Death of the Author is a clever & meta blend of sci fi and contemporary fiction that explores the life-altering power of storytelling, agency over your own narrative, and who stories truly belong to.

Zelu is ready to celebrate her sister’s wedding when two terrible bits of news drop at once: she’s fired from her teaching job and her novel is rejected once again. Her family both judges and pities her for being disabled and now completely unemployed, and Zelu feels all of her dreams slipping away.

But as she mopes miserably in her hotel room, she’s suddenly struck with inspiration. She drops everything to write a science fiction novel about robots and AI left on a human-less world, and that novel becomes a smash hit and reshapes her life. 

We watch Zelu’s unexpected fame rollercoaster ride and get tidbits of the famous novel interspersed with her reality. Zelu experiences some extreme highs and lows in her own life, and both narratives slowly start to morph together and feed off of each other.

How much ownership do you truly have over the stories you craft? Once you release that spark that contains so much life, does it take on its own power? Can technology and humanity coexist and empower each other?

Zelu comes to life on these pages with such clarity and intention and specificity that it is sometimes difficult to remember that she is fictional. She’s a hurricane and pushes back against every expectation someone places on her. After she falls out of a tree playing a game as a child, she becomes paralyzed and uses a wheelchair. She still grapples with some internalized ableism (and a lot of ableism from others) as an adult, especially because she had to reshape her hopes and dreams for the future.

Her family pushes and prods her in often toxic ways. They sometimes infantilize her and don’t actually listen when she attempts to express herself, they sometimes seem to place her in a lazy stoner box, and they sometimes are over-the-top reactionary and are enraged when she pushes a new boundary.

Zelu leans in and frustrates them in turn. She is a bit mercurial and selfish and doesn’t always ‘see’ her family members as full and complicated humans with their own lives. If they aren’t immediately accepting of her ideas, they become her enemies. In general, though, the family drama & trauma are a significant portion of the book.

Her identity also ties into being Nigerian and American. She spent many childhood summers in Nigeria, but after her accident her family is wary of her going, and after her fame they outright forbid it. Zelu’s book (called Rusted Robots) is set in a futuristic version of Nigeria (mostly Lagos). She fights to force others to acknowledge her full identity, and is furious when people try to remove the Nigerian setting of her book and westernize it. 

But once Zelu’s book enters the world, she has no control over its path and how others interpret and define it. It becomes its own breathing thing and works its way through readers. The weird web of writer vs. art vs. audience is explored with a lot of detail, and I leaned into those conversations, even when Zelu was forced to become pricklier and things became divisive in those relationships. This web is so meaningful but also so toxic, and the cycle gets messier once there’s a film adaptation, Zelu discovers fanfiction, Zelu blows up in an interview, and beyond. Her experience with her comment section feels very real.

I enjoyed reading the segments of Rusted Robots and was engaged with the story. I do think it’s set up in a tough way, because we are told it’s an instant bestseller and has taken the world by absolute storm, and I wasn’t quite blown away in THAT way by what we got. But it was crucial for those chapters to be included, and there is a certain suspension of disbelief that has to happen overall here.

There are interesting subplots around love and loneliness, as Zelu finds a possible committed partner but is wary to let anyone fully in. Tech is - unsurprisingly - a huge theme here. Zelu has the opportunity to walk again through brand new robotic legs, she uses an AI app that filters news and comment sections among other things, and she also takes self-driving cars (a new technology that many folks are wary of in her slightly-futuristic version of Chicago). Her family is afraid of and appalled by these things, but Zelu sees them as an extension of herself and really tries to add a human touch to the technology.

There is an Elon Musk character that Zelu engages positively with (should that be a content warning at this point? oof) and the book reads a little … pro-AI? There are visions of beautiful human and AI collaboration, but not really any thought given towards the warning or the trampling of human vision or creativity. This and the abundance of hot topics covered were stumbles for me and messed with the pacing and overall arc of the story. 

But this is truly imaginative Africanfuturism. You will have a lot to meditate on after finishing. 

CW: death (parent), ableism (sometimes internalized), grief, racism, panic attacks, gun violence, toxic relationship, medical content/trauma, war, violence, body shaming, pregnancy, kidnapping, gaslighting, sexism, transphobia

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(I received an advance reader copy of this book; this is my honest review.)