When Nnedi Okorafor was 19, she woke up disoriented in a hospital room. Fluorescent pink and green grasshoppers and praying mantises bounced around her hospital bed, making strange clicks. An enormous crow threw itself against the window, trying to break in.
Once she was no longer hallucinating from pain medication, though, things got stranger and scarier: She tried to get out of bed, and found she couldn’t move her legs. Okorafor soon learned that she was paralyzed from the waist down from nerve damage that occurred during back surgery for scoliosis.
A star athlete and pre-med college student, Okorafor lost her faith in medicine, and felt alienated from her own body. “It was a death of who I was going to be,” she said of the paralysis. It was also a rebirth of sorts.
She retreated into her imagination, and from her hospital bed started sketching a story about a Nigerian woman who didn’t need to walk because she could fly. Later, after she had regained most of the sensation in her legs, learned to walk again and returned to college, she enrolled in writing classes.
Thirty years and more than twenty books later, Okorafor, now an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer, is exploring that traumatic experience, and the transformation that followed, in her heavily autobiographical new novel, “Death of the Author.”
A genre-defying metafictional experiment, the story centers on a Nigerian American writer from Chicago named Zelu, who is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair after a childhood accident. She dreams of becoming a writer, but her lovingly overprotective parents and siblings are skeptical that she’ll ever support herself. After struggling for years to get published, Zelu writes a best-selling postapocalyptic novel set among sentient robots in a future Nigeria, and lands a seven-figure advance and a movie deal. Her sudden rise to fame is both thrilling and jarring, as Zelu sees her success disrupt her family, and her novel get whitewashed by Hollywood executives who strip it of the African elements.
With its autobiographical framework, “Death of the Author” is a departure from Okorafor’s previous work, otherworldly stories that often draw on her experiences in Nigeria, where she found that belief in the supernatural — giant spider deities, water spirits, shape-shifting leopard people — is part of daily life.
But the novel is still mind-bending, maybe more than anything she’s written. Okorafor weaves Zelu’s story with together with chapters from Zelu’s novel, “Rusted Robots,” which is narrated by a robot who travels to the ruins of Lagos and meets the last human on earth. As the two narratives unfold, the boundaries between autobiography and fiction and realism and fantasy seem to dissolve, and it becomes harder to tell whether Zelu’s story or her robot’s tale is in the foreground.
For Okorafor, trespassing across genre boundaries came naturally.
“If there’s one thing that’s frustrated me about my writing career, it’s boxes and labels; it’s, Oh, you are a science fiction writer, never shall you do anything else,” Okorafor said. “A lot of this novel is not categorizable — it’s messing with expectations.”
Since the release of her debut novel some 20 years ago, Okorafor has become one of the genre’s most innovative and provocative writers. In a swath of the literary world that has traditionally been dominated by white, male writers and Western mythology, Okorafor has broken through with wildly imaginative fantasy stories that are steeped in West African beliefs, culture and traditions.
Her fiction, which she calls Africanfuturism, often features powerful young Black or African heroines with supernatural abilities who shatter the limitations others seek to impose on them. Though her stories sometimes take place in the distant future or on interstellar spaceships, they aren’t escapist fantasies; along with shape-shifters, sorcerers, aliens and robots, Okorafor writes bluntly about racial inequality, 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, “Zarah the Windseeker,” which sold modestly when it came out in 2005. But in the decades since, she’s won just about every major science fiction and fantasy award, including the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award.
She’s also made her mark in pop culture. She written for Marvel Comics’s Black Panther series, and created a new Marvel superhero, a Nigerian teenage girl named Ngozi, after Okorafor’s sister, who uses a wheelchair and gets superpowers from her bond with Venom, an alien symbiotic organism.
This year alone, she’s releasing three new works, including “One Way Witch,” the next novel in a series set in a future part of Africa, and she’s writing the screenplay for the film adaptation of her novel “Lagoon,” which takes place in Lagos during an alien invasion and was optioned by Amblin Partners, a production company led by the director and producer Steven Spielberg.
Her fan base include blockbuster fantasy writers like Leigh Bardugo, Rick Riordan and the icon Ursula Le Guin, who once said that “there’s more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor’s work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics.”
The best-selling fantasy writer George R.R. Martin, a longtime fan of Okorafor’s work, called “Death of the Author” one of her best and most formally inventive novels.
“What I love about Nnedi’s work is I don’t know what’s going to come next,” he said in an interview. “It speaks to a certain adventurousness and willingness to break the mold and do something different.”
Julia Elliott, an executive editor at William Morrow who acquired “Death of the Author” in a seven-figure deal, said she was mesmerized by the way Okorafor embedded a vividly imagined sci-fi story within a work of autobiographical fiction, and how the intertwined narratives echo one another.
“As soon as I began to read this manuscript, I knew it was different,” Elliott said. “It’s exploring a lot of the themes that I’ve seen her dig into before in other works, but this book feels more grounded and personal than anything I’d seen from her.”
A week before publication, Okorafor was feeling uncharacteristically anxious. She worried about exposing so much of herself in the novel: her early, life-defining accident, her sometimes tense relationships with her parents and siblings, her grief over the loss of a beloved family member, even her experiences as a successful author who at times feels boxed in by the entertainment industry’s racial blind spots.
She wondered if readers might feel duped when they realize “Death of the Author” isn’t exactly a science fiction novel, but more of a metafictional novel about a science fiction novelist.
“I’ve been confusing people for a long time and I thought, They’re really going to be confused now,” she said.
For the past few years, Okorafor, 50, has lived in a quiet gated community in Phoenix, where she moved in 2021 from her hometown, Chicago. The desert climate suits her and makes it easier to manage her disabilities, she said. Decades after her back surgery, she still lacks full sensation in her legs and feet, and getting around during Illinois’s brutal winters was difficult.
She lives with a menagerie of robots and animals, chief among them a hairless cat named Neptune Onyedike, and Periwinkle Chukwu, an otherworldly-looking oriental shorthair with a long face and large ears who is the star of Okorafor’s forthcoming graphic novel, “The Space Cat.”
She writes at a large desk near the window overlooking a patio where hummingbirds flit around a feeder; Okorafor calls them her “guard hummingbirds” because they seem to recognize her but dive bomb unfamiliar visitors who approach the house. Along the wall next to the TV sat Astrochukwu, a discontinued robot from Amazon with a square screen as a face and two white circles for eyes. Its eyes spun and lit up electric blue when she called its name.
“Astro, act like a goat,” she said, prompting the robot to bleat.
Along with robots, Okorafor, who once dreamed of becoming an entomologist, is obsessed with insects. She wore a bronze grasshopper pendant around her neck, and has one tattooed on her right shoulder. Her desk is littered with insect and arachnid figurines, including a metal praying mantis, a dragonfly and a black plastic spider.
Though she’s terrified of spiders — she clutched her face and squealed while describing a spider “the size of a dinner plate” that camped out on the ceiling of her family’s home in Arondizuogu, Nigeria — Okorafor frequently invokes them in her work. She feels a particular connection to the Nigerian figure Udide, a story-spinning spider artist who lives underground in the spirit world. Udide pops up often in Okorafor’s extended fictional universe, and appears in Zelu’s novel in “Death of the Author” as giant robot spider who delivers a terrifying prophecy.
Okorafor first had the idea for a novel that centered on her boisterous, close-knit family decades ago, when she started writing after her paralysis. Her two older sisters, Ngozi and Ifeoma, urged her to chronicle their adventures visiting family in Nigeria. But Okorafor kept putting it off. Fantasy came more naturally to her. The truth was intimidating.
Then, in November of 2021, her sister Ngozi died unexpectedly at age 48. “It was devastating in a way that I still can’t put into words,” Okorafor said. Later, their mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Okorafor began writing about Zelu and her family as an outlet.
“The grief gave me the courage to do it,” she said.
Okorafor drew on her relationships with her siblings and parents, who emigrated from Nigeria and later settled in the south suburbs of Chicago, where Okorafor often felt like an outsider. Growing up in a middle class, overwhelmingly white neighborhood, Okorafor and her siblings were taunted by neighboring children, who chased them down the street yelling racial epithets. The siblings coped by sticking together.
In “Death of the Author,” Okorafor captures the peculiar loneliness of being from two places, and never feeling she fully belonged in either. Like Okorafor, Zelu hates having to constantly define and defend her identity, and vents about having to endlessly “debate whether she was “an American, a ‘diasporic,’ an Africanfuturist or an African writer.”
Zelu’s rage at having her novel embraced by Hollywood but gutted of its African elements reflects some of Okorafor’s own experience, she said, though she didn’t want to go into detail. “It was therapeutic to fictionalize it,” she said.
Her sister Ngozi is memorialized in both of the novel’s narrative strands. She appears as one of Zelu’s sisters. And she is invoked in “Rusted Robots,” when the robot Ankara is saved by the last human on earth — an elderly woman named Ngozi, which means blessing in Igbo.
Okorafor leaves it to readers to decide whether “Death of the Author” is realism or fantasy. For her, the distinction is without difference.
“I see the world as a magical place,” she said.
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