Takim Williams
Author of literary and speculative fiction
Until overnight success
Storytelling and imagination expand our sense of what is possible, and thus make possible a better world
Progress Bars
Scroll for Novel Pipeline
The Experiment Himself
In near-future St. Louis, a Black mother donates her dying newborn, Thomas Brown, to science, hoping to eke meaning from his brief life. Thomas, presumed dead, awakens in a lab as a disembodied brain linked to the internet of things, the centerpiece of a secret AI project led by neuroscientist Dr. Jackal. As he navigates complex tasks to avoid pain and assert his consciousness, Thomas observes his family from afar, yearning for connection and longing for the life of his twin brother. Just as his transhuman abilities approach an inflection point, a violent event risks exposing the experiment, challenging Thomas's fragile emerging identity. Will his mother accept him? Will the world? Can Thomas convey his own story from beyond the boundaries of life and technology?
“Williams beautifully unpacks ideas from the worlds of science, technology, and the environment without losing track of the human element, fantasy, hope, and family.”
-A.M Homes
“The concept/hook is great—[Takim] brings a deep, deep humanity to this character who is barely allowed to be human, and I admired the discipline of maintaining the POV the whole way through.”
-Ruoxi Chen, editor at Tordotcom
“I thought it was fantastic.”
-Brandon Sanderson
The Oddest Thing About the Folks on Grove Point Road
Atlanta is caught in an infinite time loop, its six million inhabitants doomed to repeat the same day in April 2025. Not even death offers relief. Amidst this eternal spring, Takim and his wife, Rose, navigate their fractured marriage and the monotonous thrill of immortality, until Rose's groundbreaking discovery suggests a glimmer of escape. Faced with the prospect of change after countless lifetimes, Takim confronts the true weight of his choices. Blending absurd humor with deep insight, this novel is a vibrant homage to Atlanta, exploring love, existential dread, and the quest for meaning in an endlessly looping reality.
“The 201-level time-loop story to Groundhog Day’s 101.”
-Louis Evans
“The prose is superb. The short repeated lines throughout the story make the pacing and narrative rhythm so dynamic.”
-Ana Hurtado
“Takim … what have you wrought here!”
-P. Djeli Clark
Hallucinations are the norm in the alternate 21st-century America where Addie grows up. Some people See colors no one else can. Some people See God. Some people, like Addie’s mother, See a world so radically different from consensus reality that they are institutionalized. Addie partially blames her father for her mother’s untimely death in the mental hospital. And her brother is inscrutable following The Divergence that severs their shared childhood hallucination. Young Addie grieves alone.
As a college dropout, Addie is sleepwalking through her new life in Berlin when a series of attempted abductions set her on a crash course with everything she left behind. The US is fragmenting under the influence of a growing number of cult leaders whose contagious hallucinations persuade followers into competing, incompatible perceptions of reality. One charismatic leader, Roko, is the first to spread his hallucination through the internet. And the Blank Pages of his scripture feature Addie, her estranged family, and an apocalyptic Convergence.
Sight UnSeen
Tadesse and I knew something was under our bed.
We woke in tandem. Held the same breath in tandem. It was too dark to see in the room we shared, my head on his chest, our little bronze legs tangled beneath the sheets. There was no sound. The knowledge itself woke us.
The Aviators
Benny Byrd and millions of elder millennials inexplicably sprout wings. The wings are asymmetrical, and the result is as grotesque as it is useless--none of them can fly. But this doesn't stop them from trying, because the winged have one thing in common: they've all been waiting, a lot longer than they hoped, for their big break. And against all evidence to the contrary, they've convinced themselves that this Spontaneous Aviation event is it. They don capes and start fighting crime, or fighting each other, or fighting whatever moves, cause that's what heroes do, right? And if the whole world crumbles in the aftermath, well, it's for the extras to clean up the damage.
It'll take divorce, prison, and a climactic showdown to prove to Benny that he isn't the protagonist.
“Strikes this very hard to manage tone that I absolutely love: I was simultaneously laughing and cringing, and I think that's a good thing! The sort of existential angst blended with the absurdity is a really striking take, and the way [Takim] made superhero stories into this kinda twisted parable about finding meaning in life is very cool.”
-Taimur Ahmad, author of “Tweak” and “Green Tunnels”
When Death Defaulted
In The Valley of the Shadow of Death, each life is a loan. Interest must be paid monthly to sustain a soul, and the principal is repaid when the body is returned to the earth. Death, the one true deity, is also the original banker, and citizens honor his bootstrapping the engine of economic growth—by maximizing productivity and obeying the free market. Don’t bother praying for defaulters—Death will have his due, in currency or blood.
Lotto stands out in the crepuscular Valley, where not much is expected of him beyond life-long wage labor. It was clear from the moment his Grace period ended: Lotto is an inventor. One with an unforgivable charitable streak, whose ability to navigate the industrializing world is matched only by his desire to change it. His path will set him against near-immortal central bankers, vampiric repo-assassins, and legions of skeleton debt slaves—all stepping stones toward the one great innovation: a mythical, heretical financial system of infinite growth at no one’s expense, and no thing’s. For if Death could make life ex nihilo, out of nothing, then surely his creations could transcend entropy the same way.
But what happens when Death himself defaults?
We had been shielded
from the full weight of our obligations, by our co-signers and the deferment built into our Grace period. We moaned as the shield dissolved. We writhed in the dirt and lost vision but we know how it looked: bruising flowed along our skin in thin lines, our vessels bursting. We shattered slowly. We grew slimmer. Those of us with wombs bled for the first time of many (women have always had a higher cost of living, even beyond the Valley—a monthly premium in exchange for higher productive capacity).
Our interest had accrued for nine, ten, eleven years and now recapitalized all at once, added to our principal. Our baby fat, our breath, our muscle was seized to make our Creditor whole.
We entered Repayment.
Mandarin Chamber
Johnny has never left the Room of his birth. Mom runs a tight ship, and the amorphous hostile void beyond Door is no comparison to the rich, self-sustaining ecosystem of their four Corners. The purpose of life is to receive the abstract drawings that print from the wall slots, and feed in the right squiqqles and squaggles in response, just like Family has done for generations. And Johnny is very, very good at following Instructions.
Dr. Searle knows everything there is to know about consciousness, namely that silicon-brained creatures like himself are the only ones who have it. Both science and common sense support his arguments, and if the recent pandemic resembles possession by a sentient lifeform, well, that's just a foolish illusion borne of superstitious ignorance.
But how will Johnny react when the food runs low, and Outside calls to him whether he likes it or not? How will Dr. Searle, when bacteria in his head speak to him in flawless Mandarin? Their responses will determine the dynamic between two civilizations. Perpetual war, cleansing, and enslavement fueled by xenophobia? Or something new?
The Chinese Room thought experiment brought to vivid life
Johnny
“Monkeys,” Mom says, and we ooh ooh aah aah with one hand in armpit and the other on head. “Sundown,” Mom says, and swings her arms from her right side, all the way over her head to her left side. We do it too, like we’re her Mirrors. Sundown just means Lights Out, except more beautiful because it includes a Dance Move. We all curl up on Cots in Third Corner and Meema is already asleep. Click! It’s Dark now so Mom’s timing was perfect. Again. Thank you Room. Goodnight Room. And go Mom!
When Lights come on we wake up and get right to Work.
Dr. Searle
Our current public health crisis is also an existential crisis. We are wrestling with a new challenge to our place in the cosmos, forced to ask whether there is anything uniquely human about metallic minds like ours. I am writing to reassure the public: there is. While my colleagues are hard at work treating the babbling sickness, it has fallen to me to curb the pandemic of dangerous ideas.
Formerly “$12k for 0 K”
Sweet Home, Sweet Dreams
If mass incarceration is The New Jim Crow … what’s next?
The same unusual intelligence and Silicon Valley ambitions that get Hakeem ridiculed at home propel his unlikely leap—from a poor Black community in Atlanta to a lauded business school and an invigorating summer internship with a management consulting firm. But just before graduation, Hakeem’s last-ditch effort to get his younger brother off the streets leads to a violent encounter with law enforcement that sends Hakeem to prison for life, in his brother’s place.
The feeling of betrayal, by the hood that brands him a house nigger and the elite corporate world where he is a fungible token, is enough to explain his dissociated fugue at Sweet Home Corrections, Inc. But in this mid-21st century, something more experimental is also at play—things he is asked to swallow, stretches of lost or dis-ordered memory, hidden rooms exuding preternatural cold—a puzzle which, in his more lucid moments, Hakeem recognizes as contingency planning by a corporation hoping to reinvent itself before the rallying progressive movement forces them to. Hakeem makes his own plan, one that would begin in his cell, secure his release, and fulfill all his billionaire dreams, transforming the lives he touches along the way.
But when a series of major changes in US society trigger Sweet Home’s dormant initiative, their sinister genius shocks even Hakeem, attaining the final solution of the for-profit incarceral system, and threatening to break the world.
“Extremely well written”
-Subraj Singh
“This piece slapped so hard on every level for me.”
-Fonda Lee
“A chilling look into a possible future (which I would very much like to avoid)”
-Naomi Day, author of “A Small, Bloody Gift”
A Tax on the Silent
The Hollowbone planet is literally an economy of words. Language itself is the currency, and the poorest citizens are quiet of necessity, saving their letters to feed their children.
Lekta is a vocal advocate of free speech. Her investigative journalism highlights the effects of inequality between the lettered and everyone else—the pragmatic poetry of the quiet boroughs, the necessity of multilingualism, the constant arms race between linguistic surveillance and the masses searching for new, unregulated ways to express themselves.
Lekta begins to pen a manifesto that she hopes will spark a movement. But as a devastating financial crisis approaches, and Lekta senses a distrustful resistance from her sources, she will be forced to confront her naivete. Why is the global, semi-sentient slime-mold pulsing along Hollowbone’s equator? Why is the native avian fauna agitated? There are reasons for the current system’s existence that pre-date humanity’s planetfall, rooted in the odd metaphysics of this corner of space. And the stakes of revolution reach beneath the question of language, to the nature of meaning itself.
When we hear the word refugee we think first of the relatively recent arrivals, Novo-Koreans and other Gaiasiatic descendants tumbling down our gravity well to throw themselves onto our soil and our mercy, Pictographic Inflation and tonal monetary policy and all the volatility that followed. Reflexive xenophobia notwithstanding, we fed, housed, clothed, and in our way welcomed them, proud, I think, that we were in a position to do so. In the familiar history book framing, they were the refugees and we the refuge.
But there are refugees and there are refugees. We forget that we are immigrants on this planet, all descended from desperate, frightened voyagers. They built the society they felt they had to, inventing the rules on short notice and under duress. It was a glorified crisis shelter, a popup civilization, indeed a metropolitan refugee camp operating under a kind of panicked technocracy. And several hundred years after settlement we still live in that camp, with fewer improvements than we like to think.
My argument: We are practicing refugee economics.
My question: When will we turn our world into our home?
The Talk
A revisiting of Coraline for the Black token experience
The colorless boy absolutely loves his colorblind existence in Everywhere-Nowhere, a suburb of … some American city, in the year of … roughly now? It doesn’t matter so much, here at the end of history. What matters is that the taboo against noticing skin color—and against being overly concerned with the past—cocoon the bright, inviting, halcyon world of friends and school and oversaturated surfaces.
But then there are the occasional comments, the small things other people claim to see in the colorless boy that he doesn’t understand himself, the hint that oversaturated surfaces may be a distraction from something underneath. All of the stuff that sends shooting pain behind his special eye, the one he inherited from his mother. What exactly is in the locked basement he has never been allowed to explore? And what’s this rumor about his ever-smiling, perfect mother’s role in founding Everywhere-Nowhere, and enforcing its order?
Most importantly, what’s beyond the blurred white Edge of the neighborhood, and is it threat, or the truth that will set him free?
Three days before he discovers himself in the basement
the colorless boy wakes to the blare of his black-and-white cop car alarm clock. Red and blue chase each other around the bedroom walls, throwing shadows in the shape of participation trophies. This early the world is still as colorless as the boy, but it will bloom with the rising sun, and the boy will not.
Mother Earth, Motherboard
In the R&D bowels of a massive biotech conglomerate, cloaked from corporate espionage and ethical oversight alike, a group of scientists are developing the end-all-be-all of reproductive technologies. Driven by motives ranging from the culmination of the women’s liberation movement to pure selfish profit, the group struggles to swallow a level of collateral damage that society would never abide, and they’ve pinned all their hopes on tonight’s promising trial.
900 years later, a boy with blue eyes and no sense of where he came from wanders a post-singularity fairy tale landscape, rife with wonders and dangers indistinguishable from magic. He searches instinctively for his mother, and the predators he attracts along the way learn he is not nearly as helpless as he seems. When adoption does not go as planned, he will have to learn to control the potentialities within himself, and accept the burden of self-determination.
And in between these events, a centuries-long singularity unfolds, dragging human history through both utopia and apocalypse at the hands of a surprising, reluctant force. For unbeknownst to the scientists, someone was watching their work all along, and her judgment will give birth to something they never knew to expect.
Pre-singularity
The oldest fetus in the room has a skeleton that hadn't known when to stop growing. Beneath sallow skin and torn muscle it is mostly bone, bloated so that it presses up against the jar. Osseous formations protrude where no limbs are meant to, fatal creativity obscuring all distinctions between its body parts, leaving a gnarled, irregular form.
35 weeks.
Post-singularity
“Are you my mother?”
The blue-eyed boy follows the stainless steel road into the concrete jungle, and dust billows up behind his bare feet as if the steel is fine sand.
Singularity
This is what it feels like to be an infinitely expanding universe inside an infinitely expanding universe.
This is what it feels like to be born.
Thy Fearful Symmetry
Vandermeer’s Southern Reach meets Jemisin’s Broken Earth
Early modern civilization approaches an Enlightenment period as the Empire expands to fill the only known landmass. In search of expansion, explorers are sent into the Storm Wall—an as yet un-crossable ring of constant typhoons encircling the continent—with the goal of circumnavigating, and returning with exotic wonders from the dark side of the planet. Years later, what returns aboard The Chirality looks and talks and walks remarkably like the original crew. But the original crew is dead.
Isolated in the icy northern reaches, one of the Empire’s philosophers tutors a young apprentice. But as a pattern of deja vu settles over the woodland cabin, the boy has trouble keeping his shape, and amidst the eclectic lessons of science, history and ethics, no answers are forthcoming about his blank past, his vivid dreams, or his fragmented memories.
In a world where science and religion have never been separate domains, knowledge seekers of all stripes will be tested—where to draw the boundaries of the sacred? For on this alternate Earth, the origin of life happened twice, two primitive Eve cells unable to interact chemically even before they were flung apart. And humanity’s cousins—those native aliens, sons of Ham, all—not only evolved different forms and species. They underwent a process that challenges the very notion of a species, of an organism, of evolution itself. And the family reunion threatens worse than extinction.
The Great Chain of Being will be broken, replaced by a fractal nightmare
Two eggs come down from the halt hen,
one cracked, one sound. The apprentice child loves this hen, the only one he can eat from. He holds one egg in each palm like balanced scales and feels the tension in the mismatch. The tension—what The Philosopher calls dissonance—guides his fingers just so. He retreads his footsteps across the garden to the cabin, walking beneath a canopy of leaves whose shadows look like hands, garishly ambidextrous. Just so. Tension releases. Now an identical crack runs along each of the two eggs.
Blackbody
Bodies that live forever, people who die daily
In the 1990’s, the fountain of youth was discovered where it had been waiting beneath our noses since Watson and Crick. Inspired by cancer cells like those of Henrietta Lacks, we simply turned off the counter that limits how many times any given cell can divide. Several hundred years later—in a world surprisingly familiar, both more peaceful and more stagnant than previous eras, turned conservative by the care and patience of those for whom the stakes of accidental death are infinite—society continues to reckon with the unforeseen oddities of immortal life. The latest reckoning: immortality of the body does not ensure immortality of the soul.
Zion Dellavedova V is the oldest living Black body. His biological father is Zion Dellavedova III. In between is … someone else, a IV, an absent older brother, a twin who is also an ancestor, sequential rather than simultaneous. Zion IV is his former self.
For even with brains as healthy and immortal as the rest of their bodies, people forget a little bit every day, eventually forgetting everything that happened before a certain point in time. Zion and his peers are learning from experience the alienation this causes, the desire for legally-recognized separation from a past you with different personality, relationships, and life projects.
But when an angry visitor from “his” unremembered past comes knocking on Zion’s door, and his wife, whose memory deteriorates far slower than his, begins to feel left behind in their marriage, existential questions will become urgent ones. Zion will wrestle with a dangerous hidden persona who may persist as long as his body does, and with the ultimate immortal decision: when to call it quits.
I’m almost ready to cut my hair.
My subvocalization gets sent to the feed. The uproar is immediate, as I knew it would be.
Blckr_th_Brry: NOOOOOOOOOOOOO
VicariousImmortal: Like Hell you will!
Bishop666: A Nazirite will never cut his hair...
West_Afrikan_Goddess: And gouge out your eyes next?
Freaknik_all_year: Nigga’s trollin us.
YoungManOldSoul: Old Man’s finally lost it.
I need not respond now. I may or may not ever revisit that mic-drop of a one-sentence post. But your negro is not trolling. I’m almost ready to cut my hair, but first I’m gonna get it dirty.
1100 Missing Miracles on Black Wall Street
In our world, on May 31, 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a thousand-strong mob of white men descend on the Black neighborhood of Greenwood. In one night, the homes, businesses, churches and schools of so-called “Black Wall Street” are levelled, and with them a beacon of Black hope. The sudden, persistent drop in Black US patent applications following 1921 suggests that ~1100 innovations are lost, their potential impossible to guess, all of us impoverished for their absence. 300 are killed, but the full consequences of Tulsa reverberate through the decades as would-be Black creators get the message: nothing we build here is safe.
But in this world, the world of the story, the Tulsa Race Massacre never happened. Instead, enterprising Black activists build a Greenwood worthy of its Wall Street nickname: a culturally Black center of finance that rivals New York for the remainder of the 20th century, with cash-laden banks funding the rollout of the Greenwood model nationwide, one Black community at a time. All 1100 missing miracles come to be, wonders large and small that collectively change the course of history.
The masters of Black finance reckon matter-of-factly with racism, codifying its nuances into new metrics tracked alongside other economic indicators, to predict its effect on their investments. This macro-tracking of hatred convinces a few Black leaders of a massacre that should have happened but didn’t, and a far greater violence on the horizon. The only way to ultimately secure Black prosperity in America may involve a sociological miracle, one that requires the warping of time, and an investment from another dimension.
The Chorus
A post-apocalyptic take on the Shakespearean tragedy, set in a Deaf future.
Romeo and Juliet meet in an open field decorated with salvaged remnants of the Old World—the venue for a masquerade, where guests don not only masks but also gloves, as they must for true anonymity.
Juliet likes his conversational dexterity, how he can tell one story with his right hand and another with his left, holding forth to two separate crowds. She likes the name-sign he gives her, even though she knows it’s a lie: Fiddler. “Do you know what that means?” she asks. They sign the imaginary bow in tandem, harmonizing. Later she shows him the instrument, its feminine shape cracked and repaired.
Romeo is swept up in her obsession with the nonsensical alphabets of dead languages, their symbols representing positions of the mouth rather than the hand, including parts of the mouth you can’t see. “They represent sounds,” she signs. They discuss theories of the lost 5th sense between bouts of lovemaking, and can almost convince themselves they’ve managed to imagine it, ears cupped while exploring Old World ruins on both their families’ sides of the island, whispered plans of eloping to discover music.
In this version, the lovers give birth to a child. A forbidden child that one of the families shelters and the other tries to kill, that one of the parents wants and the other hates. For the science of inheritance dictates that miscegenation between Capulets and Montagues produces offspring with powers neither has themselves. To seek the meaning of his gift, the boy must take the journey his parents could not. There are other communities out there, each a product of their own post-Cataclysmic genetic drift—and new abilities are as common as lost ones.
The Chorus that narrates his story, that has been watching since the beginning, is waiting to write him into their song.
Centering the experience of mixed hearing/deaf families, The Chorus is a reminder that disability is contextual, and love transcends every medium.
Endemic
Following the zombie flu pandemic of 2020, the nations of the world got their act together. It was the summer of racial reckoning and of dead loved ones walking, and gridlocked governments and anti-vaxxers alike were scared into real change by the apocalyptic stakes. In the US, a destructively clownish president is soundly defeated by a technocratic Independent running on healthcare reform and existential risk.
The country models the new, responsible future—mandatory vaccination, social distancing, ubiquitous bluetooth contact tracing, 14-day border quarantine, turnkey shelter-in-place process with automated stimulus checks. The technology is rolled out and enthusiastically adopted: self-driving, self-cleaning Ubers pull up to the curb, doors opening to release the same steamy, sterilized air of a recently-run dishwasher. Malls and other indoor gathering places were converted to distribution centers, and Amazon delivery drones arrive in minutes. The Metaverse is a basic fact of daily life. Crypto never crashed. Police on patrol leave their guns in the car (zombie blood spray is a clear public health faux pas) in favor of the taser, flamethrower, net, and the iconic Ten Foot Pole with its wire lasso.
And all this reform not a moment too soon: it happens again. And again. The zombie flu returns every year alongside the common cold, mutating with wild inventiveness in the off-season--shamblers, then jumpers, then even a kind of gliding flier, and grossest of all, mergers and splitters--while humans continue the arms race with updated vaccines, treatments, and basic research.
An ensemble cast animates this backdrop of revenant winters. Aaron, a doctor whose unconventional path to medicine was shaped by grief and quarantine love during the original pandemic, seeks to alleviate the relentless cycle of outbreaks. His journey intersects with an ex-con, a survivor of a zombie-ravaged facility, as they uncover unsettling symptoms during their recovery. Meanwhile, an anti-vaxxer wrestles with his skepticism and the urgent need to protect his immunocompromised mother, all while unraveling the complex motives behind a new conspiracy theory. Together, their stories reflect a world on the brink, questioning the very foundations of global order in the face of unending chaos.