In Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor, one of the most acclaimed science fiction writers of our time, moves into mainstream literary fiction. Her protagonist is Zelu, a prickly, mercurial, iconoclastic writer who gets high in inappropriate situations, hooks up promiscuously, and ends up quarrelling with everyone, especially her large, overprotective Nigerian American family. She is also paraplegic, and has PTSD from the accident that left her disabled at the age of 12.
As the book begins, she loses her job as a writing professor for giving an entitled student a brutal critique, on the same day that her novel is rejected by a 10th publisher, and while she is at her sister’s wedding, under an onslaught of uncensored judgment from all her most conservative family members. It’s at this moment, when “[her] face was crusty and itchy with dried tears … her mind cracked so wide open that all her demons had flown in”, that she’s inspired to begin a new project, about robots on a post-human Earth, though she’s never written anything like it, and doesn’t even read science fiction.
That novel, Rusted Robots, becomes an instant bestseller, wins multiple awards, and turns Zelu into a multimillionaire and international star. She is mobbed by fans wherever she goes. Every person she meets, everywhere in the world, from chauffeurs to tech billionaires, has read her book and acclaims its genius. Powerful people contact her out of the blue, wanting to help make her dreams come true. Meanwhile, there’s a hot new man in her life who understands her in ways she never thought possible.
This may sound like a simple wish-fulfilment narrative, but Death of the Author is never just that. To start with, Zelu is not the ultra-deserving, implausibly selfless protagonist one usually finds in such fictions. In fact, she’s self-absorbed, prone to ugly meltdowns, and full of grievances against her family, her adoring fans, and even total strangers. When another character tells her about his charities for climate change and heart disease, she doesn’t even feign interest. “Zelu didn’t really understand or care about this. Her motives were more self-driven.” There are many references to the Hero’s Journey here; Zelu’s journey is about self-actualisation, not about saving the world.
She is also oddly passive. One of the cardinal rules of writing fiction is that protagonists must solve their own problems and achieve their desires through their own agency. Okorafor breaks this rule again and again. More than one plot point involves someone simply offering Zelu a technological solution to her problems, and her agency is expressed only by deciding to accept it. This unconventional approach to plotting is potentially interesting, especially in a book that is largely about a disabled person gaining autonomy through technology, and the issues of identity this creates. In a disability narrative, perhaps a protagonist’s agency can and should take different forms.
Whether or not this was the aim, I don’t think Okorafor’s approach really works. To give a small but illustrative example, a couple of scenes are devoted to Zelu’s use of self-driving taxis, and how she overcomes her own and others’ discomfort with them. You can see why a Black disabled woman would find it freeing to get a cab without having to deal with a stranger’s attitudes. Still, it’s hard to feel that invested in a scene where a character decides to order a taxi, which then just drives them where they want to go. There are conflicts that resolve on their own, without the need for even technological help, as when a TV interviewer accuses Zelu of rejecting her identity as a disabled person, sparking a hate mob against her online, but the episode blows over by itself, without affecting anything but Zelu’s mood.
We also get to read Zelu’s novel, Rusted Robots, in chapters spread throughout the book. It’s in the Africanfuturist mode Okorafor has made her own, set in a post-apocalyptic West Africa populated by culturally Igbo robots. This setting is beautifully evoked, as is the central relationship between two artificial intelligences from warring clans. There are resonances between the Zelu plot and the Rusted Robots plots that make both narratives more interesting. Masquerades appear as a motif; an Igbo masquerade character can be an AI inhabiting a robot body in Rusted Robots, or a member of a secret society dancing in traditional costume at one of Zelu’s family gatherings. However, the characters in the story-within-a-story have too little room to develop and the plotting often feels phoned in.
Ultimately, there is much to love here: the spiky feminism; the warm but also critical treatment of Nigerian culture; the thorny, eccentric, lovable main character. For the many fans of Okorafor, this will probably be more than enough. But, in stepping outside SF, I felt that Okorafor lost her instinct for what makes a compelling story. Those who are new to her work might be better off starting with an earlier book, such as Who Fears Death or Binti, which have the strengths and bracing idiosyncracy of this book without its bagginess or its fumbles.
• Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor is published by Gollancz (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
