2 w. ago
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor review – an SF master moves into the mainstream
This book within a book weaves a writer’s struggles with scenes from their Africanfuturist tale of post-apocalyptic robotsIn 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...
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