This book within a book weaves a writer’s struggles with scenes from their Africanfuturist tale of post-apocalyptic robots

In Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor, one of the most acclaimed science fiction writers of our time, moves into mainstream literary fiction. Her protagonist is Zelu, a prickly, mercurial, iconoclastic writer who gets high in inappropriate situations, hooks up promiscuously, and ends up quarrelling with everyone, especially her large, overprotective Nigerian American family. She is also paraplegic, and has PTSD from the accident that left her disabled at the age of 12.

As the book begins, she loses her job as a writing professor for giving an entitled student a brutal critique, on the same day that her novel is rejected by a 10th publisher, and while she is at her sister’s wedding, under an onslaught of uncensored judgment from all her most conservative family members. It’s at this moment, when “[her] face was crusty and itchy with dried tears … her mind cracked so wide open that all her demons had flown in”, that she’s inspired to begin a new project, about robots on a post-human Earth, though she’s never written anything like it, and doesn’t even read science fiction.