This article first appeared in The Kansas City Star on September 9, 2025.

A disgraced writing professor crafts a multimillion-dollar bestseller. A robot generates a story that saves the Earth. Nnedi Okorafor’s new novel Death of the Author is a story about salvation through the act of creating.

Half dystopian sci-fi, half literary fiction, the book toggles between Ankara the robot and paralyzed Nigerian American writer Zelu. Each character learns that stories are key to avoiding cataclysmic disaster.

“If you look at the way AI learns, it’s through narrative,” Okorafor said. “The way that humanity speaks is through storytelling. Full stop. And automation is the child of humanity.” 

Okorafor, who categorizes her work as Africanfuturist, is known for her Binti trilogy and several Marvel comics, including Black Panther: Long Live the King and Wakanda Forever. 

Among her awards are the Nebula, Eisner, Lodestar and multiple Hugo Awards. Her books weave components of her Nigerian heritage into futuristic science fiction narratives.

Death of the Author (HarperCollins, $30) is the next KC Pop-up Book Group pick on Oct. 1 and the author will be featured during the Library’s Heartland Book Festival on Oct. 11 (Get free tickets here.) 

The character Zelu is part of a large Nigerian family, outspoken and free-spirited, and has been a wheelchair user since falling out of a tree as a child. Her already unstable life takes a turn when she’s fired from her adjunct teaching position for unprofessional behavior in the classroom. 

During the dark time that follows, she moves back in with her parents and starts writing a novel called Rusted Robots that features Ankara. The story is a departure from her previous work, and she’s surprised by the seven-figure, three-book deal and movie option, as well as its rise to the top of bestseller lists. Its publication completely changes her life — ruin averted.

In the other narrative, Ankara is wandering through the ruins of Lagos, Nigeria, dodging enemy robots, and desperately wishing to stop the countdown to the end of the planet.

It’s nearly impossible to discern which character is telling which story — or if one is telling both. 

That’s by design, and the effect is like a literary Mobius Strip. In one of Ankara’s sections, Okorafor explains it this way: “We cannot escape our creators. … You can’t erase that which made you. Even when they are gone, their spirit remains.” 

In one of Zelu’s sections, she explains another way: “Articles were published online discussing the novel’s relevance to the ongoing conversations around AI. People talked about the fact that a novel that focused so much on body or lack of body had been written by a paraplegic woman.” 

Writing Rusted Robots is healing for Zelu, both personally and financially. She describes the rusted robots as a “metaphor for wisdom, patina, acceptance, embracing that which was you, scars, pain, malfunction, needed replacements, mistakes.”

When Zelu’s fame draws the attention of an MIT robotics team, the line between woman and robot begins to blur. The team customizes a pair of robotic legs that allows her to walk, even run, and leave her wheelchair behind.

The robot becomes more human as well, which is what ultimately allows her to tell a story that, though it’s easy to say is AI-generated, really isn’t. 

“Ankara has a bunch of experiences that are absolutely profound that also make her able to create,” Okorafor explained of the robot. “But the main one is she experiences grief.” 

Ankara was already built as a storytelling robot. Her job is to pick through the ruins of humanity and archive the shreds of the past she digs up. 

After she’s ripped apart by a model of robot that wants to destroy all evidence of human life, the last remaining person on Earth repairs her by uploading a disembodied AI program — in effect, giving her a soul.

The robots and the last human on Earth become friends over the many days it takes the person to relate the details of her life. When the human dies, it triggers a grief so profound that Ankara glitches.

“When AI writes a story, how do we describe it? Like, this is soulless,” Okorafor said. “Ankara is able to write because she has a soul.”

Meet the author

The “Death of the Author” event with Nnedi Okorafor is at noon on Saturday, Oct. 11, at the Central Library, 14 W. 10th St., during the Heartland Book Festival. It’s free with RSVP at heartlandbookfest.org. 

Join the KC Pop-Up Book Group

The Kansas City Star partners with the Kansas City Public Library to present a book-of-the-moment selection. We invite the community to read along. Kaite Mediatore Stover, the library’s director of readers’ services, will lead a discussion of Nnedi Okorafor’s 'Death of the Author' at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 1, at the Library’s Waldo branch, 201 E. 75th St. 

Email Stover at kaitestover@kclibrary.org to RSVP or RSVP on the Library's website.