{"id":11400,"date":"2026-09-08T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11400"},"modified":"2026-09-08T00:04:17","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T04:04:17","slug":"death-of-the-author","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/08\/death-of-the-author\/","title":{"rendered":"Death of the Author."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Metafiction can be a powerful tool in the hands of the right author; At Swim-Two-Birds<\/em> 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\u2019s a gimmick that interrupts the narrative and results in one good story and one mediocre one, as in The Blind Assassin<\/em>, which creates a work that ends up less satisfying than it would have been had the author just focused on a single work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(I\u2019m using the term \u201cmetafiction\u201d here to refer to a fictional story within a novel, which is the definition I learned in college while we studied Italo Calvino\u2019s If on a winter\u2019s night a traveler<\/em>, one of the best examples of the genre I\u2019ve ever read. Wikipedia defines it differently.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nnedi Okorafor\u2019s Death of the Author<\/a><\/em>, which made the shortlist for this year\u2019s Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel, is more than just one novel; it\u2019s 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<\/em>, with interviews interspersed throughout the book. The result is more like one and a half novels, each of them feeling about three-quarters full.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s tried for years to write serious literature, barely making ends meet by working as an adjunct professor, but as the novel opens, she\u2019s 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\u2019s published and making Zelu rich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cthat robot author.\u201d Her family, however, doesn\u2019t understand her writing, despises her choice to use the exos as a violation of God\u2019s will, and wishes she\u2019d 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 \u2013 much as the protagonist of her novel, the Hume named Ankara, has to do in the escalating conflicts of its post-apocalyptic world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rusted Robots<\/em> is not a very good or convincing novel, and that undermines huge parts of the rest of Death of the Author<\/em>. It\u2019s written in a different voice from Okorafor\u2019s usual writing, and the result sounds like a stilted attempt at YA literature. There\u2019s some character development, and there\u2019s a plot-shaped object there, but because it\u2019s maybe the length of a short novella and written in a simpler style, it feels like she\u2019s showing us the veneer of a novel rather than an actual one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The constant interruptions to veer into Rusted Robots<\/em> or those interview segments also end up detracting from Zelu\u2019s story, which is the most interesting and the most fleshed-out by far. She\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there\u2019s 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\u2019m not sure it\u2019s internally consistent with what came before. I\u2019ve seen this novel described as a M\u00f6bius strip; that doesn\u2019t fit the structure, as it\u2019s not Finnegan\u2019s Wake<\/em>, but the conclusion at least should force readers to re-evaluate some of what\u2019s come before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n