Death of the Author - Nnedi Okorafor
What is really unusual in her approach to SF is that the futuristic science-fiction appears a side issue to the main story set in a more familiar reality only slightly more advanced than the present day. That's a style more often employed in the genre of fantasy, where they want to keep one foot in reality while the world on the other side of the door is one where magic exists. Here the science-fiction is merely a story presented in-between that has been written by one of the main characters who is an author. I say “merely” but obviously it's not that simple and there is evidently more connecting the two parts of the novel.
The main character is Zelu, 32 years old and paraplegic after a childhood accident, lecturing in creative writing as an adjunct at a university. Things aren't going well. She's just been fired for being a little too honest about the pretentious work of one of her students and other complaints have been made about her “attitude problem”. To top it all off, she has just received the 10th rejection letter for her novel. With money running out, Zela is forced to return to live with her parents while she takes a new direction and starts writing a science-fiction story about robots. To her great surprise, her science-fiction novel is a worldwide success and it propels Zelu into international fame and a world she is not quite ready to embrace.
The story she writes is called 'Rusted Robots'. It's set in a post-human world occupied by humanoid robots called Humes, NoBody AIs and various other self-building and replicating mechanical intelligences. One Hume, Ankara, is interested in the human preoccupation of stories, of writing stories, of telling and sharing stories. Ankara travels to learn and collect them, but the world is still a far from peaceful place and Ankara has been tasked with delivering a message to other Humes that the world is facing complete and final annihilation. The other Humes, constantly under attack from no-body ghost AIs, are more concerned with this immediate threat than the one that Ankara has to deliver.
There's an intentional ambiguity in Death of the Author, and maybe even a meta-level aspect of author Nnedi Okorafor's brush with success and acclaim. Even the title plays on a certain ambiguity, the 'death of the author' suggesting perhaps the literal death of the author - she certainly lives a reckless lifestyle - but it also refers to the author needing to remove themselves from their work, to let the novel speak to the reader, allow them to relate personally to a work without prejudice of who the author might be or what they think might be their intentions for the work. As Zelu's personal life becomes even more filled with incident than the novel she has written and even rivals it for its leap into science-fictional realms, the gap between the two parts of the novel narrows and correspondences and correlation between them grow in intriguing ways.
I need hardly say that despite attempting to accept “the death of the author”, there is a relationship between Zelu’s life and the one she feels compelled to write about, but it's not one that you can reduce down to simple parallels, particularly since Zelu’s life, her family history, their Nigerian origins and its tribe mentality are very complicated. It's no easy matter for anyone, least of all Zelu herself (or indeed the reader) to unpick the cultural, the personal, the inherited traits, how much she lives up to them or how much she kicks against them. She's certainly determined to retain her independence, her fighting spirit, to be the person she wants to be, not what others have determined for her, but being wheelchair-bound restricts her to a large extent, or has such restrictions placed on her by how society functions.
“Humankind was done. It was officially the age of automation”, Ankara observes as the last human dies. 'Rusted Robots' is clearly a reflection of the world the troubled author dreams of, the eradication of humanity, a binary world where we can fix our flaws or accept them as being distinguishing features, where we can build and improve on what we are. The problem of course with inserting chapters from a million dollar bestseller written by one of the characters into a book is that it needs to read like a multi-million dollar idea that captures the imagination of the world. Inevitably, it's hard to see Zelu’s 'Rusting Robots' in that light. Most authors would avoid that challenge and just provide a summary of what the book is about rather than actually try to write it, but the intention is perhaps not to convince that this is a SF masterpiece, but that it is needed to play a different, necessary role.
As a plot device I'm not convinced that 'Rusted Robots' works as a miraculous science-fiction story that catapults Zelu to global fame, and it's even hard to see it as a necessary or worthwhile addition to the book. The family story and Zelu’s own backstory is good enough, the technological advances in her own world presenting opportunities and dangers, the various relationships compelling in their complexity, those complications weaved through with first person perspectives from people close to Zelu. But even if you can't put your finger on exactly what function the inclusion of the text of 'Rusted Robots' provides or how exactly it relates to the 'real world', it does provide a necessary resonance with the inner life of Zelu that feeds into the whole wonderful richness of this extraordinary book. As involved and convoluted as it all might seem, the underlying sentiment of the book can be a simple one; let go of all the complicating factors, stop beating yourself up, don't worry what everyone else thinks about you, embrace the changes. Keep living your life.
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