Kirinyaga. Kilimanjaro

Two Hugo awards, the Locus Prize, the Japanese Seiun award, and the Chinese Galaxy award.

The 22nd century. Africa is gripped by an ecological disaster: the slopes of the sacred Kenyan mountain Kirinyaga are covered with buildings, soils are poisoned, and the savanna with its zebras, rhinos, elephants, and lions survives only in recordings. Koriba, an educated representative of the Kikuyu people, remembers that his tribe once lived differently, and decides to restore the lost harmony by creating a new community away from Earth—on a terraformed planet he calls Kirinyaga.

Becoming a mundumugu, a healer and spiritual leader, Koriba leads the colonists and revives ancient customs alongside harsh Kikuyu rules—effectively determining the fate of the settlement almost single-handedly. Along the way, threats arise that can shatter the fragile balance: from a gifted girl whose outstanding thinking undermines the traditional foundations, to the intervention of a support service authorized to overturn the colonial charter. Meanwhile, Koriba secretly maintains computer contact with the rest of humanity, hiding it from his people.

The paradox is that the Kirinyaga scheme risks failing not because of violence or greed, but because of humanity’s thirst to know more. The Kikuyu can’t be made to freeze in time—just as their world can’t stop rotating around its sun.

East African Kikuyu have already tried to build a utopia on the terraformed Kirinyaga—and it ended in collapse. A century later, the Masai study this experience, examine the mistakes made, and prepare to build their own utopia on the planet Kilimanjaro, named for the mountain where, according to their belief, their god lives.

Mike Resnick is a master of large-scale imagination and vivid worlds, a winner and nominee of more than one and a half hundred literary awards—and rightly considered one of the strongest storytellers in the genre.