Binti: The Night Masquerade

Binti: The Night Masquerade is a science fiction novella by the American-Nigerian writer Nnedi Okorafor, published by Tor.com in 2018 and the last of the three novellas that began with Binti in 2015 and continued with Binti: Home.

The series follows a young woman from the Himba people of Namibia who leaves home for an off-world university, and by this point the story's interest has moved from the arrival to the obligations, since Binti is caught between the human institution that educated her and the alien species she has an understanding with. Okorafor writes in a compressed style that keeps the mathematics, the ceremonial and the emotional consequences in the same register, which is what gives the novellas their density. The third volume was given a starred review in Booklist, which recommended reading the first two first, and when the trilogy was collected as Binti: The Complete Trilogy she added a further story, Binti: Sacred Fire, to the collection. Her work is part of the group of African and African-diaspora science fiction that changed the genre's default settings in the 2010s.