[troutman]

Anyone read Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James? It is the first book in a trilogy called Dark Star, and is being promoted as a kind of African Game of Thrones.

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/08/69241...east-of-a-book
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...ame-of-thrones

For two years, he researched African history and mythology, constructing the foundation for a fantastical vision of the continent that would invert the monolithic “Africa” invented by the West. He drew on oral epics, like the Epic of Sundiata, which some people believe was the basis for “The Lion King,” though the filmmakers have called it an “original story,” while admitting some parallels with Shakespeare. (“I felt like these stories had been stolen from me,” James said at Comic Con. “People say that ‘The Lion King’ is based on ‘Hamlet.’ Please.”) He read legendary monster tales, like those about the Inkanyamba, a South African serpent with a horse’s head, who causes summer storms. He made notes on the grammar of African languages, to inflect the book’s prose. He briefly considered doing a historical series, an “Ethiopian ‘Wolf Hall,’ ” but then reverted to his dream of writing fantasy that honored the African diaspora. He wanted to build a “vast playground of myth and history and legend that other people can draw from, a pool that’s as rich as Viking or Celtic lore,” he said.

He sketched his new world’s geography. (The maps that appear in the book are his work.) He made a list of characters that kept getting longer. There would be a quest to find a boy, he decided, and a motley group of seekers: a Moon Witch, a mournful giant, a perceptive buffalo. He wondered if the Aesi—a man with “skin like tar, hair red, when you see him you hear the flutter of black wings”—ought to narrate the story. Then he started thinking about a character called Tracker, a hunter with a nose that can suss out the details of a man’s life in an instant—the spices in his kitchen, the last time he washed—and track a woman to another city with just a whiff of her shirt. Tracker would be sullen and resentful, reserving his gentleness for a group of deformed children, called mingi, whom he meets through an “anti-witch” called the Sangoma.

Michael B. Jordan purchased the rights to produce a film adaptation of the novel in February 2019. [wikipedia]