Risk and reward

Years ago while writing a column on the history of science fiction for Kirkus Reviews, I was struck at how some of the genre's most creative and best-known works felt as through they came from creators that weren't incubated within the confines of its fandom. I have a feeling that it has something to do with being unincumbered by the tropes and conventions and designs that came before, leaving them a bit more free to let their imagination play out, yielding stories that really stood out.

One of the authors that I've thought fit that description neatly is Nnedi Okorafor, whose books like Lagoon, Binti, and Noor, feel like nothing else out there. She's created worlds and characters that are a vibrant bend of science fiction, fantasy, folklore, the strangeness of the natural world, her Nigerian ancestry, her American upbringing, and a whole lot more. As her star has risen within literary circles, she's pushed back hard against those genre definitions, firmly rejecting descriptions of her work as "Afrofuturism" in favor of her own definition: "Africanfuturism," which she spelled out in 2019 as fiction that "specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view as it then branches into the Black Diaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West."

I've always wondered about the vehemence that she's defended that title online, and why or if genre distinctions are really anything more than marketing directions for a bookstore and things for people who attend cons to endlessly argue over. Her latest book, Death of the Author provides some understanding: it's her line in the sand over the boundaries of one's artistic identity and how one goes about preserving the integrity of one's stories in an environment where it's hard to maintain control over the message, especially online. It's a passionate, razor-sharp novel that feels both autobiographical and fantastical as she and her characters contend with the boundaries between fame and reader expectations. It's a novel about taking a risk to produce something wholly creative and special, and protecting those instincts against the forces that will erode it away into something widely palatable but bland.

The novel follows a struggling, disabled creative writing adjunct named Zelu Ony­enezi-Oyedele. She's the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, and was paralyzed as the result of a childhood accident, and has grown up something of an outlier in her family. While her siblings have gone on to notable and powerful careers, but she's been content to study English, teach college students, and write.

As the book opens, she's fired from her job as a professor of creative writing after she lost her temper with her class of entitled graduate students – while overseas at her sister's lavish destination wedding. Stewing, high, and sitting on the beach after the celebrations, she's struck with an idea: a story set in the distant future where humans have vanished, leaving behind factions of robots and AI. The words flow out of her, and she's soon written a novel, Rusted Robots.

When she shows it to her friend and her agent, she's soon in the midst of a bidding war for the publication rights and finds herself shot into the stratosphere of the literary world. Her debut earns considerable acclaim and a massive print run, gaining her legions of fans who're enamored of her world and the vibrant story she's constructed. Running parallel to all of this is Zelu's relationship to the rest of her family. They aren't exactly thrilled at her career choices, have concerns about her health and safety, and worry about how the members of their extended family back in Nigeria perceive her.

With fame comes expectations. Her new fans hang onto her every word on Twitter, demanding to know when the next book in the series is coming. Her book's sky-high popularity leads to a fast-tracked movie deal, and it's at the premiere that Zelu realizes that everything has gotten away from her. The movie is an unrecognizable twisting of her story and when she speaks her mind during a press interview, she finds just how quickly the unmanageable fandom and media attention that's followed her can turn.

Death of the Author pairs nicely with another couple of works that came out recently that explore this fraught relationship with sudden fame: R.F. Kuang's novel Yellowface and Cord Jefferson's 2023 film American Fiction. In the former, a young white author passes off a manuscript as her own after her Chinese-American friend and fellow author dies, and has to keep up with the lie as accusations pile up on social media, while in the latter, a professor, frustrated that his latest novel was deemed "not black enough" writes a caricatured novel that leans all the way into the stereotypes and ends up becoming a critical hit.

Zelu isn't in a situation where she's hiding her identity behind the book, but Death of the Author is all about authenticity. She sees Rusted Roots as a story that's integral to all parts of her identity; drawing on her life, beliefs, and the cultural heritage from which her family came from. Writing in all of its forms is an intimate act, and when they put something out into the world, a creator is sharing some part of themselves. It's a tricky, anxious thing to do, and Zelu finds that the combination of fame and her identity can be exhausting:

Zelu found herself spending less and less time on social media. Not only did she hat ethe progressively ruder messages asking for updates about the next book, she also didn't want to educate people about her exos, or debate whether she was an American, a "diasporic," an Africanfuturist, or an African writer.

Stalled on her next book, Zelu just wants to create in the purest sense of the word, and she doesn't – as I suspect Okorafor doesn't – want to be defined by anything other than the boundaries that she sets out for herself. As her fame exploded, she found that all of those nit-picky discussions over her work really didn't have anything to do with her. For someone who has been forced to be independent for her entire life – through her career, injury, interests, personality, and family – the entire exercise is tantamount to torture. It's little wonder that she had so little patience with the unprepared journalists who interview her and explodes when they try and tease out some level of responsibility that she might have for her fans.

For years, Okorafor has worked closely with author George R.R. Martin: he signed on as an executive producer for an adaptation of her novel Who Fears Death back in 2017 (the project seems to still be moving along in the developmental phase), and I couldn't help but think about how their experiences with online fandom has percolated into this story. Martin has long been working on The Winds of Winter, the next installment of his A Song of Ice and Fire series, so long that its completion has become something of a meme in its own right: "Get back to the keyboard, George."

The pressure that he faces online every time he pops up for air seems like it's excruciating: a continual stream of demands for when he'll deliver the book, predictions that he'll die before he finishes, and a flurry of reactions whenever he provides an update – no matter how miniscule. Zelu faces something like that: an excruciating onslaught of demands and expectations for the hypothetical sequel that she's supposed to be working on. In many ways, those demands are a constraint in and of themselves. Rusted Robots was a book that flowed from her in the moment, rather than something that she planned out as a series of works, and with the success of the book and film, there's a clamor for more of the same, something that she doesn't seem entirely sure that she wants to do.

In the biggest possible picture, Death of the Author feels to me as though it's a primal cry against the sort of industrialized content that we're fed in the form of big brand-name franchises and publishing cycles: stories that are willed into being because they further the goals of a studio or publisher, or written because its author (and publisher/marketers) know that it'll be a surefire success. There's creativity and talent that goes into those sorts of projects, but if often feels like the final products that we get are the ones who made it through the production gauntlet because they're the version that has the least risk.

That big-budget film adaptation of Zelu's novel? Her deeply- personal, African-inspired characters were watered down and changed to better suit a western audience, turning her story into something unrecognizable and which wasn't her. Zelu's in a place where she could easily continue the story of Rusted Robots, even if it was something she figuratively phoned in. She could coast for the rest of her life on that career path, pushing out installment after installment whenever she needed some extra cash.

But is there really passion and creativity in that work? Zelu is principled and determined to ensure that whatever she writes lives up to the passion and personality that informed the book that led to her runaway success and fame in the first place. I've often found Okorafor's books following that same line: they're enormously creative and often confound whatever expectations I might have had going into them. After finishing this book, I feel like I understand why she's continually fighting to define herself on her terms, and better understand why she hasn't thrown up her hands in frustration and moved onto other things: it's the only way to keep herself from becoming something unrecognizable.

It's fitting that this novel defies those expectations and genre labels to be something wholly its own thing. Is it literary fiction because of the family drama? It has excerpts from Rusted Robots sprinkled throughout, is it science fiction? An autobiographical novel?

But at the end of the day, does it actually matter where it's supposed to sit on the shelf? It's a Nnedi Okorafor novel: it'll go and do wherever it wants. We're just along for the ride.