How Long til Black Future Month

Even fans of How Long 'til Black Future Month admit the twenty-two stories run uneven, with only five or six really landing and the rest ranging from forgettable to actively disliked. A cluster of experimental, code- or AI-voiced entries, ‘The Trojan Girl,’ ‘The Evaluators,’ ‘The Elevator Dancer,’ and ‘The You Train,’ draw specific complaints for being hard to follow, and a further reader admits they “did not get this one. on any level. at all.” Even ‘The City Born Great,’ among the most praised and anthologized pieces here, gets flagged as “frenetic and confusing and missing a lot of backstory.” Critics single out didacticism as the collection's main craft weakness: “If Jemisin has a weakness, however, it's a propensity for didacticism.”