They are described as pale and at least one of them has green eyes. The Khoush are the dominant majority culture, and a fictional one as far as I know. But they're also still a minority, still marginalized just as they are in our world. For example, her people are not pastoral but are clans of specialist artisans with valuable techno-mathematical skills. The Himba of course are a real people from Namibia, and Binti introduces herself at one point as 'Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka of Namib.' There are some differences between her people and our contemporaries, as far as I can tell, social and cultural changes that fit into a world where galaxy-spanning space travel is a norm and multiple alien civilizations abound. There are only two ethnic groups mentioned in the book, the Himba and the Khoush. So let's put them both aside for a moment and talk about Namibia.īinti is Himba. On the other, we have the inciting incident, the reason the Meduse are attacking. On the one hand, we have the edan and what it implies. These are the two things that stand out brightest for me in this story. The Meduse can't touch her because of a mysterious ancient artefact she's carrying, the edan. The Meduse have a history of war specifically with the Khoush, apparently the dominant human ethnocultural group in this time and whose monopoly on space travel seems absolute: the Meduse appear unaware that there even are any other kinds of human until they meet Binti.īut this isn't why Binti survives the initial attack.

We learn that the Meduse have a history of war with humans but this is a surprise attack in a time of peace. We meet the Meduse stinger-first: one of them reenacts the chestburster scene from Alien with the boy, splattering Binti with his blood in classic horror-film fashion. The Meduse look like human-sized floating jellyfish, 'their domes' flesh thin as fine silk, their long tentacles spilling down to the floor like a series of gigantic ghostly noodles'-I found the sudden noodles delightfully bathetic after the blood and violence of their introduction. Everyone dies-the authority figures, the friends, the boy-and Binti is a sixteen-year-old alone on a ship hijacked by hostile aliens.

And that's when it all goes suddenly and horribly wrong: the real story, the one that started offscreen and has been gathering momentum all this time, comes crashing in at an oblique angle and shatters this gentle narrative of the pursuit of higher education. She even meets a boy she might have liked. She makes friends with her fellow future students. She runs the gauntlet of disapproving, intimidating teachers. The book begins, in fact, as if it were an entirely different story: the titular Binti is a mathematical prodigy going against her conservative culture and abandoning the family business to go to a prestigious alien university. The event that drives the story of Binti happens far offscreen.

Binti book sparknotes