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You Have to Read This!: The Binti Trilogy

November 17, 2025

Folio’s Sophia Schoepfer gives her six compelling reasons to make The Binti Trilogy your must-read book this season …

1. A HERO UNLIKE ANY YOU'VE SEEN BEFORE

The Binti Trilogy is the story of Binti, a young Himba woman who leaves home to study at a prestigious intergalactic university. It’s one of the first times I’ve had the chance to read science fiction that has a non-white, non-male hero. The plot is rich and vibrant, with a fabulous cast of characters – human and alien – and it takes you to completely unexpected places. There’s nothing else like The Binti Trilogy on the Folio list.

2. WELCOME TO ‘AFRICANFUTURISM’

Author Nnedi Okorafor coined the term Africanfuturism to describe stories that centre the African continent, experience and culture – and envision a positive, hopeful future. This is different from Afrofuturism, which Okorafor describes as ‘a reductive and America-centric label that gets slapped on all things black and speculative regardless of everything.’ Coming from a very different background, I gained an inspiring insight into science fiction from an Africa-centric perspective.

3. A VIBRANT SPACE OPERA

Jellyfish-like aliens, interplanetary diplomacy, living spaceships – what’s not to love? It’s fantastically epic yet deeply relatable – a young girl leaves home to tread a new path and test herself in the world (and what a world it is!). But this is also a story of rich human – and alien – experience: friendship, family, first love and the quest for identity.

4. INCREDIBLE TENSION – INTERSPECIES STYLE

In the first book, Binti encounters an initially hostile alien species who pass her their DNA, changing her braided hair into alien tentacles (or ‘okuoko’). She becomes ‘other’, and she feels as though she occupies the space between being human and being alien. It’s an incredible concept – charting the pains of coming of age and finding belonging against the very real threats of deep-rooted interspecies tensions.

5. OUT OF THIS WORLD AMBITION

As well as the books’ themes of coming of age, selfhood and cultural identity, there’s also an entire plot about warring alien species and intergalactic peril, and how Binti must become a spokeswoman for peace. It’s off the scale. Or as Ursula K. Le Guin once put it: ‘There’s more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor’s work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics.’

6. AN AWARDS FEST SUREFIRE WINNER

The Binti books have scooped several prestigious prizes, including two of the biggest honours in science fiction – a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award. Folio is publishing the first ever illustrated version of The Binti Trilogy, with beautiful paintings by the artist David Palumbo and a shimmering slipcase featuring an outer space landscape.