Spellbinding .. Okorafor pulls us so deeply into Zelu’s innermost workings that her wins and losses feel like our own even if we don’t fully agree with her choices ... While thoroughly imaginative, these excerpts sometimes feel weighed down by world-building, and they lack the subtleties of Zelu’s more grounded, fluid world. But they are essential to the novel’s most prominent concern: the nebulous link between artists and their art. With one final, surprising reveal, Okorafor cleverly subverts the very nature of this link, and we are left reconsidering everything we’ve just read. The effect is as delicious as it is disorienting.
Death of the Author (2025) offers us new and scintillating conceptions of the Cartesian mind-body duality ... Zelu’s story offers a view of literary stardom that is at once exciting, hilarious, and moving. It also provides a metacommentary on how books are consumed by the public, as well as how stories shift as they cross into other media ... In this story within a story, Okorafor personifies and gives creative expression to the Western division of the human ... Not only are the AI and robot, representing mind and body, trapped together, but they are also in a symbiotic relationship. They are mutually interdependent. In this reparative act, Ngozi literally puts the 'Ghost' in the machine ... What is most captivating about the inner story, Rusted Robots, is precisely the ongoing dialogue between Ijele and Ankara, between the personification of mind and body, or spirit and matter ... From their initial entrapment, these figures are constantly seeking to escape each other, though they end up understanding and bonding with one another. This story is about their unification, friendship, and alliance. Moreover, their constant bickering with one another regarding whether to be or not to be (dis)embodied, which is both the question that the story poses and a question with which advanced technology attempts to seduce us, further makes the reader reflect on the mind-body tension within ourselves ... Even though the robot generates Zelu’s story, it is Ngozi who enables it to do so, in part by transmitting her own stories containing her humanness, which is here decidedly marked as Black and female, as is also the future of storytelling.
Okorafor has a lot to offer outside its story-within-a-story structure ... There’s rising action that builds but no release. But by the end, the explosion I felt like I was promised became a balloon leaking air. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it left me pawing at the back of the book, wondering if I had flipped past the final chapter.
I don’t think Okorafor’s approach really works ... 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.
Zelu’s desire to live life on her own terms will engage readers who love to watch protagonists grow. Highly recommended for fans of Octavia Butler, Nicky Drayden, and Tade Thompson.
A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.
