Included in the best new Spring Sci-Fi and Fantasy books of 2025 by The Millions, Reactor, Gizmodo, Book Riot, and Storizen.
The year is 2035, and Los Angeles County is awash in a tangelo haze of wildfire smoke. Xandria Anastasia Brown spends her days deep in the archives of the Huntington Library as the curator of African American Ephemera and associate curator of American Historical Manuscripts, supported by an array of AI personal assistants and health bots. Descended from a family of obsessive collectors who took part in the Great Migration, Xandria grew up immersed in African American ephemera and realia: boots worn by Negro Troopers during the Civil War, Black ATA tennis rackets, bandanas worn by the Crips….
Although Xandria’s work may preserve collective memory, she is losing a grasp on her own. Evren, her new health bot, won’t stop reminding her that her symptoms of long COVID are worsening; not to mention that severe asthma, chronic fatigue, grief, and worrying lapses in reality keep disrupting progress on a new Octavia E. Butler exhibition, cataloging the new Diwata Collection, and organizing the Huntington against a stealth corporate takeover. Then, one morning a colleague Xandria can’t place calls to wish her a happy birthday—and the library goes into an emergency lockdown.
Sequestered in the archive with only her adaptive technology and flickering intuition, Xandria fears that her life’s work is in danger—the Diwata Collection, a radical blueprint for humanity’s survival. Up against a faceless enemy and unsure of who her human or AI allies truly are, she must make a choice.
Available at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Sistah SciFi, or wherever you buy books. #TheEphemeraCollector
Reviews & Endorsements
A gripping saga
People
. . . the radical heart of The Ephemera Collector [is] the notion that preservation matters
David L. Ulin, Alta
Jackson is an exciting new voice in Afrofuturism
Publishers Weekly starred review
Highly recommended for those who seek to understand the past and reimagine the future
Henry Bankhead, Library Journal starred review
This impressive debut novel reads in part like ‘if Octavia Butler lived through COVID,’ while also being something boldly original in its voice, vision, and genius
Mat Johnson, author of Invisible Things and Pym
Both a masterful formal experiment and an exhilarating science fiction epic, The Ephemera Collector is a fractal of a novel
Jinwoo Chong, author of Flux
Brilliant, bioluminescent work
Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn’t Require You.
Jackson’s powerful imagination blends technology, nature, and revolutionary vision to craft a blueprint for another world
Marytza K. Rubio, author of Maria, Maria
Although this is a novel, there is clearly a poet conducting
Avery r. young, author of neckbone: visual verses
A daring Afrofuturist debut that just scratches the surface of its own astonishing futures
Kirkus Reviews
Something lovely happens when genres like horror and science fiction play with elements of historical fiction
Gabino Iglesias, Locus
“But the Earth is falling (apart), not just the sky, but humans too. They are tuned out. Appear to have given up. Some are preparing to flee; some are preparing for war. Where I stand, I’m not quite sure.”
read an Excerpt
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