AFROFUTURIST FANTASY recommendation - "The Deep" by Rivers Solomon (with clipping.)

“The Deep” by Rivers Solomon turns a piece of brutal slave-trade history into an underwater Afrofuturist civilization—and then makes the emotional cost of that history the engine of the story. Published in 2019, the novel was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, won the Lambda Literary Award, and draws attention not only to world-building but to how trauma travels across generations. Its premise traces back to 2017, when This American Life commissioned the experimental hip-hop group clipping to write “The Deep” for an afrofuturism segment; the song was inspired by drexia, a mythology created alongside the group’s work. In that mythology, pregnant women are thrown overboard during the slave trade, fetuses adapt to breathing underwater, and a new underwater society—descended from those survivors—forms over time.

Solomon’s book follows the Washington Roux, the fictional underwater people whose origins are rooted in real, horrifying facts: during the transatlantic slave trade, over a million people died during voyages, and many were thrown overboard. The novel’s most distinctive narrative device assigns the burden of remembering that history to a single role: a “historian.” Once a year, the historian joins the community for immersive remembrance ceremonies, then returns the burden to the next historian—so only one person carries the full psychological weight at a time. The story centers on the current historian, a young woman named Yetu, who received the role when she was very young and has been shaped by it so deeply that she can disappear from her own body for days or even months during remembrances.

When Yetu begins the next ceremony, she leaves in the middle, raising the central tension: what happens to an individual who has never fully been allowed to be one? The novel also asks what the community owes itself when memory is both identity and injury. Themes run through the book—cultural and individual memory, intergenerational trauma, racism and speciesism (the Washington Roux are treated like fish or animals by land dwellers), and belonging. It also includes queer elements, including non-normative mating among the Washington Roux.

One of the book’s most compelling ideas is the balance between collectivity and individuality. Yetu wants to escape the collective memory to reclaim her own sense of self, but leaving the community with those memories would harm everyone else. That conflict is reinforced by the writing’s point of view. Solomon’s world uses pronouns that shift with the remembrance: the community’s language leans on “we/us/ours,” and the remembered experience feels plural—almost as if multiple lives are happening at once. The video transcript highlights how this approach echoes clipping’s “The Deep,” where the only pronoun used is “y’all.”

At 163 pages (or about four hours as an audiobook narrated by David Diggs, with an afterword by clipping), the novel is brief but dense in implications. The world-building is intentionally suggestive—rules are present but sometimes vague—inviting readers to imagine what the society keeps, what it abandons, and what utopia might cost. For readers seeking adjacent titles, the transcript points to Chana Porter’s “The Seep” (queer sci-fi with utopia/dystopia tension) and “Follow Me to Ground” (also about non-human people, though less liked by the reviewer).