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After the Flare

A Novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
"After the Flare is spectacularly imagined, well-written, and a pleasure to read. An absorbing novel that explores a compelling, African-centered future world." –Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review A catastrophic solar flare reshapes our world order as we know it – in an instant, electricity grids are crippled, followed by devastating cyberattacks that paralyze all communication. With America in chaos, former NASA employee Kwesi Bracket works at the only functioning space program in the world, which just happens to be in Nigeria. With Europe, Asia, and the U.S. knocked off-line, and thousands of dead satellites about to plummet to Earth, the planet's only hope rests with the Nigerian Space Program's plan to launch a daring rescue mission to the International Space Station. Bracket and his team are already up against a serious deadline, but life on the ground is just as disastrous after the flare. Nigeria has been flooded with advanced biohacking technologies, and the scramble for space supremacy has attracted dangerous peoples from all over Africa. What's more: the militant Islamic group Boko Haram is slowly encroaching on the spaceport, leaving a trail of destruction, while a group of nomads has discovered an ancient technology more powerful than anything Bracket's ever imagined. With the clock ticking down, Bracket – helped by a brilliant scientist from India and an eccentric lunar geologist – must confront the looming threats to the spaceport in order to launch a harrowing rescue mission into space. In his follow-up to Nigerians in Space, Deji Bryce Olukotun poses deep questions about technology, international ambition, identity, and space exploration in the 21st century.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 10, 2017
      Olukotun’s uneven sophomore novel creates an Afrocentric near future marked by perilous technology and international turmoil. A massive solar flare destroys all electronics across the globe except along the equator, where the thicker magnetic field offers some protection. As the world’s population reels and satellites fall to earth, Nigeria leverages its newfound technological superpower status by ambitiously launching a space program to rescue an astronaut trapped on an international space station before its life support capabilities run out. Kwesi Bracket, a former NASA scientist of African descent, gets hired to oversee the design and construction of the training pool. The time-sensitive push to the stars faces increased pressure as Boko Haram encroaches towards the space base. To complicate things further, Kwesi and his colleague Seeta, an audio engineer, discover artifacts that suggest something alien is living underground in the compound. This mystery brings a wealthy and eccentric anthropologist to the area and leads them into an exploration of African history and lost empires. The prose’s clunky exposition and too abrupt action sequences cannot quite support the novel’s wide ambitions. While the world Olukotun builds is evocative, readers will feel shortchanged by the lack of development and confused plot.

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  • English

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