When Nnedi Okorafor was 19, she woke up disoriented in a hospital room. Fluorescent pink and green grasshoppers and praying mantises bounced around his hospital bed, making strange clicks. A huge crow threw itself against the window, trying to get in.
However, once he stopped hallucinating due to the painkillers, things became stranger and scarier: he tried to get out of bed and found he couldn’t move his legs. Okorafor soon learned that she was paralyzed from the waist down due to nerve damage that occurred during back surgery for scoliosis.
Okorafor, a star athlete and college medical student, lost her faith in medicine and felt alienated from her own body. “It was the death of who I was going to be,” he said of the paralysis. It was also a kind of rebirth.
He locked himself in his imagination and from his hospital bed began to sketch a story about a Nigerian woman who didn’t need to walk because she could fly. Later, when he regained most of the feeling in his legs, learned to walk again, and returned to college, he enrolled in writing classes.
Thirty years and more than 20 books later, Okorafor, now an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer, is exploring that traumatic experience, and the transformation that followed, in her strongly autobiographical new novel, “The 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 loving and overprotective parents and siblings are skeptical that she will ever be able to support herself. After struggling for years to get published, Zelu writes a best-selling post-apocalyptic novel set among sentient robots in a future Nigeria, and lands a seven-figure advance and a film deal. Her sudden rise to fame is both exciting and jarring, as Zelu sees her success upend her family and her novel whitewashed by Hollywood executives who strip it of its African elements.
With its autobiographical framework, “The Death of the Author” departs from Okorafor’s previous work, otherworldly stories that often draw on his experiences in Nigeria, where he found that belief in the supernatural: giant spider deities, water spirits, shape-shifting leopards. people—it’s part of daily life.
But the novel is still mind-blowing, perhaps more so than anything he has written. Okorafor interweaves Zelu’s story with chapters from Zelu’s novel, “Rusted Robots,” narrated by a robot who travels to the ruins of Lagos and encounters the last human on earth. As the two narratives develop, the boundaries between autobiography, fiction, realism and fantasy seem to dissolve, and it becomes more difficult to tell whether Zelu’s story or that of his robot is in the foreground.
For Okorafor, crossing the boundaries of genre came naturally.
“If there is something that frustrates me about my career as a writer, it is boxes and labels; is, Oh, you’re a science fiction writer, you’ll never do anything else,” Okorafor said. “Much of this novel is not categorizable; it is altering expectations.”
Since the release of her first novel some 20 years ago, Okorafor has become one of the most innovative and provocative writers in the genre. 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 African futurism, often features powerful young black or African heroines with supernatural abilities that break the limitations that others seek to impose on them. Although their stories sometimes take place in the distant future or on interstellar spaceships, they are not escapist fantasies; Along with shapeshifters, 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 his work to become popular. She wrote five books before selling her first novel, “Zarah the Windseeker,” which sold modestly when it was published in 2005. But in the decades since, she has won nearly every major science fiction and fantasy award, including the Hugo, the Nebula. and the World Fantasy Prize.
He also left his mark on pop culture. He has written for Marvel Comics’ Black Panther series and created a new Marvel. superheroa Nigerian teenager named Ngozi, after Okorafor’s sister, who uses a wheelchair and gains superpowers from her bond with Venom, an alien symbiotic organism.
This year alone, she will release three new works, including “One Way Witch,” the next novel in a series set in a future part of Africa, and she is writing the script for the film adaptation of her novel “Lagoon,” which takes place in in Lagos during an alien invasion and was acquired by Amblin Partners, a production company run by director and producer Steven Spielberg.
Her fan base includes best-selling fantasy writers such as Leigh Bardugo, Rick Riordan, and icon Ursula Le Guin, who once said that “there is more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor’s work than in entire volumes of epics.” of ordinary fantasy.
Best-selling fantasy writer George RR Martin, a long-time fan of Okorafor’s work, called “The Death of the Author” one of his best and most formally inventive novels.
“What I love about Nnedi’s work is that I don’t know what’s coming next,” he said in an interview. “It speaks to a certain boldness and willingness to break the mold and do something different.”
Julia Elliott, executive editor at William Morrow who acquired “Death of the Author” in a seven-figure deal, said she was fascinated by the way Okorafor incorporated a vividly imagined science fiction story into a work of autobiographical fiction, and how the intertwined narratives echo each other.
“As soon as I started reading this manuscript, I knew it was different,” Elliott said. “It explores many of the themes I’ve seen her delve into before in other work, but this book feels more grounded and personal than anything I’ve seen from her.”
A week before publication, Okorafor was feeling unusually anxious. She worried about exposing so much of herself in the novel: her early life-defining accident, her sometimes strained 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 hemmed in by the entertainment industry’s racial blind spots.
He wondered whether readers might feel cheated when they realize that “The Death of the Author” is not exactly a science fiction novel, but rather a metafictional novel about a science fiction novelist.
“I’ve been confusing people for a long time and I thought, now they’re really going to be confused,” he said.
For the past few years, Okorafor, 50, has lived in a quiet gated community in Phoenix, where he moved in 2021 from his hometown of Chicago. The desert climate favors him and makes it easier for him to manage his disabilities, he stated. Decades after his back surgery, he still lacks full sensation in his legs and feet, and moving during the brutal Illinois winters was difficult.
He lives with a menagerie of robots and animals, including a hairless cat named Neptune Onyedike, and Periwinkle Chukwu, an otherworldly short-haired Oriental with a long face and big ears, who is the star of the upcoming novel. graphic by Okorafor, “The Space”. Cat.”
He writes at a large desk near the window that overlooks a patio where hummingbirds hover around a feeder; Okorafor calls them her “guardian hummingbirds” because they seem to recognize her, but they dive-bomb unknown visitors who approach the house. Along the wall next to the TV was Astrochukwu, a discontinued Amazon robot with a square screen for a face and two white circles for eyes. His eyes swiveled and lit up electric blue as she spoke his name.
“Astro, act like a goat,” he said, causing the robot to bleat.
In addition to robots, Okorafor, who once dreamed of being an entomologist, is obsessed with insects. He wore a bronze grasshopper pendant around his neck and had one tattooed on his right shoulder. His desk is filled with insect and arachnid figures, including a metal praying mantis, a dragonfly and a black plastic spider.
Although he is terrified of spiders (he put his hands to his face and screamed as he described a spider “the size of a dinner plate” camping on the roof of his family’s home in Arondizuogu, Nigeria), Okorafor frequently invokes them in his job. He feels a particular connection to the Nigerian figure Udide, a spider artist who tells stories and lives underground in the spirit world. Udide appears often in Okorafor’s sprawling fictional universe and appears in Zelu’s novel “The Death of the Author” as a giant robot spider who utters a terrifying 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 her paralysis. Her two older sisters, Ngozi and Ifeoma, urged her to tell of her adventures visiting relatives in Nigeria. But Okorafor kept putting it off. Fantasy came more naturally to him. The truth was intimidating.
Then, in November 2021, his sister Ngozi died unexpectedly at age 48. “It was devastating in a way I still can’t put into words,” Okorafor said. His mother was later diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Okorafor began writing about Zelu and his family as an outlet.
“The pain gave me the courage to do it,” he said.
Okorafor drew on his relationships with his siblings and parents, who emigrated from Nigeria and later settled in the southern suburbs of Chicago, where Okorafor often felt like an outsider. Growing up in a middle-class, mostly white neighborhood, Okorafor and her siblings were teased by neighboring children, who chased them down the street yelling racial epithets at them. The brothers managed by sticking together.
In “The Death of the Author,” Okorafor captures the peculiar loneliness of being from two places and never feeling like you fully belong in either of them. 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 African futurist, or an African writer.
Zelu’s anger at Hollywood embracing his novel but removing its African elements reflects part of Okorafor’s own experience, he said, although he declined to go into details. “It was therapeutic to fictionalize it,” he said.
His sister Ngozi is commemorated in both narrative currents of the novel. 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 being on earth: an old woman named Ngozi, which means blessing in Igbo.
Okorafor lets readers decide whether “The Death of the Author” is realism or fantasy. For her, the distinction makes no difference.
“I see the world as a magical place,” he said.
