I hadn’t yet read anything by Nnedi Okorafor when I started Death of the authorbut after just a few pages, I found myself making a mental note to add everything she had written to my To Read pile. Okorafor coined the term “Africafuturism”, describing a subcategory of science fiction “more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point of view” than the more “American-centric” Afrofuturism “.
Death of the author is a bit like two books in one, following Nigerian American main character Zelu’s meteoric rise to fame as the author of an unexpectedly successful novel, Rusty robotsand brings us into said novel, set in a future society without humans, inhabited by robots and AI.
Zelu, a disabled writer in her thirties with a large extended family, goes through a difficult time at the beginning of the book and must fight to be taken seriously by the people around her when she experiences the success of the day the next day. She faces constant rejection as she tries new things, like self-driving cars and an exoskeleton mobility aid. The family dynamics and the world they live in – on the cusp of major change driven by technological advancement – ​​felt very real, and I became much more invested in their drama than in what was playing out in Rusty robots. But everything is there for a reason, and the two narratives interweave well to create an immersive and thought-provoking story.
