When Nnedi Okorafor was 19, she woke up in a hospital room, disoriented. Fluorescent pink and green grasshoppers and mantises danced around her hospital bed, making strange clicking noises. A huge crow swooped at the window, trying to break in.
However, once she stopped hallucinating from the painkillers, things got weird and scary: She tried to get out of bed, but found she couldn’t move her legs. Okorafor soon learned she was paralyzed from the waist down due to nerve damage during back surgery for scoliosis.
Okorafor was a star athlete and pre-med college student who lost faith in medicine and felt alienated from her body. “This was the death of the person I was becoming,” she said of the paralysis. This is also a rebirth in a sense.
She retreated into her imagination and from her hospital bed began to paint the story of a Nigerian woman who didn’t need to walk because she could fly. Later, when she regained most of the feeling in her legs, learned to walk again, and returned to college, she signed up for a writing class.
Thirty years and more than 20 books later, Okorafor, now a critically acclaimed science fiction and fantasy author, explores this painful period in her autobiographical new novel, Death of the Author. experiences and the transformations that come with them.
A genre-defying experiment in metafiction, the story centers on Zeru, a Nigerian-American writer from Chicago who was paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair after a childhood accident. She dreams of becoming a writer, but her overly loving parents and siblings doubt she can support herself. After years of struggling to get published, Zeru wrote a best-selling post-apocalyptic novel about sentient robots in a futuristic Nigeria, earning a seven-figure advance and a film deal. Her sudden fame was both exciting and shocking, as Zeru watched her success disrupt her family while her novels were whitewashed by Hollywood executives, stripped of their African elements.
The autobiographical framework of “Death of the Author” differs from Okorafor’s previous work, with these otherworldly stories often drawing on her experiences in Nigeria, where she discovered a belief in the supernatural—giant spider gods, water spirits, Shapeshifting leopard men – are part of everyday life.
But the novel remains puzzling, perhaps more so than anything she wrote. Okorafor weaves together Zeru’s story with chapters from Zeru’s novel Rusty Robot, narrated by a robot who travels to the ruins of Lagos and meets the last human on Earth. As the two stories unfold, the lines between autobiography and fiction, realism and fantasy, seem to disappear, and it becomes increasingly difficult to tell whether Zeru’s story or her robot’s is in the foreground.
For Okorafor, crossing genre lines is a no-brainer.
“If there’s one thing that has frustrated me in my writing life, it’s boxes and labels; it’s, oh, you’re a science fiction writer, you’ll never do anything else,” Okorafor explain. “Much about this novel defies categorization—it confounds expectations.”
Since publishing her debut novel nearly 20 years ago, Okorafor has become one of the most innovative and provocative writers in the genre. In a literary world traditionally dominated by white male writers and Western mythology, Okorafor broke through with richly imagined fantasy stories imbued with West African beliefs, culture and traditions.
Her novels, which she calls Afrofuturistic, often feature powerful young black or African heroines who possess supernatural abilities that break the limitations that others try to impose on them. Although her stories sometimes take place in the distant future or on starships, they are not escapist fantasies; like shapeshifters, wizards, aliens, and robots, Okorafor writes candidly about racial injustice, Political violence and genocide, sexism and the destruction of the natural world.
It took a while for her work to catch on. She wrote five books before selling her first novel, Zara the Windchaser, which sold modestly when it was published in 2005. Science fiction and fantasy awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards.
She also left her mark on pop culture. She wrote scripts for Marvel Comics’ Black Panther series and created a new Marvel superhero, a Nigerian teenager named Ngozi, named after Okorafor’s sister who uses a wheelchair , and gained superpowers from his connection to the alien symbiote Venom.
This year alone she has released three new works, including One Direction, the next novel in a series set in a futuristic African region, and is writing a screenplay for a film adaptation of her novel Lagoon .
Her fan base includes popular fantasy authors such as Leigh Bardugo and Rick Riordan and icon Ursula Le Guin, Eng has said that “the imagination in one page of Neddy Okorafor’s book is more vivid than in an entire volume of ordinary fantasy epic.”
Best-selling fantasy author George R.R. Martin, a long-time fan of Okorafor’s work, calls Death of the Author one of her best and most formally inventive novels.
“I like Nnedi’s work because I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” he said in an interview. “It reflects a certain sense of risk-taking and a willingness to break the mold and do things differently.”
Julia Elliott, executive editor of William R. Morrow Publishing, which purchased “Death of the Author” for a seven-figure sum, said Okorafor embedded vividly imagined science fiction stories into autobiographical works of fiction. It fascinates her and how the interwoven narratives echo each other.
“As soon as I started reading the manuscript, I knew it was different,” Elliott said. “This book explores many themes that I’ve explored in other works before, but this book feels more down to earth and personal than anything I’ve seen from her.”
A week before publication, Okorafor felt extremely anxious. She worried about revealing too much about herself in the novel: her early life-defining accident, her sometimes strained relationships with her parents and siblings, her grief over the loss of beloved family members, even her time as a successful writer Feeling trapped by the entertainment industry’s racial blind spots.
She wonders whether readers will feel cheated when they realize that “Death of the Author” is not quite a science fiction novel but more of a metafiction about a science fiction novelist.
“I’ve been confusing people for a long time, and I think now they’re really going to be confused,” she said.
Okorafor, 50, has spent the past few years living in a quiet gated community in Phoenix, where she moved in 2021 from her native Chicago. She said the desert climate suited her and made it easier to cope with her disability. Decades after back surgery, she still lacked full feeling in her legs and feet, making traveling difficult during Illinois’ harsh winters.
She lives with a crew of robots and animals, chief among them a hairless cat named Neptune Onyedike, and Periwinkle Chukwu, an otherworldly-looking Oriental shorthair cat with a long face and big ears. , is the protagonist of Okorafor’s upcoming graphic novel “Space.”
She writes at a large table near the window, overlooking the courtyard where hummingbirds fly around the feeders; Okorafor calls them “guardian hummingbirds” because they seem to recognize her but dive-bomb strangers who approach the house. visitors. On the wall next to the TV sits Astrochukwu, a discontinued robot from Amazon with a square screen face and two white circles for eyes. When she called its name, its eyes swiveled and glowed electric blue.
“Astro, act like a goat,” she said, prompting the robot to bleat.
In addition to robots, Okorafor, who once dreamed of becoming an entomologist, is also fascinated by insects. She wears a bronze grasshopper pendant around her neck and has one tattooed on her right shoulder. Her desk is filled with insect and spider figurines, including a metal mantis, a dragonfly and a black plastic spider.
Despite her fear of spiders – she covered her face and screamed when describing a “dinner plate-sized” spider on the ceiling of Zogu’s home in Alondi, Nigeria – Okorafor frequently refers to them in her work . She has a special connection with the Nigerian character Udeed, a spider artist who lives in the underground spirit world. Uded appears frequently in Okorafor’s expanded fictional universe and appears in Zeru’s novel “Death of the Author” as a giant robot spider who delivers a dire prophecy.
Okorafor first came up with the idea for a novel centered on her bustling, close-knit family decades ago when she began writing after becoming paralyzed. Her two older sisters, Ngozi and Ifeoma, urged her to document their adventures visiting family in Nigeria. But Okorafor kept stalling. Fantasy comes more naturally to her. The truth is daunting.
Then, in November 2021, her sister Ngozi died unexpectedly at the age of 48. “It’s devastating, I still can’t put it into words,” Okorafor said. Later, their mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Okorafor began writing about Zeru and her family as an outlet.
“Grief gave me the courage to do this,” she said.
Okorafor drew on her relationships with her siblings and parents, who immigrated from Nigeria and later settled in Chicago’s south suburbs, where Okorafor often felt like an outsider. Growing up in a predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood, Okorafor and her siblings were often taunted by neighborhood kids who chased them through the streets and yelled racial epithets. Siblings cope by leaning together.
In “Death of the Author,” Okorafor captures the peculiar loneliness of being in two places, without ever feeling like she fully belongs in either place. Like Okorafor, Zeru hates constantly defining and defending her identity, and vents about having to endlessly “debate whether she is an American, a ‘diaspora,’ an Afrofuturist or an African writer.”
Zeru was angry that her novel was favored by Hollywood but was stripped of its African elements, which she said reflected some of Okorafor’s own experiences but which she did not want to reveal. “It’s therapeutic to make it up,” she said.
Her sister Ngozi is commemorated in both narrative threads of the novel. She is one of Zeru’s sisters. In Rusty Robot, the robot Ankara is referenced when she is saved by the last human on Earth, an old woman named Ngozi, who is known in Igbo. It means blessing.
Okorafor leaves it up to the reader to decide whether “Death of the Author” is realism or fantasy. To her, the distinction makes no difference.
“I think the world is a magical place,” she said.
