Run from your past. Hide from your future. Protect your present.
We’re pleased to share the cover for Andrea Hairston’s Archangels of Funk, a story of music, resistance, and acceptance–forthcoming May 7, 2024 from Tordotcom Publishing.
Octavia Butler meets Neil Gaiman in a tale about running from your past and hiding from your future.
The Water Wars have scrambled the world. Flood refugees are on the run. Disruptors 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, healthcare and education for flood refugees.
Slipping into periodic despair, Cinnamon’s been hiding out. She’s ready to ditch the Next World Festival she runs—a sci-fi carnival jam featuring music, dance, masked revelers, drum circles and storytellers in a grassy amphitheater on the farm she inherited. Her elders haunt her, insisting she do the Festival no matter what.
As she confronts threats to the life she’s attempting to live from the Darknet Lords and the Nostalgia Militia, Cinnamon 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.
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Archangels of Funk
Andrea Hairston is a novelist, essayist, playwright, and the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre. She is the author of Redwood and Wildfire, winner of the 2011 Otherwise Award and the Carl Brandon Kindred Award, and Mindscape, shortlisted for the Phillip K Dick and Otherwise Awards, and winner of the Carl Brandon Parallax Award. In her spare time, she is the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College. She has received the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Distinguished Scholarship Award for outstanding contributions to the criticism of the fantastic. She bikes at night year-round, meeting bears, and the occasional shooting star.
