Archangels of Funk
by Andrea Hairston
Publication Date: May 07, 2024
List Price: $29.99
Format: Hardcover, 384 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781250807281
Imprint: Tordotcom
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
Parent Company: Holtzbrinck Publishing Group
Read an Excerpt from Archangels of Funk
Description of Archangels of Funk by Andrea Hairston
“Archangels of Funk is a tour de force of Afrofunkilicious Black Girl Magic. Like all great speculative fiction, it’s about our world as well as this lush imaginary one. Don’t miss the majesty of Andrea Hairston in this new call for resistance.” —Tananarive Due, author of The Reformatory
Run from your past. Hide from your future. Protect your present.
The Water Wars have scrambled the world. Flood refugees are on the run. Disrupters and the nostalgia militia roam the roads wreaking havoc. Invisible Darknet Lords troll the internet, solidifying their power, while Cinnamon, her three Circus-Bots, and two dogs work with a community of farmers, Motor Fairies, and Wheel-Wizards to provide housing, health care, and education for flood refugees.
As Cinnamon confronts threats from the Darknet Lords and the nostalgia militia, she must determine how best to honor her elders and her history while building a future for herself and her charges.
It’s not going to be easy.
A Great Review from Publishers Weekly
Hairston’s magnificent third novel in the sequence that began with Redwood and Wildfire is a multisensory plunge into a dystopian future of climate crisis and warfare over who controls the water. When told from protagonist Cinnamon Jones’s point of view, however, the plot skews cozy, focused on personal concerns about weaving meaning from history to create a coherent future. In Cinnamon’s case, this means revitalizing the Next World Festival, an annual celebration established by her elders in her youth. Almost 60 now, Cinnamon struggles to make the upcoming event worthy of this heritage. Her plotline is rendered three-dimensional by the interpolated narration of characters with fewer existential concerns but more holistic viewpoints, particularly the AIs and dogs who are her main interlocutors—and who manifestly connect, in ways Cinnamon can’t quite bring herself to trust, with the “haints” of her history. The most impressive feat here is the language; Hairston’s prose is a dynamic collage of real and invented cultures spiked with italics, inventive capitalization, and musical allusions (“Nobody rescued Cinnamon either. And Saving Your Own Self was a Hard Problem”). Ecocatastrophe and cyberthreats are familiar territory for sci-fi, but Hairston puts a beautiful twist on both in this exploration of “waiting for love to come on back in style.”