Death of the Author (Okorafor)

[cahn]

Zelunjo Onyenezi-Onyedele (Zelu) is a (Nigerian-American, parapalegic) writer who hasn't had much luck with getting her first litfic book published. She throws caution to the wind and writes a post-apocalyptic SF novel about dueling robots, Rusting Robots, that becomes a runaway best-seller, and then starts having to deal with that fame, while she also deals with her loving and sometimes stifling family, as well as the rest of her life. Meanwhile, all of this is happening against the backdrop of a near future where robotic exoskeletons have started to become possible and space travel is opening up...

So yeah, some of these thoughts are in reaction to discussing with ase --

I liked the near-future and (except for one thing in the spoiler section) thought it was quite well done -- a reasonable extrapolation, compelling, and also getting that sort of "hey the future is cool!" feel while still showing some of the underside as well.

I thought the chapters about Zelu were compelling and I enjoyed them, although I will say that I think I am no longer interested in character arcs involving adult children who struggle with their (especially immigrant) families not taking them seriously. Like. If I want that I can just pick up the phone, you know? (The last conversation I had with my mom before writing this paragraph, literally, went like this: "You're going on [trip], right?" "Yes--" "Did you remember to get a hotel??" "...yes." "Did you remember to get a rental car??" "...yes." It's nice that my mom is concerned about me, but I've in fact been traveling without my parents for more than a quarter century now...)

I also felt like Zelu, while a reasonably compelling character that held my interest for a book, is not actually a protagonist that I like all that much. She may have reasons to be whiny but she is whiny; she makes questionable decisions; one of her questionable decisions that she makes multiple times is that she repeatedly does not tell people she loves about decisions she's making that will be things they will want to know. Now, I see why -- I've been known not to tell my parents things because I know they'll flip out (and those things aren't always bad things, even!) and I have my own quirks left over from that -- but Zelu does seem to take this to extremes. I got the sense of her as a somewhat selfish person who has to work pretty hard (and often doesn't) to overcome her selfish tendencies.

The Rusting Robots chapters bothered me; I found them hard to get through (though they got easier as the book went on) and I kept getting thrown out of the book by not being able to imagine at all how Rusting Robots was a best-seller. (I admit that these chapters were sufficiently non-compelling to me that I didn't really think too much about how they might or might not hold together, so I can't speak to that.)

Then the last chapter happened, which retroactively made me like everything better! With its reveal that everything is flipped, that the robots chapters are actually real and the Zelu chapters are actually the book! (Or maybe it's some sort of meta spiral, where both sides are writing each other??) And that reconfiguration did change how I related to the whole thing. I do feel like Zelu, reimagined as a way in which robots are trying to make sense of themselves as well as of human traits, love and selfishness and selflessness and all of those odd things, suddenly becomes a much more interesting character.

Also. ase reminded me that there's this whole throwaway bit near the end, which is enough near the end that it's never really followed up on, where Zelu just ups and decides to dramatically genetically alter both herself and her unborn child, which apparently the white multibillionaire Elon-Musk-lookalike knows how to do even though this has never come up in the book until now, so they can go to spaaaaaace. This seems like a terrible idea for any number of reasons, starting with: your unborn kid?? Because Elon-Musk-stand-in says he just happens to have been doing mysterious research into this?? Also, does she discuss this with, or even tell, her spouse/the child's father?? No, of course she does not! I think the narrative wants us to think this will be okay, but it just seems like this could go very badly. Though, you know, if the narrative is written by robots, I'm more okay with this, plus which of course since it's near the end of the book one can imagine that the narrative isn't actually okay with it. And also I think she dies at the end? So in that case it doesn't really matter?


Okay, so (especially if you don't read the spoilers, which I would recommend not reading if you're actually going to read the book) this sounds like I'm saying negative things but I actually think it's going on the top of my Hugo ballot. It's the one book on the ballot that I feel like really embodies the kinds of things I want to see in a Hugo winner -- complex and interesting near-future-worldbuilding combined with characters who feel like real people, frustrating though real people may be. And the things that didn't gel with me are exactly that -- not things I thought were bad about it, but things that didn't gel with me personally.

This is a very interesting ballot. I think Drop of Corruption is probably the most technically perfect writing, and has a lot of interesting things about it, though in some sense is playing everything rather straight; Incandescent has a flawed ending but I adore it the most of all the nominees and feel like it's doing good and interesting things within the magical-school framework; Everlasting is perhaps the most compelling to read but the weakest as a book; Raven is doing some interesting things (inside of an epic fantasy outline that is even more bog-standard than any other nominee), but is significantly weaker than the other nominees I've read in terms of craft. And then Death of the Author, which has the prose and the big ideas and an interesting ending and a protagonist I don't vibe with... and then there's Shroud by Tchaikovsky, which I haven't read. It is on my shelf looking at me. Maybe I will. It doesn't look THAT long and the print is large.

Anyway, so far I think my ranking is pretty firm at
Author > Incandescent > Drop > Raven > Everlasting.

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

This does sound very interesting!