Fiction Reviews
Death of the Author
(2025) Nnedi Okorafor, Gollancz, £20, hrdbk, 439pp, ISBN 978-1-399-62295-0
It can happen a reviewer can admire a book in principle yet fail to warm to it in practice, and yet somehow feel that it is their fault. Such has been my experience of reading Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author.
The novel follows Zelu Onyenezi-Onyedele, a Nigerian-American writer who gives up on literary fiction after the latest of many rejections and being sacked from her university job teaching creative writing. With nothing to lose or prove, she writes Rusted Robots instead, an afrofuturistic science-fiction novel. This turns out to be a runaway success on a J. K. Rowling-scale, film adaptations and all.
While this amount of fame and money would change anyone’s life, this proves particularly important as Zelu is disabled and wheelchair-bound following a childhood accident. True, this is perhaps less of an issue for her than it is for her loving, if at times overbearing, parents and her highly successful siblings.
But what the success of Rusted Robots does do is give Zelu the resources and the confidence to assert her independence from her family, which causes much more tension as it changes her from an object of charity to a subject of concern.
While fame, especially online fame, proves not to be an unadulterated joy for Zelu, technological developments in this near-future world facilitate her desire for independence. These include driverless cars and AI exoskeletons which give her the ability to walk once again. Perhaps even her childhood dream of being an astronaut can be realised.
In addition to Zelu’s third-person narrative and interviews with her relatives, we also get chapters from Rusted Robots. This is set in a far-future Nigeria where humanity is more or less extinct, and robots define themselves in relation to or in opposition to their progenitors and the need for physical embodiment.
One android is warned of a forthcoming invasion of (checks notes) zombie space robots driven mad by passing through the sun, which feels like a nice nod to Delany’s Nova, and begins a quest to warn others.
This is an extremely clever book trying to do a number of things at once – on one level it tells the story of a Nigerian diaspora family and how the unexpected success of one sibling changes the dynamic within it completely – your classic literary fiction that Zelu initially put her mind to writing. But it’s also a lightly science-fictional look at how technology can empower people with disabilities. And then also it’s the SF novel written by Zelu which stands in dialogue with both the other strands, echoing and re-expressing their themes of identity, connection, empowerment and being human.
I take my hat off to this multi-tiered confection. This is normally the kind of thing I very much enjoy. Zelu is a great character, her family and the rest of the supporting cast are cast in three dimensions, and the ambition on show here is remarkable.
But for whatever reason I wasn’t any more than mildly intrigued by any of it. It may be something as straightforward as an incompatibility of reader and writing style, but it does mean that I can only give a qualified recommendation for The Death of the Author. With, as noted, a residual sense of guilt that the fault may lie with this reviewer than the author herself.
Tim Atkinson
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