Nnedi Okorafor: Death of the Author

The next in line of the Hugo nominees. Zelu is a Nigerian-American, wheelchair bound wannabe author who taught writing at the university. She was fired for giving an honest opinion about a student's writing exercise. At the same time, her novel was returned by one more publisher.  She has been forced to move back to her parents', and doesn’t leave her room. She starts to write furiously, something else, something she never thought she would write - a sci-fi story about robots. When she finishes, she sends it to a friend, who loves it. He has always been honest, and so Zelu sends it to her agent, who also loves it. After it is published, it becomes a worldwide bestseller and is instantly optioned for a movie. It takes some adjusting to new fame for her and her family, which has been and still is extremely protective (and restrictive). A new company that develops high-tech medical devices offers her exoskeleton bionic braces that would enable her to walk again. She takes the offer and, after some heavy exercise, learns to use them. Her family isn’t happy about them and sees them as an affront to the natural order. That causes Zelu to move out to her own apartment, which she now easily can afford.  She already has a contract for the next two books, but it turns out to be very hard to begin writing them. She gains a huge online following, but gets practically canceled after comments at a TV interview. Personally, I didn't understand at all what was so bad about her comments.

Interwoven with this story are parts of the robot book she wrote. Or are the chapters from it, or are they something else? In those chapters, humans have died out except for one. The robots love the stories humans have created and know them all. So far, no robot has been able to author an original story.  Some of the robots resemble humans; others are more like computer AIs that can move between computers and robot bodies. There are disagreements that lead to civil war, even as they face an outside threat. 

There is fairly little science fiction in the main story, mostly the exoskeleton part. The robot story was more of a pure sf story, but I didn’t like it too much. Never in a million years would that have been a best seller or easily adapted for a movie (Well, Zelu _hated_ the movie, so it apparently wasn’t adapted well). The story was interesting, and the relationship between Zelu and her family was well described. Practical no one was a good, easy-going person; perhaps the “best” character as a person was Zelu’s long-term, very understanding boyfriend. Especially her family behaved very strangely protective and restrictive toward her. The Nigerians were described as petty, competitive, and sometimes dangerous people (When Zelu was visiting Nigeria, she was ambushed for extremely poorly described reasons - apparently mostly because she was rich and famous. The part with the robot story was a bit strange - they were too confusing and not as well written as the rest of the book, but there was a twist of sorts, which gave at least some kind of explanation to that. 

The genre of the book is a bit hard to define - was it a literary novel with connections to science fiction or “real” science fiction? Perhaps more the first choice. It was an interesting book, nevertheless. At least if you mostly skip the robot parts. 

448 pp