The Voices of Martyrs

From visionary Afrofuturist Maurice Broaddus comes the re-release of this seminal collection, with an all-new introduction and notes from the author. Fourteen stories meld history, folktales, horror, fantasy, and science fiction into electric moments scattered through ten centuries of Black experience.

An outcast West African warrior takes on evil spirits, and the brutal priest who creates them. A freedwoman reveals what a spirit stone truly commemorates. A museum of grief houses a widower's memories-and a child's. Visiting his mother's Jamaican home, an American inherits a strange spirital inheritance. A 1970s quad skater flees time-traveling Afronauts convinced he can find the mothership groove. Steamfunk revolution foments in communities underneath robot-run Indianapolis. A lieutenant of the Evangelical States of America navigates first contact with an unexpected alien race.

Through war and enlightenment, alongside vampires, obeah men, and common injustice, Broaddus's lyrical prose delivers epiphanies wrapped in page-turning excitement.