Often lost in painful, vivid visions of the zoti's past, Yetu no longer has an understanding of herself as an individual separate from history or her people. RELATED: Solarpunk Books for When You Crave Optimistic Sci-FiĪfter spending most of her life as historian, Yetu is exhausted from the emotional and physical burden of her role. How two-legged surface dwellers murdered zoti in their search for resources under the ocean floor. How the first infant zotis were nursed by the ocean as they explored their ability to live underwater.

But as historian, Yetu must live every minute with first-hand understanding of the atrocities committed against the zoti's ancestors: how pregnant women, the first mothers, were thrown overboard because they were seen as sick passengers on the ships that acted as prisons. Most wajinru, or zoti aleyu ('strange fish'), do not live with an awareness of their people's origin, perhaps through a deliberate act of forgetting. For the past two decades Yetu has been tasked with a responsibility as historian of her people, a duty she never asked for or wanted.

The Deep is told primarily from the point of view of 34-year-old Yetu. Solomon brings the world explored by Drexciya and Clipping to life in vivid, unforgettable new ways in the new novella. The syringe-like precision and powerful imagination seen in An Unkindness of Ghosts is on full display in The Deep. RELATED: Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books by Black Authors You Need to Read Under the brutal control of an overseer, darker-skinned Aster sees an opportunity to fight for her freedom and upend the ship's brutal hierarchy. The ship is organized around the same racial lines as the antebellum South, with light-skinned individuals at the top of the ship and darker-skinned individuals enslaved in the bowels of the vessel. Described by Amal El-Mohtar for NPR as 'a syringe full of stars,' An Unkindness of Ghosts is set on a generation spaceship traveling to a mythical planet of plenty. Their first novel won the Firecracker Award and was nominated for the Locus, Lambda, and Tiptree Award, among others.

Solomon made perfect sense as the next player to explore the world of this game of Telephone. With Clipping's permission, Wolfe reached out to Rivers Solomon, author of the award-winning Afrofuturist sci-fi novel An Unkindness of Ghosts.

Saga Press editor Navah Wolfe heard “The Deep” at the 2017 Hugo Awards and recognized that the world explored in Clipping's song contained rich possibilities.

The Deep by Rivers Solomon