Book Review: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

This may be the best book I have read this year, and I have read some great ones, so that is intended as high praise. It is literary fiction AND science fiction AND a family saga - and by that, I do not mean it is "literary science fiction" or "a family saga in space", I mean it is three distinctly different genres within the single book, and all three are executed masterfully.

One strand of this book is the story of Zelu, a Nigerian-American woman who was made paraplegic by an accident at the age of 12, and who begins the novel as an unsuccessful writer. The plot engine really starts as Zelu has an epiphany at her sister's wedding in Tobago, when she is unceremoniously fired over the phone from her adjunct teaching job, and proceeds to write a new novel in a white heat, which she calls Rusted Robots. Her book, which represents a post-human world inherited by and squabbled over by Humes (humanoid / embodied robots) and Ghosts (AI), is a runaway success, beyond all expectations.

This creates the second strand of the book - the Rusted Robots universe, which is presented as interspersed chapters between Zelu's life. In Rusted Robots, Ankara (a Hume) and Ijele (a Ghost) are the main characters driving the action, and are trying to save the world from the threat of the Trippers, spacefaring robots who have been driven mad by their journey into the heart of the sun. Ankara is the hero of Rusted Robots, but a flawed one, and the complexity of her relationship with Ijele is unfolded carefully within the futurescaped post-human Nigeria.

From this point on, Okorafor ducks and weaves between the complexities of Zelu's large, complicated and vibrant family, the events and challenges of her life, and the world of the Rusted Robots. The unifying themes are there - ability / disability, diaspora, post-humanism, and the overarching question of what do we owe each other vs what do we owe ourselves - but there is a delicacy of touch, with the parallels never being bludgeoned in or feeling forced. Okorafor allows the three stories to touch and pull away, informing and infusing each other, while all remain compelling on their own terms.

While Ankara is a (fairly) straightfoward hero, Zelu is far more ambiguous as a protagonist - she's prickly, rude, often careless of others' emotions (her hapless partner and eventual husband, Msizi, is the ultimate witness to that), reckless with her own safety in ways that also endangers others, selfish, and self-centred. She's also fearsomely intelligent, fiercely independent, and frustrated by the constraints of both her body and her family, which both act to suppress her in different ways. Her decision to go forward with the exoskeleton leg technology developed by the book's relatively benign white-guy-techbro, Hugo, makes complete narrative sense in all three storylines - Zelu needs to be autonomous, and she is curious rather than repulsed by the idea of the blending of biology and machine.

Not having an easy-love relationship with Zelu, as a reader, makes this book so much better than it would have been if she was an uncomplicated heroine. A lot of her choices are dubious at best - some are reckless, some are selfish, some are mean - but we are never able to doubt the strength and power of her motivations, and everything she does makes sense in the context of the woman who is revealed through the text. Her final choice in particular is one that many readers will completely disagree with, perhaps be outraged by, but it is consistent with who Zelu is and the journey she is on. The trials and tragedies of her story are real, and deeply felt, but there's always a sense that she might also be a bit of an arsehole, and honestly, the story is much more compelling for that reason.

Finally, I must give a huge thumbs up to the ending. A book that is trying such an innovative parallelling of genres ran the risk of failing to stick the landing, but this book ends magnificently, and I was completely satisfied as a reader who is typically quite a tough judge on endings. I will be thinking about it for a long time to come, and highly recommend it to readers who enjoy literary fiction, science fiction, family stories, or African / African diaspora literature. 9.5/10 for me.