I can’t be normal, so I’ll be something else.
page 144, Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
Table of Contents
Preamble
I think of all the books I have read over the last couple months, Death of the Author has been the book I’ve been looking forward to reading the most. I put in a hold for the book at the library as soon as I could, I even read Remote Control last month which had been sitting in my to-be-read pile for years as a little appetizer before the full meal.
Right now, the list of science fiction authors I enjoy is quite short, just two entries in it. Becky Chambers and Nnedi Okorafor. Okay actually it is three – Arkady Martine and A Memory Called Empire deserve to be on this list. I believe that book was also the first book review I published on this blog.
Point being, despite sci-fi being a genre I generally enjoy, there are only very few sci-fi authors whose work I like. I think it is because I ended up leaning a lot more towards various fantasy sub-genres over the last few years and didn’t particularly try looking for a wide variety of sci-fi. So when I find a sci-fi author I enjoy I tend to enjoy them a lot more.
I think that’s enough of me rambling about sci-fi books, let’s get into the book.
The Book
I think the first thing worth noting about Death of the Author is that it is a work of meta-fiction. In this case, the book tells the story a disabled Nigerian-American author Zelu who writes a science fiction novel called Rusted Robots. The book then goes deeper and puts the story of Rusted Robots within itself, in separate chapters. We also get Zelu’s perspective, and we get interview chapters where a journalist character Seth interviews Zelu’s family and friends after the events of the book which I also found intriguing.
The interview chapters in particular felt like the book was zooming out to flesh out Zelu as a character more, they also served the purpose of giving a little more colour to Zelu’s family and friends, developing them as characters and offering a different perspective their relationship with Zelu and with the events of the book. I think this worked quite well and the interview chapters did not feel like extraneous filler.
Meta-fiction
I think this is the first time I have read meta-fiction so I do not have point of comparison. However, I generally found the way the book used the structure to be quite engrossing. I liked both the story of Zelu and the story she wrote about these robots in the far future where there are no humans left on Earth. In some ways, the Hume robots from Rusted Robots reminded me of the robots from Monk and Robot. Specifically their curiosity about the world around them and their human creators.
The meta-fiction aspects of this book and the use of the literary criticism term never felt like pretentious navel gazing bullshit but instead felt like an author using the tools of their craft to tell a heartfelt story about the experience of being a writer.
Themes
Death of the Author weaves in a number of themes throughout the narrative. The primary themes I picked up on were – family, disability – and its relationship to technology, the effects of fame, and the power of stories.
Family and Nigerian culture
Like with Nnedi Okorafor’s other books, this one sprinkles in a healthy dose of Nigerian culture throughout the story. Zelu is of course Nigerian American, so are her other family members. Parts of the book take place in Nigeria, both in Zelu’s story and also in the far future of Rusted Robots. There are of course plenty of mentions of jollof rice, I think if I was making a Nnedi Okorafor bingo card, I’d put “mentions jollof rice” in it. One of these days, I’ll eat some.
Senegalese jollof rice; sweet, tangy fried plantain; a whole deeply marinated tilapia topped with a savory mix of tomatoes, green peppers, onions, spices, and olives. This came with a big glass of sweet baobab drink.
page 88, ibid
Large sections of Zelu’s story is about the complex relationships she has with her family and the nature of these relationships is intertwined with Nigerian culture. What I found to be the most impactful here is the way the book portrays the death of a parent and the grief one finds themselves mired in after. As someone who has lost his father, I found this section of the book to be a very grounded and real depiction of such an experience and I was very moved by it.
Disability representation
I think it is worth talking about the representation of disability in this book. I am not paraplegic so I won’t comment on the specific minutiae of that particular representation. I found that Zelu’s disability was portrayed with a reasonable amount of nuance throughout the story. The story weaves in the use of assistive technologies such as autonomous cars and the “exos” which give Zelu a new degree of freedom and autonomy.
Zelu faces quite a bit of ableism throughout the story; the Storygraph page for this book puts ableism in the “Graphic” section under content warnings. That is accurate, so if you are not comfortable with graphic descriptions of ableism, you may want to skip this book.
Fame, power of stories and death of the author
The two themes of fame and the power of stories are intertwined in this story. The story Zelu writes makes her very famous which in turns affects her life in various ways both positive and negative. On a more meta level, the story of Rusted Robots is one in which the sentient robot characters learn the value and power of stories by learning to write their own and using them to effect positive change in their world.
There is also the aspect of fame that causes a death of the author. Fame causes the story to warp and shift and take a form of its own in a way that sidelines the author entirely. This is depicted in this story through the creation of the Rusted Robots movie adaptation which completely changes vital aspects of the story in a way that kills Zelu’s intentions for the story.
I think this is a book written by an author who loves writing stories. There is a love for the craft on display that I really appreciate. An understanding that the stories we write for the world to see are inextricably linked with the stories we tell ourselves everyday. It is a story about the very human conflict between the stories we tell ourselves and the way the rest of the world perceives us. We are the author of our own stories but that authorship disintegrates when it makes contact with the outside world.
Conclusions
Death of the Author is Nnedi Okorafor’s best book yet, I think she has outdone herself. It wraps the science fiction that Okorafor is so good at in a meta fictional blanket, a story about a disabled Nigerian author exploring complex themes in a nuanced and thoughtful way that will leave an impression on you long after you have finished the book.
I don’t know if I want to read more meta-fiction of this nature but I certainly want to read more of Nnedi Okorafor’s writing in the future. I think this book is one that will end up on my 2025 books of the year list and another one that I will probably end up buying a physical copy of for my collection.
That’s all from me this time. See y’all in the next one.
P.S – This book was originally titled The Africanfuturist. I am glad the title was changed because Death of the Author is a much better title that fits the book much better.
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