archives of knowledge and meaning might morph with the changes in technology. I think, maybe this just verged too far into lofty sci-fi for me when I’m more of a speculative fiction/dystopian fan grounded in a near-future. When things go to space and aliens I tend to lose interest and have a harder time relating to the lives of characters. That’s absolutely a me issue, so if you love all facets of sci-fi equally this will absolutely blow you away.

My favourite stories in this collection were “Debut” about AI learning how to create art; “Saturday’s Song” the creation of a story by some group of god-like entities; “Gamma” about two children playing together and falling in love amidst a nuclear catastrophe; “Performance Review” which is a look at life if every metric measured for work performance included actual brain scans. There was also an extended almost novella length story called “Ganger” which could have been its own book about a suicidal woman looking for meaning in a society under a dome where everything is controlled, everything a data point.

I was very into some of these stories but a lot more I just didn’t connect with. But, the writing never faltered. Highly recommend for anyone into sci-fi.

The narration was also great, but sound wise it dipped sometimes which I found really annoying.

[Annarella]

If was the first book I read by Wole Talabi and this anthology was a good introduction to this talented authors.
There's different themes, characters and Africa is the common trait.
I liked the storytelling and want to read a novel to have a better idea of this author
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

[Sara G]

The stories in this collection range from a few pages to novella length works. I thought the shorter ones were more effective, on average; the longer ones tended towards being obvious. But they were all enjoyable reads.

[Emily]

I loved the hard sci-fi elements, but most of the stories had a darker feel then I prefer. The concepts were very cool though! Definitely worth checking out if you are a sci-fi lover.

[Bennett Graff]

4.5/5

Saturday's Song, Blowout, and Ganger were all fantastic. Would recommend.

[Megan]

*I received an eARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.*

I had read Talabi's Hugo and Nebula nominated novelette A Dream of Electric Mothers in Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction and loved it but was disappointed by Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, so I went into this collection with some trepidation but I really enjoyed it!

In Convergence Problems, Talabi explores the rapid change of technology, especially as it relates to Africa. There are stories that explore colonialism both historically and in the space age, identity, AI, grief, family, and so much more. Talabi's prose is excellent and his ideas are inventive and engaging. There are several stories that play with form in such a fun way, and I would love to see more of that! I think I will give Talabi's next full length novel a chance but where his work has worked best for me is in the short form.

Standouts to me were:
An Arc of Electric Skin
Nigerian Dreams
Performance Review
Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core
A Dream of Electric Mothers