- The Ephemera Collector is an Afrofuturist story within a story about a literary curator & archivist using an experimental format, that includes poems, journal entries, and footnotes in the spirit of the genre-bending novel The House of Leaves. The timeline shifts from the distant future (2288) to near future (2035) to 20th & 21st century history (1921-2020), and finally forward once more to the distant future.
- Don’t skip the prologue. The Ephemera Collector prologue summarizes the entire book in a 14-line Q&A interview; a nod to the prologue of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare which contains a 14-line sonnet spoken by the Chorus that tells the entire story of the play.
- Visual story telling is key. The illustrations and typography are part of the narrative that fit together like puzzle pieces. The book is best experienced in a visual format, where some chapters are simply date-stamped pictures. Several parts were cut out of the audiobook version because the visuals can’t be conveyed with an actor’s voice.
- The main themes of The Ephemera Collector include the Future of AI and Health, Cultural Preservation, the Corporatization of Culture, Restorative Justice, and Climate Change which have a direct impact on the protagonist Xandria Brown and her research for The Diwata Collection.
- The action primarily takes place at The Huntington Library, Museum, and Botanical Gardens, the actual home of Octavia E. Butler’s literary archive as well as the installation of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Orbit Pavilion. Both facts are critical to the “who-done-it” component of the two story lines.