I would like to thank Gollancz for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher- Gollancz

Published – out Now

Price – £20 hardback £9.99 ebook

The future of storytelling is here.

Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she's suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister's wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she's not sure what comes next.

In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life - she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.

What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu's life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.

Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.

How much of a story is the author? In many ways all of it but at the same time crime authors don’t really plan to kill people or horror authors all mess with powers they should know better to touch. But knowing JRR Tolkien fought in WW1 will give you some insight into some scenes and themes in Lord of the Rings. For readers we get impressions of authors through their wok, a connection we feel that may be quite unlike the real person. In Nnedi Okorafor’s fascinating novel Death of the Author we explore these links in a mix of reality and science fictional ideas to create something quite surprising and for me an engrossing tale of family, choices and a desire to live your own life.

Zelu is having a very difficult day attending her sister’s wedding. Her very judging relatives are saying that as she is paraplegic and as a woman in a wheelchair, that she will struggle to find someone, her agent says her literary novel on submission has again been rejected and she has just been fired as an adjunct professor for taking down a selfish student whose work she does not rate at all. The tailspin she is in though means Zelu surprisingly finally feels a novel come to life in her. A science fiction epic called Rusted Robots. It becomes a worldwide bestseller and soon a giant movie deal is calling but for Zelu this also finally could offer her some freedoms, but it may not mean she gets the understanding and acceptance she is always craving.

This is a complex novel to describe. For me it is very much a story exploring choices and being true to who you are and what you want. We have Zelu’s timeline as a common thread watching her star rise and fall in publishing, and this is constantly matched up with excerpts from Rusted Robots which tells us the story of a post-human world of robots in the wreckage of humanity fighting a war against AIs and also now finding out a danger is heading to earth as well. A scholar robot named Ankara who forms a bond with an AI known as Ijele that both sides in the war would destroy both if they found out about it. The question the book poses is how much does a story and its author really tell you about the author.

Zelu for me is the standout character. An american woman with Nigerian parents of Igbo and Yoruba parentage. A clash of royalty and working-class ideals and she is one of four siblings who love to argue, and some would say compete against each other. They all have high flying jobs and are moving into marriage while Zelu to them appears to be a disappointment and crucially that she is disabled also seems to ply a factor. There are things she is felt she cannot o and her parents has as one character says built a house around her which in her mind-thirties she has not left. At the same time Zelu is very much her own person, she enjoys casual relationships, weed and not hiding her thoughts and opinions but she’s not where she wants to be, and that frustration leads to her epic sacking and the creation of a huge hit science fiction novel which she admits was not something she was expecting to do. Zelu as we find out is very much a character focused on what she wants to do in the moment even when there may be consequences and judgements she then must deal with as she doesn’t always consider (or care about) the fallout. The intriguing question is where does this come from? And as we see in Rusted Robots that may also be something she too explores as a consequence of the book.

Okorafor explores family pressure, ableism and culture from many angles in this story. How Zelu gets judged by many for being disabled and in an unusual science-fictional scene when she is offered to have an incredible new set of artificial leg enhancements that give her the power to walk. Her family are more horrified at Zelu becoming seen as a freak and getting hurt. She finds media accuses her of ablism. Zelu though is just considering tat she wants to be able to walk for the first time since she was 12. Zelu can be seen as incentive and unlikeable, but I loved the way we have to learn to accept her own her own terms. Later in the novel for very personal reasons she takes a trip that gets her into huge danger which she is warned against, but she still does it and there are more consequences and its about owning the aftermath of that which is Zelu’s personal breakthough. It is marked that her one strongest relationship is with a man named Msizi who rarely judges her and knows she needs to do what she wants, and he rarely asks for her to do things in return. It’s a wonderfully adult and complex relationship that works for both of them and offers her some respite from the wider world and family. It hints that Zelu is very much a character who lives in the moment - she hasn’t wanted to be an SF writer she just needed to write one just then, its not then her career path in itself but a stepping stone to other choices and decisions which can be both perplexing and yet eventually we see they take her to what she needs most of all – clarity of thought and tying back to her earliest ambition.

There are plenty of other things to enjoy. While the megahit Rusted Robots is probably the most unlikely and speediest turnaround of a book and movie deal it allows Okorafar to explore changing tastes, media reaction, social media pressure and the peril of movie adaptations but this is more with a wry smile than an in depth investigation of publishing but reminds us once a book it out there the author can become public property, a commercial deal and in many ways irrelevant to marketing. I would have loved though a little more explanation of why this book appears as several characters say to have caught the zeitgeist and connected so  much with people.

The Rusted Robots sections are for me where we get to explore Zelu from a very different perspective. Its not simple allegory Zelu is not like any of the characters in the story nor do we recognise family members but at the same time this is a story reflecting some Nigerian culture, attitudes to becoming some less than or more than human and the power of stories to pull people along. There is a neat little revelation in Zelu’s section that her dad loved Human Heads songs, and a reference gets reflected one way in her story and another in the Robots showing us how influences echo in stories. We can see Zelu’s life in the Robot’s story too but its more with a side glance and a lot of interpretation and layering going on. Creativity works both ways and perhaps this story opens up Zelu’s future choices in particular regards her legs and desire to live outside of her family home. The finale really plays with these two tales and could be seen as too cute to explain some handwavium or as I did a reminder that even these two stories are part of a book, and an author is too weaving words, themes and images at us the reader to now process in a different way.

If you come to Death of the Author expecting pure SF you’ll possibly be disappointed and if you come expecting a gritty literary contemporary novel about publishing then you’ll be perplexed with some places this goes to but I liked a lot how this crosses both worlds and explores how each gets influenced by the other. Science fiction is always for me talking about the time it is written in and the author too reflects their own perspective of their world. We though as readers create our own versions in the reading experience so we may miss subtle clues as we never get to see the whole life story of an author before a book gets written, like icebergs most is under the surface. This story explores where authors and their stories come from and it’s not a straightforward process at all. Death of the Author will be hanging around my mind for some time as I ponder the power of stories in a really interesting way. Highly recommended!