Books Read: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

No, not that death of the author.

The initial conceit of Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author has a touch of Percival Everett’s Erasure about it. Zelu is a paraplegic Nigerian American, fired from her university teaching job for being too abrasive. Soon after, her literary novel is rejected by publishers and her agent. Faced with her judgmental family and limited prospects, Zelu, in a blaze of desperation, frustration, and anger, begins writing a science fiction novel about robots on a post-apocalyptic Earth. That novel, Rusted Robots, becomes a huge bestseller, changing Zelu’s life forever.

Like Erasure, Okorafor includes excerpts from Rusted Robots.¹ A criticism that I’ve seen leveled against the novel in the novel is that, despite its huge popularity, Rusted Robots is rather ordinary. It’s true that if you’re versed in science fiction, there’s nothing especially innovative about Rusted Robots. But I’d also argue that rusted-on (see what I did there) science fiction fans aren’t the target audience.² This novel is meant to have broad appeal, and while post-apocalypses (even with robots) were once the exclusive domain of SF, that’s no longer the case. Equally, who doesn’t love a story structured around an odd-couple relationship? In this case, our narrator, Ankara, a female-constructed “Hume” (a robot that resembles us), and her kind’s sworn enemy, Ijele, a digital-only “NoBody” who mainly resides in the cloud. The point is, I enjoyed Rusted Robots on its own terms and for the type of novel it emulates.

I wasn’t as enamoured with Zelu’s George R. R. Martin / Patrick Rothfuss-inspired arc as a popular author. It’s overly familiar in a way that’s less insightful than Rusted Robots, especially the shenanigans surrounding the film adaptation.³

Far more interesting is how Zelu deals with her disability—a spinal injury sustained after falling from a tree in her youth that paralysed her from the waist down. It’s the way she embraces technology to gain independence—a set of exoskeletons to replace her legs, and the risks she takes with her body—that is both wonderful and courageous but also put her at odds with her family, particularly her mother. In fact, the constant tension between Zelu and her Nigerian family, both in America and Nigeria, is among the best parts of the novel. But even with that tension and drama, what stands out is the love they share, a love that ultimately accepts Zelu for the woman she is.

The novel’s ending—which I’m going to do my best not to completely ruin—isn’t just surprising but provocative. The robots in Rusted Robots pray at the shrine of stories, downloading, archiving, and preserving all of human creativity. It’s made clear, though, that these robots can’t produce their own narratives; they can only copy. The climax hinges (not a pun) on our robot hero, the scholar Ankara, penning her own wholly original story—one that would pass as human-authored. If we view Ankara as a descendant of generative AI (hinted at but never stated outright), then for many creatives this ending will be a punch in the gut, an acknowledgment that AI may inevitably reach human levels of creativity. In contrast, Okorafor could also be presenting a type of AI we have yet to develop—one not built on our work but with the capacity to truly dream of electric sheep. Okorafor leaves it to the reader to decide.

The ambitious ending is just the cherry on top of what’s a vivid, sometimes frustrating, but always intriguing novel.

1. Are they excerpts, though? It felt to me that if you excised those chapters, you would have an unbroken narrative, which would make for a very short science fiction novel.

2. Not that Zelu wrote the novel with a specific audience in mind.

3. It goes as badly as you’d expect, with the Nigerian setting and the nationalities and names of the robots changed for an American audience. I know this happens, but I find it hard to believe there’d be no pushback from Zelu’s fans, horrified by the whitewashing.