Metafiction can be a powerful tool in the hands of the right author; At Swim-Two-Birds is one of my favorite novels of all time, using the technique to explore the relationship between an author and their creation, and to ask broader questions of free will and the meaning of life. More frequently, at least in my experience as a reader, it’s a gimmick that interrupts the narrative and results in one good story and one mediocre one, as in The Blind Assassin, which creates a work that ends up less satisfying than it would have been had the author just focused on a single work.
(I’m using the term “metafiction” here to refer to a fictional story within a novel, which is the definition I learned in college while we studied Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, one of the best examples of the genre I’ve ever read. Wikipedia defines it differently.)
Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, which made the shortlist for this year’s Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel, is more than just one novel; it’s trying to be at least two, the story of a disabled Black woman named Zelu who writes a best-selling sci-fi novel, and the novel itself, called Rusted Robots, with interviews interspersed throughout the book. The result is more like one and a half novels, each of them feeling about three-quarters full.
Zelu is Nigerian-American, raised in Chicago, one of six children to a couple of Igbo and Yoruba origins. When she was 11, she fell out of a tree while playing with friends, an accident that left her a paraplegic and made her the subject of pity and infantilization from her parents and siblings and of scorn and fear from relatives in Africa. She’s tried for years to write serious literature, barely making ends meet by working as an adjunct professor, but as the novel opens, she’s fired from that job and gets her umpteenth rejection letter from a publisher, forcing her to move back in with her parents. At this personal nadir, she begins writing a science-fiction novel about a post-human world populated by two types of artificial life, robots in human-shaped shells called Humes and bodiless AI programs called NoBodies. The novel is an immediate success, sparking a bidding war before it’s published and making Zelu rich.
The sudden media attention brings her into the sights of a scientist who has developed a form of intelligent prosthetic limbs called exos; Zelu decides to take the leap, regaining some mobility and independence while making herself world-famous as “that robot author.” Her family, however, doesn’t understand her writing, despises her choice to use the exos as a violation of God’s will, and wishes she’d stop smoking so much weed. As the novel keeps building, along with a film adaptation and expectations of sequels, Zelu struggles to adjust to the rapid shift from anonymity to celebrity, and grapples with an existential crisis of her own – much as the protagonist of her novel, the Hume named Ankara, has to do in the escalating conflicts of its post-apocalyptic world.
Rusted Robots is not a very good or convincing novel, and that undermines huge parts of the rest of Death of the Author. It’s written in a different voice from Okorafor’s usual writing, and the result sounds like a stilted attempt at YA literature. There’s some character development, and there’s a plot-shaped object there, but because it’s maybe the length of a short novella and written in a simpler style, it feels like she’s showing us the veneer of a novel rather than an actual one.
The constant interruptions to veer into Rusted Robots or those interview segments also end up detracting from Zelu’s story, which is the most interesting and the most fleshed-out by far. She’s a fascinating character, at least in part an author surrogate, evolving in some ways as her life changes rapidly, while still maintaining the fatalism that forms her main line of defense against her family and the world in general. Her choices can be irrational, which makes her maddening but also recognizable as a three-dimensional character who feels human. She deserves a better partner than Msizi, the South African entrepreneur whose AI-powered personal assistant app ends up a secondary distraction throughout the book.
Then there’s the ending, which is clever, maybe extremely clever, but also rather unsatisfying. Okorafor throws several matters into question with the resolution of both of the main plot points, and I’m not sure it’s internally consistent with what came before. I’ve seen this novel described as a Möbius strip; that doesn’t fit the structure, as it’s not Finnegan’s Wake, but the conclusion at least should force readers to re-evaluate some of what’s come before.
Death of the Author is very much a novel of ideas, which does mitigate some of the plot deficiencies. The main story sits on a foundation of Zelu’s identity as a disabled Black woman born to immigrant parents, with a large extended family in Nigeria, and as someone who perceives herself as an intellectual but ends up finding success writing a genre piece wildly different from her previous work. Zelu lives much of her life feeling like whatever she does is going to go wrong, which at least in some part is a function of the number of people expecting something of her, and the number of different faces she has to present to the world. (Okorafor hints at a religious divide, where Zelu is secular but retains some of the trappings of belief, such as thinking the universe is ready to smack her down if she gets too high.) Yet her ability to interrogate these influences on her life is limited. Her decisions are often impetuous, even if they’re right, and she doesn’t seem to have the introspection required to understand what’s pushing her in any direction.
The role of technology in society and individual lives, including AI, pervades both the novel proper and Rusted Root, while that inner novella’s story hinges on the power of storytelling and whether that is unique to humanity. Okorafor seems to be an AI believer, or at least a proponent, as there’s no hint in the novel of anything going awry from the technology, and its presence in the story is only positive. Zelu’s meteoric rise is possible because of technological progress, including her exos, and it opens up further opportunities for her later in the novel, one of which comes about in part due to the absence of real privacy caused by tech firms gathering endless information on us. Even I found myself skeptical of some of the pro-technology language in this book, as someone whose career also arose due to the changes in our world that technological progress has brought about.
Death of the Author is a lot of book, and offers plenty to discuss and debate, more than even the typical Hugo winner would. It’s an ambitious book, and a profound one. It’s also not entirely successful as a work of fiction, thanks to the shared narrative that results in neither Zelu nor her robots getting their due in the end. It’s a better work of literature than The Incandescent, also nominated for those same two awards, but nowhere near as enjoyable a read.
(Aside: I have read Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, about a year ago, and loved it.)
Next up: Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto, the second book in his Harlem trilogy.