Noor
Ratings24
Average rating4
From Africanfuturist luminary Okorafor comes a new science fiction novel of intense action and thoughtful rumination on biotechnology, destiny, and humanity in a near-future Nigeria.
Anwuli Okwudili prefers to be called AO. To her, these initials have always stood for Artificial Organism. 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 disabled 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.
Once on the run, she meets a Fulani herdsman named DNA and the race against time across the deserts of Northern Nigeria begins. In a world where all things are streamed, everyone is watching the reckoning of the murderess and the terrorist and the saga of the wicked woman and mad man unfold. This fast-paced, relentless journey of tribe, destiny, body, and the wonderland of technology revels in the fact that the future sometimes isn't so predictable. Expect the unaccepted.
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An enjoyable short novel (short novel - there's a novel delight in itself) about cyborgs, ecological disaster, and one of the most pervasive and long standing tropes in science fiction: the mysterious, evil, all-powerful corporation which covertly runs everything, all served to us in a Afrocentric, afro-futurist setting. The plot: AO was born with severe defects mitigated with cybernetic enhancements, even more enhanced after a later car crash, but she suffers extreme prejudice for being a cyborg, which culminates in her killing attackers and setting her on the run to the Red Eye, a desert vortex fatal to anyone not equipped with a force field (here, trendily referred to as an anti-aejej). I was delighted with this story out of my mind, some aspects, the plot and the tropes, channels your typical pulp stories you might pull out of 30s/40s American magazines, but on the other hand, it could also only be written now, in science fiction's current milieu. Another story in conversation with our past, good, bad, and reforming (redemptive?) in its gaze. And of course, the evil corporation sells everything and delivers through drones, ah, right wink wink nod nod. But, don't we just love this stuff. I do. This review was too fancy, this was one good fun story.
I don't usually care for YA. A few pages into it I had to go to Goodreads and double-check the categories... okay, confirmed, solidly tagged as “Adult Fiction”... but it's not. It's distinctly YA utopian magical fantasy. Still, as YA utopian magical fantasy goes, it was pretty darn good: strong characters, great tensions between them, original setting, creative story arc and side plots. This was my second try after abandoning it some months ago, and I'm glad to have picked it up again. It was worthwhile, I just had to be in a more forgiving mood, acknowledging and forgiving the everpresent dei ex machina and convenient handwaving. (After all, “Then a miracle occurs” worked for Sidney Harris).
