This character-driven near-future sci-fi novel is unlike anything else I've read - a book about a writer writing a book has been done before, but not in this way. Zelu is a very realistic character, which made it very easy to go along with the near-future stuff, and everything was worked out in detail.
It was a bit long for my taste though.

Starting the new reading year of weak with this one, to my utter disappointment. Mind you I think this is also very much due to me expecting something very different the author's writing just not working for me personally. Now I can absolutely see how strong Okorafor is as both a writer and a narrator. The story she writes here is an increcibly interesting one, it just... almost didn't go far enough for me?
It's literary fiction with the mildest of sci-fi possible until the ending. It tells the story of Zelu who, at the worst time in her life, decides to write a very different book from what she usually publishes and teaches: A science-fiction novel, first in a trilogy, about robots in a future after humanity. The book becomes a smash hit, Zelu rises to fame, but because she's black and disabled she still gets a horrible amount of hate nevertheless. The way she develops from there, her own experiences with new "robotic" technology and how she deals with the popularity she gains is avbsolutely interesting. I just always felt like we stayed a little on the surface. I expected a harsher critique. The book focused more on her difficult relationship with her family, really. The story also moves at a breakneck speed (jumping from her writing the book to releasing it to being pressured for the second book by her publishers), while the pacing is still kind of weirdly slow in between.
In the end, I can see that this is a well-written book but Okorafor's writing style isn't my personal cup of tea. I enjoyed Zelu as a protagonist at first but never really warmed up to her and didn't care much about her fate. I absolutely adored the concept of an author writing a sci-fi robot version of herself and then slowly using existing technology to become that version, but it kind of got bogged down by the rest of the book.
Probably 2 t0 2,5 stars, but rounding up to 3.

I received this as an ARC for Netgalley. This is my second or third book by the author and I just dont think that they are for me. The subject sounded so interesting but I just found the book boring. The characters didn't appeal to me and the pace was so so slow. I just found myself not caring and struggling to read it and decided at 50% to put it down.
I loved the culture that came through the book, with the food, the interactions of the family and the release of the film in the story line but it wasn't enough to keep me going. I will say a big part of it may be something that happened about 50% to the main character that I experienced in my life, and it is still quite raw to read about, that is in no way the fault of the author and her depictions of the characters at that time are flawless but I just couldnt keep reading.

It's hard to describe how I feel about this book. I bot loved it, and wished that it had given me more. Zelu is an incredible woman, and for me, this book is as much about overcoming the limits that we set for ourselves, or are imposed by others as it is about anything else. The interweaving of Zelu's story, her novel, and the interviews given by her loved ones was skilfully done, although the interviews confused things somewhat. Early interviews suggested (to me at least) that a tragedy was coming, but both Zelu's story. and the novel could not have had a more triumphant end.

Zelu's fury and struggle around the adaptation, white-washing and general destruction of the core of her story as it was made in to a film felt so real, and so raw that I was furious on her behalf whilst reading this. Nigerian identity is central in these stories, even the difficulty of balancing Igbo and Yoruba roots and traditions when you don't live in the community or speak the language.

What a story! I read this story in chunks over several days, wanting to savour the story. This book is told in three formats - the story of Zelu, our author protagonist, interviews with her family/friends but also we get to read sections of her story with Ijele and Ankara. This is a really interesting take on what happens to books and stories when they go beyond what the author intends. This story is a lodestone that touches on lots of different factors - ethnicity, disability, sexuality, family and lots more. I would say that this book at points can be challenging - the sci-fi elevents of this such as the Exos and the app that Zelu uses are done well but the further reaching into other aspects aren't as tightly done. I would argue the ending isn't as satisfying as i'd have liked but I did enjoy the overarching plot and characterisation in this novel.Thank you Netgalley for the ARC

I would like to thank the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to read and honestly review an advanced reader’s copy of this book.

I chose this as my final read of the year, finishing it late last night, and I’ve been reflecting on my thoughts ever since. Overall, I enjoyed it. I appreciated the main character, Zelu: how she consistently stands up for herself and navigates her complex relationships.

However, I hesitate to call this book as sci-fi, which is how it was originally marketed to me. While it contains futuristic elements - such as the exos that helps Zelu walk, her AI phone assistant, and a brief space scene at the end - these things aren’t quite enough. Additionally, the sections of Zelu’s sci-fi novel about robots adds a layer of sci-fi.
However, I think the book is better described as literary fiction *about* science fiction rather than belonging to the genre itself.

The story spans decades of Zelu’s life, offering a deep exploration of her character, experiences, and beliefs. That said, I found myself wishing for more character growth. At times, the plot felt repetitive, revisiting similar scenarios where Zelu didn’t seem to evolve or learn from past experiences.

I think my favorite parts were the chapters from The Rusted Robots. I especially loved the conclusion to that story—perhaps even more than Zelu’s own ending, which felt unresolved to me. While I think that ambiguity was intentional, it didn’t entirely work for me.

Despite a few issues, this was a compelling read, and I’m excited to add a copy to my shelves!

This follows the story of Zelu, a paraplegic Nigerian-American in her early thirties. Her outspokenness loses her a university job, her book is rejected and she is left adrift at her sister's wedding. Out of this comes the idea for a robot-based dystopian sci-fi novel which catapults her to fame, which creates more problems than it solves. And the lines between her reality and fiction begin to blur.

I loved this, I mean, really loved this. It's almost two stories. That of Zelu and the science fiction book that she writes. And the strength of this book for me was how invested I became in both those - initially - unrelated stories. On one hand, you have Zelu, opinionated, frustrated, part of a large judgemental over-achieving family who veers between dismissive and overprotective. Her story is one of love, grief, and dealing with infamy. She's a messy, brilliant, interesting, flawed woman, grappling with loss, identity, love and her physicality. And then you have this wonderful dystopian world where AIs have spilt into two factions, robots called 'Humes' and body-less AI 'Ghosts', adversaries in a world where humans have wiped themselves out. And the story of Ijele and Ankara.

It's a book about stories, who tells them, the power they can have and who interprets them. Death of the author is a literary theory that argues that the meaning of the text is determined by the reader's interpretation, not the author's intention. As with all Nnedi Okorafor's work there are so many layers to this, so much to think about, but it's so easy to read. I fly through her books and afterwards, I find myself picking through just how many elements were going on. I loved it, I thought it was incredible. Even if you don't love sci-fi or fantasy, trust me, this one you will.

This book was incredible! I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I read it! I read an eARC on Net Galley so thank you to the author and the publisher.

This book was so thought-provoking that I read it more slowly than I normally do because I needed time to stop and digest the thoughts and ideas being positioned. It’s such a clever, intriguing book. This is my second book from this author and I will read absolutely anything I can find from them now!

I was a huge fan of the main character and her desire to take control of her life. She has to make difficult decisions, often that put her at odds with her family who are very vocal about it. However she’s so strong and admirable. We frequently see a narrative where she’s criticised no matter what she does. She’s disabled from a childhood accident but is berated for trying to get help. She’s often seen as a troublemaker purely for being different and living a different way but she still pursues her dreams. She’s a wonderful main character that shows huge strength and determination. However she’s very balanced and we see her temper and her frustrations too.

We follow our MC as she reaches a low point in life and is motivated to write a sci-fi book about robots which is not her normal genre. However it’s wildly successful and we see the benefits and turbulence this brings. We see the conflict this brings to her as her story is distorted by fans. This was such an interesting exploration of the highs and lows of this kind of success.

We also explore what it means to be human, which I won’t go into too much but this was fascinating.

I just found this book so interesting, it was so thought-provoking. I could never have guessed where it was going to go. There was a tension constantly which I’m desperate to talk about when others I know read this book! This was an absolutely brilliant reading experience.

I have a fine line with science fiction in that I am not overly keen on different worlds etc. but I have been wanting to read a book by this author for some time so I was really pleased to get an advance copy of this book from NetGalley. It didn’t disappoint me. I enjoyed Zelu’s story more than the story in the story. I found her a fascinating character and her choices were interesting a powerful. Overall I really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend and try more of her books.

My review could by summarised with the title of a 60s German movie: "Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed". I'm not sure about what it is even if I liked it.
It's a sort of love letter to writing and Nigeria. There's a pinch of sci-fi, reflection.
It's one of those "you-have-to-read-it-to-understand"
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

In the best possible way... I have no idea what to make of this book. It is one part family drama, one part meditation on the power of story, one part love letter to Nigeria/being Nigerian, and one part metatext in the most delightfully twisty fashion. I'll be chewing on the ending, and how it puts the title in a new light for hours yet. 5 stars.

This is an incredibly strange book to recommend or review lol. Nnedi Okorafor is an author I've heard about and been recommended for a few years and so I was really looking forward to this when it was announced.

The narrative is split into dual perspectives. Firstly we follow Zelu, a mid-thirties, paraplegic, black woman who after being fired from her role as an adjunct lecturer, and being rejected by another publisher for literary fiction, decides to write a science-fiction book unlike anything she has written before entitled Rusted Robots. This book then finds itself skyrocketing to stardom, throwing Zelu into the public zeitgeist. The second perspective follows the story of Rusted Robots in a future where humans are gone from the world, leaving Humes and NoBodies as two rival races of AI battling it out.

I think this synopsis gives you a solid idea for just how bizarre a book this is lol. At 430 pages long, Okorafor explores race, heritage, disability, sexuality, conflict, and a whole cavalcade more themes that provide a rich story to explore and extrapolate from. Nevertheless, the length also makes the book feel meandering and aimless at points as plot points are picked up and dropped throughout. I found myself extremely frustrated with almost every character in this book which did not create a satisfying reading experience, but it did allow a layered one.

I will be interested in reading Okorafor again following this and look forward to reading other people's perspectives because I think it will be a divisive one.

Thank you to Netgalley and Gollancz for providing an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

It doesn't necessarily have to, but science-fiction can present us with new ways of viewing who we are as people and as a society right now, how we confront genuine issues that are around us today, how we respond to changes and consider where that might take us in the future. Traditionally, that often that involves our relationship with technology, a reality that seems to be becoming more science-fiction-like every day. There are many innovative ways of exploring that subject and, as a black writer writing about a family of Nigerian origin, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor definitely takes an interesting and unusual approach to those themes in Death of the Author.
What is really unusual in her approach to SF is that the futuristic science-fiction appears a side issue to the main story set in a more familiar reality only slightly more advanced than the present day. That's a style more often employed in the genre of fantasy, where they want to keep one foot in reality while the world on the other side of the door is one where magic exists. Here the science-fiction is merely a story presented in-between that has been written by one of the main characters who is an author. I say “merely” but obviously it's not that simple and there is evidently more connecting the two parts of the novel.

The main character is Zelu, 32 years old and paraplegic after a childhood accident, lecturing in creative writing as an adjunct at a university. Things aren't going well. She's just been fired for being a little too honest about the pretentious work of one of her students and other complaints have been made about her “attitude problem”. To top it all off, she has just received the 10th rejection letter for her novel. With money running out, Zela is forced to return to live with her parents while she takes a new direction and starts writing a science-fiction story about robots. To her great surprise, her science-fiction novel is a worldwide success and it propels Zelu into international fame and a world she is not quite ready to embrace.

The story she writes is called 'Rusted Robots'. It's set in a post-human world occupied by humanoid robots called Humes, NoBody AIs and various other self-building and replicating mechanical intelligences. One Hume, Ankara, is interested in the human preoccupation of stories, of writing stories, of telling and sharing stories. Ankara travels to learn and collect them, but the world is still a far from peaceful place and Ankara has been tasked with delivering a message to other Humes that the world is facing complete and final annihilation. The other Humes, constantly under attack from no-body ghost AIs, are more concerned with this immediate threat than the one that Ankara has to deliver.

There's an intentional ambiguity in Death of the Author, and maybe even a meta-level aspect of author Nnedi Okorafor's brush with success and acclaim. Even the title plays on a certain ambiguity, the 'death of the author' suggesting perhaps the literal death of the author - she certainly lives a reckless lifestyle - but it also refers to the author needing to remove themselves from their work, to let the novel speak to the reader, allow them to relate personally to a work without prejudice of who the author might be or what they think might be their intentions for the work. As Zelu's personal life becomes even more filled with incident than the novel she has written and even rivals it for its leap into science-fictional realms, the gap between the two parts of the novel narrows and correspondences and correlation between them grow in intriguing ways.

I need hardly say that despite attempting to accept “the death of the author”, there is a relationship between Zelu’s life and the one she feels compelled to write about, but it's not one that you can reduce down to simple parallels, particularly since Zelu’s life, her family history, their Nigerian origins and its tribe mentality are very complicated. It's no easy matter for anyone, least of all Zelu herself (or indeed the reader) to unpick the cultural, the personal, the inherited traits, how much she lives up to them or how much she kicks against them. She's certainly determined to retain her independence, her fighting spirit, to be the person she wants to be, not what others have determined for her, but being wheelchair-bound restricts her to a large extent, or has such restrictions placed on her by how society functions.

“Humankind was done. It was officially the age of automation”, Ankara observes as the last human dies. 'Rusted Robots' is clearly a reflection of the world the troubled author dreams of, the eradication of humanity, a binary world where we can fix our flaws or accept them as being distinguishing features, where we can build and improve on what we are. The problem of course with inserting chapters from a million dollar bestseller written by one of the characters into a book is that it needs to read like a multi-million dollar idea that captures the imagination of the world. Inevitably, it's hard to see Zelu’s 'Rusting Robots' in that light. Most authors would avoid that challenge and just provide a summary of what the book is about rather than actually try to write it, but the intention is perhaps not to convince that this is a SF masterpiece, but that it is needed to play a different, necessary role.

As a plot device I'm not convinced that 'Rusted Robots' works as a miraculous science-fiction story that catapults Zelu to global fame, and it's even hard to see it as a necessary or worthwhile addition to the book. The family story and Zelu’s own backstory is good enough, the technological advances in her own world presenting opportunities and dangers, the various relationships compelling in their complexity, those complications weaved through with first person perspectives from people close to Zelu. But even if you can't put your finger on exactly what function the inclusion of the text of 'Rusted Robots' provides or how exactly it relates to the 'real world', it does provide a necessary resonance with the inner life of Zelu that feeds into the whole wonderful richness of this extraordinary book. As involved and convoluted as it all might seem, the underlying sentiment of the book can be a simple one; let go of all the complicating factors, stop beating yourself up, don't worry what everyone else thinks about you, embrace the changes. Keep living your life.

I don't like not finishing ARCs but in this case I just can't continue with it. The writing is not for me at all. I don't think that this is a bad book, I just went into it with the wrong idea. It reads a lot like literary fiction rather than scifi and because apparently I'm really struggling with reading lately I'm DNFing this for the time being.

Description:
Zelu thinks she’s hit rock bottom, but then she writes a sci-fi novel that takes the world by storm. Her newfound fame gives her a bunch of opportunities and her life starts to get increasingly exciting. Chapters about Zelu’s life are interspersed with chapters from her universally beloved sci-fi novel.

Liked:
Really enjoyed the descriptions of the exos and what they did and didn’t do for Zelu. I thought her relationship with Msizi was complex, believable, and fairly endearing (although sometimes frustrating). The food descriptions were incredible and I really felt Zelu’s hunger. I liked Tolu and a handful of the other interesting, cameo-type appearances of a bunch of the people in Zelu’s life.

Disliked:
Zelu is frequently insufferable and her family are The Worst. I really didn’t buy that her siblings would all be so supportive and interested in each other but absolutely ignore Zelu’s success and shoot her down at every opportunity. Zelu is strong-willed and often very childish in her behaviour - which was frequently irritating - but most of the decisions she makes about her own life are absolutely understandable. I did really like the moment with her mother towards the end where they both have the chance to explain their behaviour just a tad, though. I wasn’t at all invested in the sci-fi story (and I *love* sci-fi). Bold move to spend half the book talking about how much the world adores a story you’ve also written as part of the book… is this manifestation? 🦋

Despite that little rant, I would recommend. I was rooting for Zelu once I got used to her frequent tantrums, and the ending pulled things together neatly enough that the whole thing felt fairly satisfying.

I wanted to stretch myself but coming to the Sci-fi sections I just couldn’t really continue, it’s a genre I can’t always push myself through.
A challenging novel, a unique idea.

I feel like this will be a marmite book- people will either love or hate it. I'm a little more conflicted.
First of all, I'll start with what I really liked. The protagonist Zelu was brilliant. I loved how flawed and human she was, it was such an honest, personal portrayal (particularly concerning cultural identity) and all of her decisions made complete sense with her character. Most of the other characters also shared this: they felt real and human and complex and, because of this, often not particularly likeable.
I also really enjoyed the 'slightly futuristic' world. The story was clearly set in a time where technology has developed, but in a very believable way. I wouldn't be at all surprised if our world looks like it in 10 or 20 years time. It was obvious that a lot of thought had gone into it and it really worked.
The Rusted Robots storyline was the highlight of the book for me- I almost just wanted to read a whole book of just Ankara and Ijele! It's definitely told me I need to read more Africanfuturism stories because the atmosphere and story was really beautiful. The links between this world and the 'reality' (or was it reality?) were also really clever.
I will say I was a bit confused by the direction of the book for some time. There's excellent critique of the publishing industry and how it treats its authors, but some of it didn't really go anywhere. I think the more literary aspects of the story just didn't suit my typical reading and didn't fit with what I expected from the story going in, which is a me problem rather than a book problem! I also feel like I'm missing a little something from the ending. It was really well done and well crafted, but I wanted just a little bit more and I was left feeling a bit unsatisfied with Zelu's story- what happens next?
So, a really clever and intricately crafted read. It's compelling and human, though a little bit messy and I wasn't satisfied enough by the ending to really enjoy it. However, anyone wanting an original, unique and diverse mixture of literary and science fiction with compelling characters should look out for this one when it's released! I can definitely see it becoming some people's new favourite.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy. This was not a typical sci-fi book but one well worth reading. It has three distinct narratives, one of the author herself, interviews with various people in her life, and a story about robots. I also liked learning about Nigerian cultures. I think the only thing stopping this from being a 5* read for me is that the ending did not feel 100% satisfying and that at certain points the real world aspects became somewhat repetitive. However, I still highly recommend this.

This was quite an interesting book and I find that Okarafor is quite an inventive writer. Enjoyed this one.

This was an amazing concept with such interestingly flawed characters. Whilst it wasn't what I expected, it was still great.