DEATH OF THE AUTHOR by Nnedi Okorafor (BOOK REVIEW)
“Stories contain our existence; they are like gods. And the fact that we create them from living, experiencing, listening, thinking ,feeling, giving – they remind me of what’s great about being alive.”
“In the story, the robots draw from the best of humanity,” Zelu said. “Well, I like to draw from the best of robotics. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”
Nnedi Okorafor has already written some utterly remarkable works of speculative fiction. Her novels Who Fears Death (2010) and Lagoon (2014) pioneered her vision of Africanjujuism and Africanfuturism respectively, new forms of science fictional and fantastical literatures that centred the Nigerian-American perspective. Her work has rightly won an impressive array of awards, particularly her much loved Binti novella series (2015-18). Her latest novel, Death Of The Author (2025), might just be her most ambitious and accomplished work yet. The novel is an impressive meta-work that wraps a realist story about an author that draws on elements autobiographical and fictional in a far-future narrative about a world after the extinction of humans inhabited entirely by robots and Ais only to dissolve the barriers between them. Death Of The Author is a celebration of Okorafor’s Nigerian-American heritage and the messiness of families. It’s also an exploration of how stories shape our ability to perceive the world and allow us to reclaim our identities. Though there were elements that made me uncomfortable and I’ve not quite figured out how I feel about them, for the most part this is a remarkable and ambitious novel that is taking the genre new places.
Zelu is a Nigerian-American writer. A childhood fall from a tree left her paralyzed from the waist down, which has done nothing to temper her adventurous spirit and her love of swimming in the ocean and writing. She is close with her family, but finds their expectations of her restricting. At the wedding of one of her sisters, after being fired from her job and receiving a rejection letter for her novel manuscript, she is inspired to take a risk writing a new kind of novel vastly different from her previous work. Rusted Robots is a work of science fiction, one that imagines a world after the demise of humanity inhabited entirely by robots and AI. The novel follows Ankara, a Hume robot, or robot with a physical body in the shape of a human, and follows her journeys across a post-human Lagos to deliver vital news about a terrifying threat to the planet. However the other Humes are gearing up to fight their mortal enemies the Ghosts, disembodied AI who view Humes’ attachments to their physical form as an abomination. Ankara finds an unlikely ally in the Ghost Ijele, and the two form a unique friendship that just might be enough to save the world from destruction, if they can survive the prejudice of their peoples. Rusted Robots becomes a runaway hit, making Zelu a small fortune and turning her into a celebrity. This opens up new doors for her, as she is invited to take part in a trial for new robotic legs that can replace her lost mobility. However her newfound celebrity and independence causes conflict with her traditionalist family. As Zelu tries to navigate her new place in the world of fickle social media followers, movie adaptations that Americanize her story and character, and the unexpected illness of her father, she finds the barrier between the fictional world she has created in Rusted Robots and the everyday world she inhabits slowly dissolving.
Okorafor’s writing has always been incredible, but with Death Of The Author it’s clear that she has taken her command of her craft to the next level. The novel is structurally ambitious, interweaving close third person descriptions of Zelu’s life in the near-future with interviews with Zelu’s friends and family and the far future story of the post-human robots and AI in Rusted Robots. The unifying thread is the power of stories to shape our world. Zelu’s love of stories is one of her defining character traits, and it is one of the key characteristics of humanity that she supplies the Humes with. The Humes, being artificial intelligences, cannot create original stories, so those like Ankara who love stories deeply become Scholars, collecting stories from the wreckage of human civilization. In order to save the world, Ankara must overcome her programming and try her hand at storytelling, and becomes drawn to Zelu’s own story, leading to a complex recursive narrative in which, like with Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation (1981), it can no longer be determined who is the storyteller and who is the story. Within this nested narrative, the tools of science fiction and the tools of literary fiction become complimentary methods of exploring and celebrating Okorafor’s Nigerian-American heritage.
Okorafor has always been brilliant at creating strong characters. With Zelu, she has incorporated a fair bit of her own biography, but it is also clear that Zelu is different from Okorafor in a number of important ways as well, that allow her to be a fully formed character in her own right. Her incredible drive and passion make her a force to be reckoned with, but Okorafor does not shy away from displaying how her stubbornness and fixation on her own needs and wants can cause rifts between herself and her family and friends. Her love of stories, her need to tell her own story in a world in which her perspective as a Nigerian-American, a woman and a person with disabilities are all marginalized, is a key part of what drives her. This need to define herself against restrictive societal pressures is reflected in Ankara, and we can see both why Ankara is drawn towards Zelu’s story and vice versa, which is necessary for the novel’s great meta trick to succeed. Both characters are also proud of their culture, one that is drawn from their Nigerian heritage but distinct due to their perspectives either as a migrant living in America or as a post-human robot built out of Nigerian culture. This provides much of the book’s flare and passion.
Impressive and compelling as Death Of The Author undeniably is, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t talk about the bits that worked less well for me. Zelu’s accident has parallels in Okorafor’s own lived experience when complications from spinal surgery left her paralysed from the waist down. Okorafor with the help of intense physiotherapy was able to regain the use of her legs, whereas Zelu doesn’t. Drawing from her own experience, Okorafor writes intelligently and sensitively about Zelu’s feelings about how her life has changed after the accident, and some character development happens as a results of Zelu having to confront her own internalized ableism. But there were points for me where I worried that this was crossing over into unintentional but unexamined ableism on the author’s part, especially given that Zelu’s story arc involves her receiving robot legs that allow her to be somewhat “cured” of her disability. I can’t speak to Okorafor or Zelu’s lived experience as a Nigerian-American woman suffering from paralysis, temporary or otherwise, and I am absolutely certain this is all coming from a good place, but the way it was handled did make me feel uncomfortable. Additionally, in a world where we are seeing in real time the toxic influence that billionaires are having over US politics, Okorafor’s benevolent billionaires who selflessly help Zelu gain access to robot legs and even get to ride into space feel naïve and improbable.
These issues aside, Death Of The Author is an ambitious and powerful book, one that shows one of genre fiction’s key current voices stretching herself in new and exciting ways. It’s wonderfully written and intensely imaginative, and its successful merging of speculative and literary elements demonstrate how well these forms can play off each other in the hands of a brilliant author like Okorafor. Certainly, it is a novel that heralds exciting new directions for the genre and Okorafor as a writer, and I cannot wait to see where she goes after this.
Death of the Author is due for release 20th February from Orion, you can pre-order your copy HERE