2026 Book Review #39 – Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
This is the second-to-last on the list of best novel nominees for this year’s Hugo that I have been working through. It is also – to avoid burying the lede – far and away the least enjoyable read of any of them. If you include best novella nominees it’s dicier – it’s certainly more ambitious and interesting as an artistic project than Automatic Noodle or Murder by Memory, though both of them more-or-less achieved the modest goals they set for themselves - but there’s still an argument to be made it’s the worst of the whole lot I’ve read so far this year. This is mostly downstream of the entire novel hinging on a twist revealed in the literally last couple of pages, and one that didn’t work for me at all. In fairness, I am an immensely hard sell for songs about how awesome being in a band is and Hollywood movies about how Hollywood is the greatest place in the world, too.
The story is told through two parallel narratives. The first – and by far the more lengthy, prominent, and well-written – is set in the modern day and follows Zelu, an adjunct professor in a creative writing program who is fired with no notice while literally attending her sister’s wedding. In a fit of feverish creative despair, she tosses the literary fiction that she’s spent the last several years dutifully shopping around in the trash and starts working on something different. After months of living with her parents and doing little but write, she completes Rusted Robots, a post-post-apocalyptic science fiction effort built from her family’s multiethnic Nigerian culture about the robotic civilizations which have inherited the Earth after humanity’s extinction. It proves an instant phenomenon, and the rest of the story is something like evenly mixed between the good (cold-called by a prosthetics researcher who offers her a chance to walk again) and bad (attempted kidnapping) her fame brings on one hand, and the drama and trials of her incredibly unsupportive and judgmental family on the other.
The secondary narrative is Rusted Robots itself. It’s a story about an itinerant android folklorist who has spent decades wandering across western Africa and collecting all the stories left behind by humanity he can find, and the increasingly genocidal conflict between humes (robots with humanoid bodies) and the purely digital AIs which seem to define robotic politics. Problematic, when he is somewhat involuntarily made bearer of the revelation that sun-maddened and molten deep-space exploration bots are en route back to Earth and will render the whole planet down to slag when they arrive.
I don’t have much nice to say about the Robots narrative, honestly. The amount it’s talked up as a sensational record-breaking universally loved masterpiece in the main story predisposes me against it, in part. Which is inevitable given its role in the plot – presumably if anyone could write that good a book they would just...write that good a book, and then what are we even doing here? – but the dissonance is real. But even if I didn’t spend several hundred pages being explicitly invited to consider whether it was the Best Science Fiction Ever, it’s just not a particularly interesting or engaging story. The characters are little more than functional, the plot utterly predictable, the themes more or less stated verbatim at every opportunity, the worldbuilding and speculative sociology interesting in theory but mostly just a mass of wasted potential. I spent most of the book thinking that incredibly little would be lost if these sections were just cut entirely to make the book a slightly-sci-fi-tinged family drama.
Zelu’s narrative is both significantly better and impossibly more interesting to poke at and think about. They’re messily intertwined in a bunch of different ways, but I think you can usefully peel it apart into an identity-narrative diasporic family drama on the one hand and a very on the nose wish-fulfillment story on the other?
Zelu is the child of an upper-class Nigerian-American family, her mother quite literally a princess who grew up in a palace and her father and numerous siblings all highly paid and prestigious professionals of one kind or another. She has been paraplegic since childhood, is the holder of a less-than-marketable MFA and no real career prospects, and to add insult to injury vocally disdains the idea of ever getting married at every opportunity. The result is a tense and often suffocating family relationship, especially as absolutely none of them are prepared to accept or adapt to Zelu changing her station in life. In a book that’s often critically low in tension or conflict, the push and pull of the family dynamic is by far the most compelling part of the whole story.
It is somewhat unfortunately basically impossible to disentangle from the rest of the narrative, which is a wish-fulfillment narrative so on the nose I found it kind of impossible to take that seriously after a point. Or it’s really a bit more specific – the dominant emotional mode is vindication. Not just being a successful author, but getting fired from your shitty adjunct teaching job only to turn around and release basically the most successful debut novel ever, becoming a millionaire within the month. Not just proving to your paternalistically protective family that you can live an independent life, but proudly ignoring all their fearmongering and beta-testing experimental prosthetics that let you walk and run again. Not just striking up a casual friendship with not-Jeff-Bezos and getting the chance to go into space, but having your first real argument with your husband about it that ends with him fully admitting you were right and he was wrong. Even when it turns out your suffocatingly overprotective mother was right about how dangerous going back home to Nigeria to visit your father’s grave would be, your amazing new space-age legs let you literally outrun the kidnapping attempt and become a global viral sensation as you do.
It’s not like I don’t see the appeal of the fantasy – I’m sure everyone has daydreamed about something similar at some point – but the execution here is as subtle as a brick to the head. Which is clearly what a very wide audience wants in these things, but I’ve never been much able to bear the sensation of a book trying so hard to pander to me. The entire world around Zelu’s family is also very, very obviously there entirely as props and set dressing for the fantasy, in a way that I found pretty lethal to my suspension of disbelief or ability to take seriously as the grounded, modern-day side of the story (which is to say it took several chapters to get the ‘that is not how any part of the publishing industry works!’ response beaten out of me).
Now the obvious rejoinder to all of this is that it’s actually intentional. Full spoilers about something that happens in the last chapter of the book here I guess, so stop reading if that’s a thing that greatly concerns you. Anyway, it’s revealed in that last chapter that Zelu is actually the more fictional character here, the protagonist of the first wholly unique story ever written by a robot, drawing on historical records long after any physical trace of her was long gone. All of my complaints are thus transmuted into characterization notes regarding the stumbling and inaccurate attempts of a different species of intelligence centuries later to authentically recreate the 21st century world and the people therein. Which is potentially theoretically sound, I suppose, but if I accept it then my new complaint is that absolutely nothing about the narrative voice or writing style was anywhere close to interesting or entertaining enough to justify hundreds of pages of intentionally bad writing. There are a lot of narrative choices that would be potentially interesting through this lens, but the book really doesn’t give you enough to work with to draw any particularly compelling conclusions from any of them. The extra layer of fictionalizing also just instantly makes a lot of the more politically charged bits of the narrative far less interesting than if the story actually seemed willing to stand by them.
Insofar as the story is redeemed, it’s mostly done so by the character of Zelu. I mean, at least for me. But I do genuinely love to see a protagonist who is often interpersonally unpleasant, absolutely godawful at communicating what’s important to her, and absolutely caustic in response to the vast majority of criticism. Given everything else about the book, you’d be forgiven for expecting her to be made a perfect inspirational angel or utterly bland ‘relatable’ heroine – getting someone with some bite to her was at least a nice surprise. Her fraught relationship with the Igbo and Yoruba cultures of her extended family is also quite well-done.
Otherwise though yeah, really can’t much recommend this book to anyone. If you want diaspora fiction about the Nigerian-American experience, there’s plenty of that out there with far more clarity of purpose. If you want blatant emotional wish-fulfillment of whatever kind, there are almost certainly terabytes of it floating around online for whatever particulars you desire. And if you want pablum about the Importance of Stories god knows there’s enough out there for us to burn for heat all through the winter.
