Exhibit A. The cover art, beautiful, the best and only good thing about this novella. 
 Exhibit B. A premise and protagonist created to provide a non-tokenizing narrative of African heritage in science fiction: A noble goal. 
 Exhibit C. On pg. 24 a genocide* is committed by Arabic-speaking non-humanoid jellyfish aliens, who have also hijacked a ship on a suicide mission to regain something stolen from them, with the broader political agenda of destroying all Americans humans, whom they perceive as uniformly evil. Umm... 
 *I felt nothing when everyone except the protagonist died, because the writing sucks and no character development occurs at any point. Even the protagonist is a wall-eyed cipher, a perfect and perfectly bland heroine. 
 Exhibit D. The protagonist goes full-on (view spoiler)[Pocahontas, teaching the Arab-coded aliens the colors of the wind and things they never knew, they never knew etc etc. Then she speaks, on their behalf, to the prestige community of this universe to explain that the terrorists the suicide bombers the "Meduse" jellyfish aliens have been misunderstood, and everyone just needs to get along. This works, for no reason. All is instantly forgiven, even though much ink has been spent talking about the centuries of hatred between these species. (Man, if only we'd had Nnedi Okorafor to fix up that whole Israel-Palestine thing! Maybe she could hand them a pepsi?) (hide spoiler)] 
 Exhibit E. The acknowledgements include this: "I'd like to thank...the futuristic alien lands of the United Arab Emirates [sic] for inspiring me to explore outer space". 
 So in addition to being the most boring 90 pages of science fiction I've read in a while - the writing was painfully reminiscent of the staccato yet self-indulgent sentence structure 10th graders typically come up with - this stupid novella also managed to tokenize one culture in service of representing another. Maybe the worst example of post-9/11 art ever, including that one Nic Cage film and the homeless guy who screams near my house about jet fuel and steel beams. 
 How the fuck did this win a Hugo and a Nebula?