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The National
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
How Nnedi Okorafor is redefining the sci-fi novel with Death of the Author
It's not often we see an author in the UAE discussing a blockbuster novel at the moment of release. But when Nnedi Okorafor appeared at the Sharjah Festival of African Literature, just days after the publication of Death of the Author, the novel had industry tongues wagging because of a reported seven – figure advance from William Morrow, an imprint of publisher HarperCollins. No wonder then that Okorafor took the stage with quiet confidence – she already knew she was on to a winner. Death of the Author is an engaging yet complex and multi – layered story. Part-fiction and part-philosophical treatise, it's also a novel about a novel. The story follows Zelu, a Nigerian-American author who, after enduring severe personal and professional setbacks, retreats to write Rusted Robots, a speculative science fiction novel set in a post-apocalyptic city where humans coexist with androids and artificially intelligent machines. This inner narrative raises timely questions about human autonomy as we edge closer to the threshold of machine consciousness. Released on January 14, Death of the Author debuted on many US bestseller lists and received a glowing endorsement from Games of Thrones author George R R Martin. While pleased with the initial hype, Okorafor is even more content with readers engaging with the work's existential themes. 'I am trying to expand the idea of what a science fiction novel can be,' she tells The National. 'Because this book literally has chapters written by a robot – as part of a novel about post-human robots inhabiting the world – but it is all presented in a clearly literary way.' More than a genre trope, Okarafor uses this android – named Ankara – to explore the unnerving prospect of what the world could be once we have all perished. 'What humanity will always leave behind is our stories and Ankara basically goes around mining and collecting them,' she says. 'Those stories go on to be separate from their authors. They remain and exist and these robots go on to basically worship them.' The plot is partly a rebuke to the central theme of Roland Barthes' 1967 essay – from which the novel takes its title – in which the French literary theorist argued that true appreciation and understanding of a text only occurs when divorced from the author's biography and intentions. Okorafor is not a fan of the view – 'I despise that essay' – stating that it strips writers of their agency, particularly those from Africa whose cultures have been increasingly commodified at the expense of personal narratives. It also explains why she chose not to use the novel's original title – The African Futurist – as it risked being misunderstood for Afrofuturism, a contentious concept Okorafor has been actively challenging in her writing for the past five years. According to her, Afrofuturism is problematic because it explores African-themed science fiction through an American lens. A more suitable alternative, she argues, is the self-coined 'African futurism' – a subtle yet significant shift that places African voices at the centre of their own narratives. 'It is about removing the United States from the centre of the conversation when it comes to African – rooted science fiction,' she says. 'Now, I'm Nigerian-American. I was born and raised in the United States, so it's not like I have anything against America – but I do find this approach problematic. African Futurism, which I believe Death of the Author truly belongs to, is about telling stories rooted in African culture and viewed through an African lens. It's about establishing that connection and making it clear to readers that this is where these stories begin, before they either remain here or branch off elsewhere.' This more expansive view, she notes, will lead to even more diverse stories coming into the spotlight – something the success of Black Panther proved there's a real appetite for. 'It showed that the audience is ready for these stories and many African authors have known that,' she says. 'It's about opening up space for more stories like the ones I'm telling, and like the ones many African and diaspora writers in science fiction and fantasy are telling right now. What we're doing is broadening the perspective, helping people get used to greater diversity and to more varied kinds of black stories.' Hence Okorafor's move to bring some of her stories to the screen. She is writing the screenplay for her 2014 novel Lagoon, an alien invasion tale set in Lagos, as part of a development deal with Steven Spielberg's production company Amblin Entertainment. This follows the indefinite delay of the planned HBO television adaptation of her Nebula Award-winning 2010 novel Who Fears Death. 'This is a lesson I learnt from my experience with HBO in that I have to write my own screenplay,' she notes. 'It's not just about having creative control; it's about recognising that I write stories that are new and unfamiliar to many people, and they need me there to help guide the process.' Okorafor hopes her burgeoning profile and association with Hollywood royalty could usher in more African stories to the mainstream. 'Honestly, what I want is to open more doors for others,' she says. 'One of my biggest hopes for Death of an Author is that it gives us – from authors to publishers – the space to try different kinds of things, unexpected things that go beyond what people are used to.'
CBC
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in medicine or law, Zelu has always felt like the outcast of her large Nigerian family. Then her life is upended when, in the middle of her sister's lavish Caribbean wedding, she's unceremoniously fired from her university job and, to add insult to injury, her novel is rejected by yet another publisher. With her career and dreams crushed in one fell swoop, she decides to write something just for herself. What comes out is nothing like the quiet, literary novels that have so far peppered her unremarkable career. It's a far-future epic where androids and AI wage war in the grown-over ruins of human civilization. She calls it Rusted Robots. When Zelu finds the courage to share her strange novel, she does not realize she is about to embark on a life-altering journey—one that will catapult her into literary stardom, but also perhaps obliterate everything her book was meant to be. From Chicago to Lagos to the far reaches of space, Zelu's novel will change the future not only for humanity, but for the robots who come next. A book-within-a-book that blends the line between writing and being written, Death of the Author is a masterpiece of metafiction that manages to combine the razor-sharp commentary of Yellowface with the heartfelt humanity of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Surprisingly funny, deeply poignant, and endlessly discussable, this is at once the tale of a woman on the margins risking everything to be heard and a testament to the power of storytelling to shape the world as we know it. (From William Morrow)
The Guardian
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor review – an SF master moves into the mainstream
In Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor, one of the most acclaimed science fiction writers of our time, moves into mainstream literary fiction. Her protagonist is Zelu, a prickly, mercurial, iconoclastic writer who gets high in inappropriate situations, hooks up promiscuously, and ends up quarrelling with everyone, especially her large, overprotective Nigerian American family. She is also paraplegic, and has PTSD from the accident that left her disabled at the age of 12. As the book begins, she loses her job as a writing professor for giving an entitled student a brutal critique, on the same day that her novel is rejected by a 10th publisher, and while she is at her sister's wedding, under an onslaught of uncensored judgment from all her most conservative family members. It's at this moment, when '[her] face was crusty and itchy with dried tears … her mind cracked so wide open that all her demons had flown in', that she's inspired to begin a new project, about robots on a post-human Earth, though she's never written anything like it, and doesn't even read science fiction. That novel, Rusted Robots, becomes an instant bestseller, wins multiple awards, and turns Zelu into a multimillionaire and international star. She is mobbed by fans wherever she goes. Every person she meets, everywhere in the world, from chauffeurs to tech billionaires, has read her book and acclaims its genius. Powerful people contact her out of the blue, wanting to help make her dreams come true. Meanwhile, there's a hot new man in her life who understands her in ways she never thought possible. This may sound like a simple wish-fulfilment narrative, but Death of the Author is never just that. To start with, Zelu is not the ultra-deserving, implausibly selfless protagonist one usually finds in such fictions. In fact, she's self-absorbed, prone to ugly meltdowns, and full of grievances against her family, her adoring fans, and even total strangers. When another character tells her about his charities for climate change and heart disease, she doesn't even feign interest. 'Zelu didn't really understand or care about this. Her motives were more self-driven.' There are many references to the Hero's Journey here; Zelu's journey is about self-actualisation, not about saving the world. She is also oddly passive. One of the cardinal rules of writing fiction is that protagonists must solve their own problems and achieve their desires through their own agency. Okorafor breaks this rule again and again. More than one plot point involves someone simply offering Zelu a technological solution to her problems, and her agency is expressed only by deciding to accept it. This unconventional approach to plotting is potentially interesting, especially in a book that is largely about a disabled person gaining autonomy through technology, and the issues of identity this creates. In a disability narrative, perhaps a protagonist's agency can and should take different forms. Whether or not this was the aim, I don't think Okorafor's approach really works. To give a small but illustrative example, a couple of scenes are devoted to Zelu's use of self-driving taxis, and how she overcomes her own and others' discomfort with them. You can see why a Black disabled woman would find it freeing to get a cab without having to deal with a stranger's attitudes. Still, it's hard to feel that invested in a scene where a character decides to order a taxi, which then just drives them where they want to go. There are conflicts that resolve on their own, without the need for even technological help, as when a TV interviewer accuses Zelu of rejecting her identity as a disabled person, sparking a hate mob against her online, but the episode blows over by itself, without affecting anything but Zelu's mood. We also get to read Zelu's novel, Rusted Robots, in chapters spread throughout the book. It's in the Africanfuturist mode Okorafor has made her own, set in a post-apocalyptic West Africa populated by culturally Igbo robots. This setting is beautifully evoked, as is the central relationship between two artificial intelligences from warring clans. There are resonances between the Zelu plot and the Rusted Robots plots that make both narratives more interesting. Masquerades appear as a motif; an Igbo masquerade character can be an AI inhabiting a robot body in Rusted Robots, or a member of a secret society dancing in traditional costume at one of Zelu's family gatherings. However, the characters in the story-within-a-story have too little room to develop and the plotting often feels phoned in. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Ultimately, there is much to love here: the spiky feminism; the warm but also critical treatment of Nigerian culture; the thorny, eccentric, lovable main character. For the many fans of Okorafor, this will probably be more than enough. But, in stepping outside SF, I felt that Okorafor lost her instinct for what makes a compelling story. Those who are new to her work might be better off starting with an earlier book, such as Who Fears Death or Binti, which have the strengths and bracing idiosyncracy of this book without its bagginess or its fumbles. Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor is published by Gollancz (£20). 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