If the mosaic of tales in How Long 'til Black Future Month? hooked you—the way “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” “Cuisine des Mémoires,” and “On the Banks of the River Lex” each reinvent stakes and style—you’ll love Butler’s range here. “Bloodchild” turns human–alien symbiosis into an intimate moral crucible, “Speech Sounds” imagines a world where language collapses, and “Amnesty” probes consent and survival under inscrutable occupiers. Like Jemisin, Butler compresses big ideas into tight, unforgettable stories that land with both intellect and heart.

Did “The City Born Great” thrill you—the graffiti-as-midwifery, the borough-as-avatar showdown in subway tunnels? The City We Became amplifies that premise into a full-on battle for NYC’s soul, with avatars of the boroughs (Bronca, Padmini, Manny, and more) teaming up against a cosmic invader. It keeps the same kinetic, urban-mystic energy and sharp social commentary, turning neighborhoods, art, and community into literal weapons of resistance.

If stories like “Red Dirt Witch” and “Cuisine des Mémoires” moved you with their celebration of Black lineage, trauma, and joy refracted through the fantastic, The Deep will resonate. Following Yetu, the historian of an underwater people descended from enslaved Africans thrown overboard, this novella wrestles with memory, identity, and community healing—much like Jemisin’s most intimate pieces do, but in a haunting, oceanic register.

If the ethical puzzles in “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” and the moral horror of “Walking Awake” lingered with you, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed offers a profound, character-driven inquiry into freedom, responsibility, and the costs of utopia. Watching Shevek shuttle between rival societies to complete a theory that could change everything scratches the same itch for principled worldbuilding and philosophical debate that Jemisin’s most idea-forward tales evoke.

If you were captivated by the Haitian spycraft and counter-colonial daring of “The Effluent Engine,” or the civil-rights-era fable of “Red Dirt Witch,” Everfair expands that energy into an alternate Congo where revolutionaries, missionaries, and refugees forge a precarious nation. Expect dirigibles, intrigue, and a polyphonic cast grappling with empire and liberation—the same fierce, restorative imagination that powers Jemisin’s historical re-visions.