Fiction Reviews
Death of the Author
(2025) Nnedi Okorafor, Gollancz, £10.99, pbk, 439pp, ISBN 978-1-399-62297-4
I’d not read any Nnedi Okorafor before so I was curious. She’s won or been nominated for them all: Hugos, Nebulas, you name it, written too many novels, short stories and comics to count and propelled African-inspired writing to the mainstream. She’s American, born in Cincinnati and living in Phoenix, born in an Igbo Nigerian family and describes much of her work as ‘Africanfuturism’ (she explicitly rejects the more widespread label ‘Afrofuturism’) and Death of the Author is full of Nigerian references, be it the food, the setting or the characters. I was running a mental five-bar gate on references to ‘jolloff rice’ and ‘plantains’ (many, very many) but they help imbue this novel with an identity that’s fresh and distinct and I enjoyed the journey into a culture that’s quite some distance from Home Counties English.
The protagonist, Zelu, is of African heritage in a white American town: Chicago (similar to the author’s experience), and she’s paraplegic, just as Okorafor was, briefly, when she started writing. This suggests that the novel may be, in part autobiographical (I’m speculating) but it’s clearly written from experience, which gives it a richness and authenticity.
It’s a novel within a novel. Zelu writes a phenomenally successful science fiction novel about a robot ‘Hume’ who develops a relationship with a cloud-based Artificial Intelligence (a ‘ghost’) which is both illicit and dangerous. Another AI subspecies is going to wipe them all out when they fly back from the Sun where they’ve all gone mad but the Humes and the Ghosts only care about destroying each other. The humans are all gone in this climate-ravaged world, but their petty squabbles and irrational enmities it seems, live on. Extracts from this novel are interspersed in Death of the Author and that’s pretty much all the science fiction here apart from, arguably, an experimental exoskeleton (though clunkier versions are already available online).
The core novel is about struggle, acceptance and validation. Zelu’s life is going nowhere, writing novels that don’t find a home, losing her teaching job because she’s rude to her talentless students and living at home where her family see her only as the disabled sister that needs protecting, often from herself. They don’t really believe in her writing until she becomes phenomenally successful and they recoil when she considers a mechanical solution to her paraplegia. They accuse her of wanting to turn into a robot, like the characters in her novel, and invoke God, as if God would want to keep her wheelchair-bound and dependent on her family. But Zelu’s stubborn and usually gets her way – which almost costs her everything as she takes a trip she’s never made before to visit her father’s grave in a Nigeria.
Zelu is a great character and her drive and determination are very engaging. Okafor’s descriptive writing style, full of cultural references, is very readable and Zelu’s relationship with her family is complex and well-drawn. The core novel works better than the science fiction extracts form Zelu’s writing, however: they mainly tell the story in outline and lack the richness of the parent text. But there are some interesting ideas here, and I’m left with plenty to think about. A good read.
Mark Bilsborough
Stop Press: Death of the Author made the short-list for the 2026 'Best Novel' Hugo Award.
See also Tim's review of Death of the Author.
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