You're listening to imaginary worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief,

America Mollinsky. One of my favorite science fiction writers is Nettie Acoraphore.'s Nigerian American and most of her books take place in Nigeria.

In 2019 she coined a term called African Futurism, all one word. She wanted to distinguish her work from Afro Futurism.

Afro Futurism is typically about the black experience in the diaspora.

African Futurism is said in Africa,

and those stories deal with issues

which are specific to the continent.

The term took off immediately,

which makes sense because she was not the only person writing African futurism.

Establish writers could easily fit into that category, and the term could be an inspiration

for up-and-coming writers. Nettie Acorfor and other writers have emphasized that this is a broad term,

which is meant to cover a wide range of stories about African futures.

But as it kept reading her work, other African future stories, I noticed a pattern.

Climate change comes up a lot in these stories.

And the way that the characters adapt to climate change is different in African

futurism than a lot of science fiction stories written in the West. And there are reasons

for that. Like for me, and I think probably a lot of people in the West,

climate change can feel like an act of imagination.

When I read an article where a scientist says,

this could be our future, it's terrifying, but it feels like science

fiction because it's not my everyday reality unless there's a strange weather phenomenon going

on that particular day or that particular week.

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