Given Nnedi Okorafor’s literary stature, any new release from her is going to get ample attention in the speculative fiction community. But Okorafor’s latest offering, Death of the Author, is so good—okay, I’ll just say it up front, it’s great—that it surpasses even the high expectations Okorafor’s corpus has already set for itself. I had to set down the book multiple times in mind-blowing delight so I could take a second to clap my hand over my mouth and keep myself from squee-ing. Folks, Death of the Author is a magnificent achievement by a mature writer at the height of her powers.
Having a compellingly flawed protagonist is only the start of what makes this book great. The main character, Zelu, is driven by a rage born of vulnerability, family dysfunction, and discrimination. Her personality distills the novel’s power into a mixture of intimacy and expansiveness. She chafes, for instance, at how her family “was hard on her” even as her own traits come from them. Yet, in spite of these differences, Zelu’s characteristic fearlessness comes from her father: Zelu “never had any fear of bodies of water, not even the vastness of the ocean. It excited her, how deep an unknown the ocean was”; for her father, meanwhile, “[t]he depth of the water does not scare me. Its mysteries have been there since long before I was swimming in my mother’s belly, and they’ll be there long after I’ve swum off into Our Lord’s cosmos.” The book’s recurring development of this ocean motif, along with some delightful visits from auspicious dolphins, is just one of its many satisfactions.
The story doesn’t start off on such a grandiose note, though. To kick things off, Zelu is fired from her precarious job as an adjunct professor of creative writing after unleashing a furious tirade against a pretentious, hostile student. Already brought low by continual rejections of her dour, stuffy literary novel, which she had been working on for years, Zelu’s unemployment frees up her creative impulses. At her lowest point, she abruptly spurns her realist training and dives into writing a science fiction novel, Rusted Robots.
This novel, a radical departure from everything Zelu has written before, tells the story of one robot’s quest to navigate the factionalism of robotkind, or “automation,” after the humans who created them have died out. Rusted Robots is voraciously snapped up by a major publisher and becomes an instant bestseller to great fanfare. Zelu finds herself suddenly rich and famous, complicating longstanding tensions between her and her large family, who are overprotective and dismissive of her because of her paraplegia, the result of falling out of a tree when she was twelve. Through it all, not just Zelu but all of Okorafor’s characters seethe with powerful and credible motivation, the drama flawlessly wrought and expertly paced, the buildups and fights and moments of connection earned and real. For instance, when Zelu gets invited to try an experimental neurally-linked prosthetic technology, her family’s vehement lack of support is both devastating and coherently emergent from their history of loss, conceptions of disability, and, in spite of Zelu’s father, fear of the unknown.
Death of the Author’s metafictional nature gives us a crucial privilege: We actually get to read this reportedly amazing book. It might seem audacious for an author to give us a book-within-a-book with so much hype, a too-good-to-be-true masterpiece showered with “glorious positivity” from critics and the reading public. But Rusted Robots delivers a narrative that is gripping, poignant, profound, and powerfully synergistic with its frame. The heroine, Ankara, tries to overcome the enmity between her fellow humanoid robots, or Humes, and the NoBodies, supercilious entities of pure data who spurn hardware and only inhabit physical forms on an ad hoc basis. The impetus behind this attempted détente is to save the earth from a third faction, the Chargers, spacebound explorers whose CPUs have been fried into a terra-cidal madness by flying, Icarus-like, too close to the sun. Ankara’s fraught efforts at diplomacy are further complicated when her body is inhabited by a NoBody named Ijele, whose persistent presence prompts Ankara to learn empathy across difference.
This book-within-a-book structure gives Death of the Author something in common with Percival Everett’s acerbic satire Erasure (2001, recently adapted into the acclaimed film American Fiction [2023]) or Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace (2003, and the unplanned result, incidentally, of the author reconstructing a manuscript lost to the Oakland-Berkeley fires of 1991). Even the book’s physical design embodies this enmeshment. The outer dust jacket nests the white title words in a silhouette profile of a human face against a red-and-turquoise background of computer-chip-based tessellation-like designs. But when you take off the dust jacket, what you uncover is not just the same image, but rather a hardcover page for Rusted Robots, with a silhouetted front view of a robot torso and head, its turquoise eyes offsetting a decorative background of trees and dolphins. But unlike many other books-within-books that are often sandwiched in toto within a clearly demarcated frame narrative, Rusted Robots is interspersed with Death of the Author’s story of Zelu, inviting the reader to see how the narratives evolve together and illuminate one another.
Without giving too much away, I’ll just say that it’s a delight to experience how the two narratives are complementary in their differences, like expert dance partners who know just how to show off each other’s strengths and in so doing become something greater than either one would be alone. The theme of storytelling penetrates each tale’s converse complications of human/robot boundaries. In Death of the Author, the petulant student who draws Zelu’s ire writes “[l]ike a robot attempting to be creative and getting the very concept of what that means all wrong.” Later, the narrator of Rusted Robots explains that, while the robots who have inherited the earth have humanlike emotions, “no automation, AI or machine, could create stories. Not truly.” Or can they? This question can only be approached by taking both narratives together, and these dual strands enable the novel’s probings and complications of numerous binaries: human and robot, friend and foe, self and other, author and text, disabled and non-disabled, Nigerian and American. And beyond binaries, the novel offers rich interweavings of motifs of oceans, dolphins, plants, and much more, crisscrossing within and between narratives in ever-expanding pathways.
As an erudite book of metafiction, Death of the Author contains much of its own bibliography, with knowing shout-outs to Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Tim O’Brien, and many more. But the book also draws profoundly from an unwritten bibliography. Two key influences not directly mentioned are the feminist theorist Donna Haraway and the poststructuralist philosopher Roland Barthes. Haraway’s 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” declares, “[W]e are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs.” Along similar lines, Zelu, eventually outfitted with advanced robotic prosthetics, warms to the clickbait-y nickname “African cyborg” and envisions a “symbiotic relationship” between humans and robots, just as her own book shows how, in her words, “the robots draw from the best of humanity.”
The book’s theme of human-machine relations ultimately probes the meaning of authorship itself. Okorafor’s book takes its title from Barthes’s influential 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” which claims that it’s time to do away with an exaggerated veneration of “the Author-God,” whose grandiosely declared “death” opens up space for texts as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” If we’re wondering if AI can really write meaningful stories, Barthes flipped that question’s assumptions decades ago, proposing that a text is less like an individual creation ex nihilo and more like “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture,” compiled by a depersonalized notion of an author who doesn’t sound too different from a computational compiler after all.
Thinking of authors like porous sites of recombination rather than singular fonts of originality gives the reader a more decisive role in establishing a text’s meaning. Barthes’s takeaway that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author” comes across early on in Death of the Author when the snide student who provokes Zelu’s tongue-lashing says, “The reader decides what it’s about, right? Isn’t that what you said ‘death of the author’ meant?” Yet the fact that Barthes’s concepts come through the mouth of this petulant character hints at the book’s, and Okorafor’s, critical stance toward Barthes. Indeed, Okorafor has bluntly stated, “I don’t care for that Roland Barthes essay and idea.” In light of this pointed disavowal, we might understand Okorafor’s titular invocation of Barthes not as an homage, but as a counterpoint, a subversive reworking from a very-much-alive author who seeks to take the phrase “death of the author” in very different directions from Barthes. Whereas Barthes asserts that an author’s dependence on sources makes writing “never original,” Death of the Author tries to imagine how a story can be, in Ankara’s words, “new, though it was woven from the old.” The novel accomplishes this reclamation in an especially wonderful way, and without spoiling it, I simply urge you in the strongest possible terms just to read it for yourself.
The novel’s explorations of authorship and AI feel obviously timely, as urgent in their production as the fury in which Zelu pens Rusted Robots. And yet, the near-spontaneous way in which Zelu writes Rusted Robots—in a series of intense, epic bouts of spiteful inspiration over several weeks—is the opposite of how Death of the Author itself came about, according to Okorafor. Her acknowledgements state that she “wanted to write it since I started writing novels thirty years ago. It took me a long time to be ready.” This book feels so timely it’s hard to imagine this; without that note, I would have guessed that the book was directly inspired by the release of ChatGPT. But, for all the book’s felicitous timeliness, there is no trace here of any facile news peg or rushed contemporaneity. It would seem that our current moment has only now finally caught up to the book’s vision.
And what a vision it is, so virtuosically executed. From its oceans and dolphins to its structural play, the novel is encyclopedic without being pretentious, timely without being cheap, self-aware without being self-satisfied. Okorafor’s deceptively skillful narrative voice is unobtrusive, understated, fluid, hospitable. The book takes you to the highest heights possible and then blasts beyond them. Ever timely, Death of the Author is made of the stuff that endures: Read it now before everyone else already has.
[Editor's Note: Publication of this review was made possible by a gift from Jennifer Berk during our annual Kickstarter.]