#Nnedi Okorafor

[neil-gaiman]

I'm in Santa Fe so of course I went down to the picket line outside a local studio. George RR Martin was there too, and I got to see Paris, George's better half, as well. So was incredible author Nnedi Okorafor who had driven in from Arizona to be on the picket line.

[good-books-to-read]

Travel Destination: Nigeria

Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun by Tolá Okogwu

Onyeka has always been uncomfortable with her hair, people always stare and whisper behind her back, until her best friend nearly drowns and her hair comes to life and saves her.

Her mother reveals a shocking truth Onyeka’s psycho-kinetic powers make her a Solari, one of a secret group of people with super powers unique to Nigeria, where she’s sent to train, however she’ll soon have to put her powers to the test against a battle between truth and lies.

Noor by Nnedi Okorafor

AO has never really felt...natural, and that's putting it lightly. Her parents spent most of the days before she was born praying for her peaceful passing because even in-utero she was "wrong". But she lived. Then came the car accident years later that crippled her even further. Yet instead of viewing her strange body the way the world views it, as freakish, unnatural, even the work of the devil, AO embraces all that she is: A woman with a ton of major and necessary body augmentations. And then one day she goes to her local market and everything goes wrong.

War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi

In a war torn futuristic Nigeria ravaged by climate change and nuclear disasters, where the lucky ones have left the planet and those left survive using mechs, bionic limbs and artificial organs to protect against the harsh environment.

Two sisters dream of more, peace, hope and a future together, and they willing to fight an entire war to get there.

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

Twelve-year-old Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born American. Her features are African, but she's albino. She's a terrific athlete, but can't go out into the sun to play soccer. There seems to be no place where she fits in.

And then she discovers something amazing--she is a free agent with latent magical power. Soon she's part of a quartet of magic students, studying the visible and invisible, learning to change reality. But will it be enough to help them when they are asked to catch a career criminal who knows magic too?

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

When a massive object crashes into the coast of Lagos, 3 peoples life are intertwined, Adaora the marine biologist, Anthony a rapper famous through Africa and Agu a troubled solider.

In a race against time to save a country they love and the world itself.

[whilereadingandwalking]

It was amazing seeing Nnedi Okorafor speak at Call & Response Books about her new book Death of the Author, a Hyde Park-based book about a disabled professor who's life is falling apart, so she starts to pour a sci fi story onto the page. It's a novel within a novel (and a cover under the cover to match—take a peek under the dust jacket!). It's a "very naked" tale, Okorafor's most autobiographical yet.

She shared about the parallels to her own life—a lifelong athlete, at age 19 she needed massive spinal surgery that then left her unable to walk. She found solace in writing her own stories, a story about a girl who could fly. And as she did finally regain sensation and start to walk, she felt robotic, teaching her limbs to walk again. Like a rusted robot (the title of the novel-within-a-novel? Rusted Robots).

She describes her writing process as "disorganized chaos," and says that even for this braided narrative, it just kind of unfolded for her, without planning it too tightly. Her characters and world come to her, and feel heavy in her head until she's able to get them out, onto the page. She can only write one novel at a time—once, she was writing one and another came into her head, so she drew it as art "like a compressed file" to come back to later. This novel surprised her, too—she keeps finding details in it she didn't consciously plan.

[ofliterarynature]

TBR TAKEDOWN: GOODREADS, WEEK 8b

Akata Witch (The Nsibidi Scripts #1) by Nnedi Okorafor

I'm trying to trim down my tbr list(s) and I'm asking for your help! Descriptions and more info under the cut. Please reblog and add your thoughts!

* * * * *

Akata Witch weaves together a heart-pounding tale of magic, mystery, and finding one's place in the world.

Twelve-year-old Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born American. Her features are African, but she's albino. She's a terrific athlete, but can't go out into the sun to play soccer. There seems to be no place where she fits in. And then she discovers something amazing--she is a free agent with latent magical power. Soon she's part of a quartet of magic students, studying the visible and invisible, learning to change reality. But will it be enough to help them when they are asked to catch a career criminal who knows magic too?

Ursula K. Le Guin and John Green are Nnedi Okorafor fans. As soon as you start reading Akata Witch, you will be, too

Date added: 2017

Goodreads: 4.03

Storygraph: 4.01

PRO:

Liked Okorafor's Binti series

Magic school quartet?!

Entire series available from the library in my preferred format (audiobook)

CON:

YA/MG, younger than I typically look for these days

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #53 – Binti by Nnedi Okarafor

This is one of those works that has been vaguely on my radar for years and years now – I have entirely lost track of the number of places I’ve seen it recommended as some of the best or most original science fiction of the 2010s. So when my hold finally came in on it, I went in more or less blind – which was, frankly, a fatal mistake. I bounced harder off of this than I have very nearly anything I can remember – if it was any longer I probably wouldn’t have bothered finishing the story. I got the whole trilogy as a compendium, and I’m certainly not going to force myself through the rest of it. Which is a shame, because there are plenty of original ideas in there, but (to me, at least) it’s an absolutely brutal failure of form and execution.

The story follows the eponymous Binti, a prodigy and savant in mathematics and the quasi-magical ‘harmonizing’ – creation and manipulation of electric currents. At age 16, she received accepted into the planet-spanning Oomza University and, despite the clear disapproval of her family and her people’s traditional isolationism, she runs away from home and aboard an interstellar transport to take her away. But when the ship is attacked by the Medusae – an alien species with a grudge against the university – a personal keepsake that turns out to be a powerful ancient relic allow her to survive when every other passenger is slaughtered where they stand – and eventually even communicate with the aliens who have seized the ship. She learns that they attacked as part of a plan to steal back their leader’s stinger, and convinces them to let her be their ambassador and attempt to get it through negotiation with the university administration instead. After she proves her willingness to argue on their behalf, they agree – and once they arrive at the university, the administration does as well. Both she and the young Medusae she forged something of a friendship with are welcomed as students, and she has to reckon with the dramatic changes being tested and healed by the medusae caused in her. Fin.

That is much more of a plot summary than I usually write for these things, but I guess my first big issue with the story is just that that’s basically everything that happens in the book? This feels like it could be quite easily cut down to a tight, compelling short story – or else expanded into a full novel, with enough space to give things time to breathe and allow for foreshadowing with more subtlety than a sledgehammer to the face. As is, the story feels both kind of meandering and like the plot beats are a first draft that never had the space to go back and add any real interest or surprise to them.

Which would honestly have been far more forgivable if not for the prose. This is shelved as young adult but in terms of sentence complexity and the way things are phrased it honestly feels closer to middle grade? Or, at least, every sentence was very simple and very explicit and direct, in a way that I quickly found clunky and then intensely grating to read. A friend described it as reading like it was translated from a different language, which doesn’t seem to be the case but I honestly wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Everything is also just thematically very convenient, I guess? Not even that the random relic Binti found in the sand as a child and keeps as a good luck charm turns out to be a hyper-advanced technological plot device, but that for unclear reasons the otjize dye that she (and the very real Namibian Himba ethnic group she’s a member of) use to plait and colour hair is to the Medusae a miraculous panacea which heals scars none of their own technology (capable of creating interspecies hybrids and inducing mutations with a single injection) could touch. Which is a level of thematic bluntness that’s just much more fitting for a children’s story than what I went into this expecting or hoping for.

I could go on, but there’s not really any point – to be positive, the worldbuilding hinted at is intriguing and evocative like absolutely everyone says it is. The whole reading experience was just a terrible failure of marketing, I think – I can’t recall the last time I read a book I ostensibly should have liked that is quite so forcefully Not For Me. Which is odd, because I actually quite enjoyed the other novella of Okorafor I read. But then, Remote Control was written six years later and for an adult audience.

[lizard-reads-the-world]

Ooh, I got first dibs at the library!

I wonder if it will be strange going from Who Fears Death (2010) as my first Okorafor straight to her latest?

[gollancz]

Gollancz has signed Nnedi Okorafor’s "tour-de-force", the Death of the Author. Death of the Author is an "exhilarating" story about a disabled Nigerian American woman who writes a science fiction novel that becomes a bestselling phenomenon, but her success comes at a price. Billed as a "sweeping narrative" for fans of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow,Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the story is "a multi-threaded meta drama examining the relationship between storyteller and audience". 

Okorafor said: “Death of the Author is the most ambitious and naked work I’ve ever written. I’m so proud of it. I’ve been writing it in my head for 30 years. It brings together so many of my many parts, my contradictions, fusions and my weirdness. The title comes from a famous essay by French scholar Roland Barthes, an essay that I’ve always loathed but also chewed on throughout my years working on my PhD in literature. I want readers to come away from this novel with questions, answers, and a refreshed love of what we as human beings are and what we’re capable of. Also, I wanted to tell a really good story.” 

We're so delighted to have Nnedi joining the Gollancz family with this phenomenal, layered and poetic novel. Which also has robots.

[razreads]

Just because something isn't surprising doesn't mean it's easy to deal with.

Nnedi Okorafor, Binti

[laurabwrites]

She Who Knows by Nnedi Okorafor

So uh, I read a book today. A whole book (novella length I think). I'd put She Who Knows on hold through my local library and it became available mid-December. Somehow I'd missed that notification or forgot about it. Luckily I logged into my account and spotted it was available 2 days before the hold expired. I grabbed that ebook the next day, yes I did. Even though I technically have it until mid-February, almost missing the hold got me nervous I wouldn't finish before it was due. So I decided to read it before continuing The Way of Kings and started it during my lunch break. Aaand now I'm finished.

She Who Knows is a prequel novella to One Way Witch and I can attest it stands alone. I'm sure of that because I haven't read One Way Witch yet. I plan to, just haven't yet.

The world building was clear and lovely. The mix of the fantasy and technology was handled deftly, as simply how the world was, like anyone growing up in the world would. The magic was understated and felt like organic discovery, not a technical explanation laided out in a chunk.

I did feel a bit like the main character was acting older than their stated age throughout the book, but not enough that I didn't buy the characterization. And then at the end I found out the story was being told in retrospect by the main character as an older adult and everything felt consistent.

Good book/character study of the main character's early life. 4/5 and I'm looking forward to reading book 2.

[shy-girl04]

I love the sound of the pages flicking against my fingers. Print against fingerprints. Books make people quiet, yet they are so loud.


Nnedi Okorafor

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

[thelastofthebookworms]

You'll find the other polls in my 'sf polls' tag / my pinned post.

[esevik]

The next book I’ll be reading the continuation of Binti by Nnedi Okorafor titled Home.

In the first book the protagonist Binti left her home/ran away to join a prestigious university in space. However on her way there the ship got attacked by aliens and she ended up being the only survivor (kind of, the pilot survived too but he wasn’t aware of the carnage). Then some stuff happened and she ended up becoming the aliens’ spokesperson and created a truce between them and the humans. However because she became this spokesperson her DNA melded with the alien’s a bit and her hair turned into more tentacle like appendixes.

With this book titled “Home” I guess she’ll return home and deal with how her family responds to what has happened to her.

I’ll read the Swedish translation like the first book. This book also has chapters! Making my blogging a bit easier.

[nzbookwyrm]

January 2025

Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she's suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister's wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she's not sure what comes next.

In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life - she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.

What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu's life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.

Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.

[literary-illuminati]

Trying to finally start the Binti books and I'm not quite sure the term for the specific tense it uses for its narration but it is like nails on the chalkboard of my mind. Hoping I acclimate quickly.

[nn-noor]

I love reading in the park, but I have two huge bug bites and that's why I don't go.