With the Sauútiverse about to hit Glasgow for a very special event at Waterstones on 3 February, launching the new Flame Tree anthology Sauúti Terrors, Eugen Bacon whets our appetite with some links to free work from the Afrocentric speculative universe.
A year and a half since the BFA feature ‘The Call of Sauúti’, we’d love to share with you some of our fiction, available free online, and its’ all set in the Afrocentric Sauútiverse. Through a different kind of writing and unique worldbuilding, we continue to cultivate inclusive characters and stories that engage with difference.
‘Listen, Don’t Touch’ (flash fiction) by Cheryl S. Ntumy
Cheryl S. Ntumy’s flash fiction ‘Listen, Don’t Touch’ is a cautionary science fiction tale about technology gone amok, available free in Mythaxis Magazine Issue 42:
There are worse things. My mate Kwa-Nxi takes a deep breath, steeling himself.
Of course. Many worse things. Like…
He cringes, jagged teeth flashing, fingers hovering hesitantly before he signs, Disembowelment?
Oh, definitely. Yes.
(continues…)
‘Epistles of Our Mother (flash fiction) by Eugen Bacon
My flash fiction ‘Epistles to Our Mother‘, offers a cosmological timeframe and perspective about what it means to be human, and it appears in Text Journal, a special issue on writing from the fringes:
It happened one dusk as the planet Wiimb-ó came into syzygy with the two suns Zuúv’ah and Juah-āju and its physical moon, Javuiili. It was an event that also triggered the two spirit moons, Vuiili-ki and Vuiili-ku, as darkness floated over sunshine three bés straight—all standard days so to speak.
The shattering phenomena
shifted the planes of existence
and liquefied boundaries
between realities and alternate realities.
(continues…)
The Alphabet of Pinaa: An AI Reinvents Zerself on an Inhabited Moon (short story) by Eugen Bacon
The short story ‘The Alphabet of Pinaa: An AI Reinvents Zerself on an Inhabited Moon’ is comprised of alphabetical vignettes set in the inhabited moon, Pinaa, the planet’s name originating from the Setswana word ‘pina’ meaning song:
Awe
When Ar’Tam closes his eyes, he sees starburst and a rainbow, lights clicking without echo. He studies the phenomenon in his mind’s eye, dispassionate from its surrealism, disembodied from its haunting and aura of mystery. All he knows is that his moon is
watching, always watching
even as he rotates with it
on its axis until he himself drifts
only grounded by quakes.
The conveyer never once stops moving, whirr, birr, converting energy into crystals.
He
opens
his
eyes.
(continues…)
Descent (novella) by Wole Talabi
Wole Talabi’s Descent follows a team of explorers sponsored by kartels down to the planet’s surface, where they try to capture energy from an incredibly powerful sonic storm using new technology that has just been developed and is yet to be tested:
The maadiregi at the temple of the talking drum say that there is a word in old Sauúti, the high language of our ancestors, that when spoken backwards, allows the speaker to fly.
To take to the sky like a bird, unshackled from the persistent pull that Órino-Rin’s gravity exerts on us all. To be free from the weight of your own being, that intractable thing that always pulls you down to the earth like a parent’s expectations. To float up high into the pale sky where the two suns Zuúv’ah and Juah-āju blaze fierce like the unblinking eyes of Our Mother Goddess.
(continues…)
And, Coming Soon From The Sauutiverse!
And the following are new releases coming to a bookstore near you in 2026.
Sauúti Terrors (anthology) by Eugen Bacon, Cheryl S. Ntumy & Stephen Embleton (eds)
Through collaboration with other Afrodescendant peoples, we are creating a continuum of storytelling in shared voices. Out this January and hot on the heels of our first anthology—the award-shortlisted Mothersound: A Sauútiverse Anthology—is our newest anthology Sauúti Terrors—an odyssey of perils: from legends and folktales to inheritances, gods, ancestral spirits, sacred prey, sentient creatures, beings of unreality, sonic storms, solar flares and meteor strikes.
Crimson in Quietus, a novel, by Eugen Bacon
This inaugural Sauútiverse novel, Crimson in Quietus, spans across the deepest parts of the five-planet Sauútiverse orbiting a binary star, in a new kind of literary mystery where the investigator is not a detective, but a sound magic scientist. Out in September 2026.
(Cover art by Tricia Reeks)
The Sauutiverse in Glasgow
Date/Time: Tuesday 3rd February 2026, 7pm GMT
Location: Waterstones, Argyle Street, Glasgow
Cost: £20 HB / £5 General admission
Waterstones and the British Fantasy Society are delighted to present Sauúti Terrors Short Stories! We are joined by co-editors Eugen Bacon, Stephen Embleton and Cheryl S. Ntumy in a discussion chaired by BFS Chair Shona Kinsella.
Sauúti Terrors Short Stories brings together a powerful and haunting collection of short stories from the groundbreaking Sauútiverse. Sauúti Terrors tells of the doomed, the damned, the shunned, the cunning, the destroyers, the noxious, and more, in the worlds of the living, the in-between and the dead, written by African and African diaspora writers. The editors will be discussing the process of working on a collection in a shared world, the process of selecting stories and authors to include, and the joys of bringing this shared world into a new genre, before signing copies of the book.
There will be a Q&A after the panel. Register here.
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