Sunday, October 16, 2022

Remote Control, by Nnedi Okorafor

My feelings toward this book are very complex. Nnedi Okorafor gets better at writing all the time, and the prose in this book is very smooth and evocative. Some of the earlier work was kind of blocky in places, and you still get that feeling here but now it's more like a style. As for the story itself, it is set in the near future and there is technical speculation but the core of the story is fantasy, so it is hard to classify. Sankofa is, in my mind, a tragic character, cursed with incredible power that with its first use costs her everyone she ever loved, and that even by the end she can still only partially control. Even harder is that all this happens to her as a child. She wanders Ghana as a spirit would, being placated and loathed, and occasionally appreciated.

The book kind of stops rather than ends. Feels more like a starting point for a novel than a complete story. I hope Okorafor comes back to Sankofa at some point, I think she has more to say here.

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