More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
What matters is family. Without family, you’re nothing. You’re debris tumbling through space. Unseen, unconnected, uncollected, unknown, no matter how famous you are.
Being a woman is tough. Especially one who is a mother. We’re not all cut out for domesticity, even when we love our children.
Humanity didn’t think in binary, though. Emotion ruled them, and it existed in everything they left behind—their structures, their tools, even us. Emotion formed their language, and therefore it formed our codes.
There were those of us who took pride in our rust. When the rains came, oxidization brought us no fear. We rusted and moved on.
Like aging
We Humes had a profound love of storytelling. But no automation, AI or machine, could create stories. Not truly. We could pull from existing datasets, detect patterns, then copy and paste them in a new order, and sometimes that seemed like creation. But this couldn’t capture the narrative magic that humanity could wield.
Limited power of AI
Stories were the greatest currency to us, greater than power, greater than control. Stories were our food, nourishment, enrichment. To consume a story was to add to our code, deepen our minds. We felt it the moment we took it in. We were changed. It was like falling. It was how we evolved.
Power of stories
The rusted robots in the story were a metaphor for wisdom, patina, acceptance, embracing that which was you, scars, pain, malfunctions, needed replacements, mistakes. What you were given. The finite. Rusted robots did not die in the way that humans did, but they celebrated mortality. Oh, she loved this story and how true it felt.
My words hurt her, but I hoped they would heal her, too. People like us have a hard time speaking to ourselves, beyond our basic programming and thinking about our own insecurities.
But the problem is, blame comes with guilt, and guilt is heavy, and that pressure just keeps building.
“Write what you want, woman. Walk how you want. Love who you love. Speak your truth. Be good and roll with life. You can’t have or control everything or everyone.”
“We are mortal beings. We die. But we live first. And your father left a great legacy.”
Be the writer today. Use that ability. You are the observer and the observed. You are the documentarian and the subject. You are the author and the reader. This is how you create.
“Ah, Zelu, you always do things your own way. Damn the rules, damn what is expected. I wish I could.”
There was a deep Americanness to Zelu’s way of thinking, how she carried herself, even her spirit. However, her bridge to home was healthy and strong.
There was something about physical meetings that solidified the importance of an issue.
No one is going to give you space or leeway because everyone is struggling already—or at least, that’s the mentality.
It’s what makes me a good engineer. I can make connections when there are connections to be made. But Zelu? She could connect the invisible.
But I never saw it as a magic that would move the world the way it has. None of us did.
“Such a marvel! Don’t listen to what anyone says. You are revolutionary.”
This could be a sound track
“You’ve been shrugging off the house they built around you since you wrote that book, and this was the last straw. They don’t know what to do now. You rewrote your narrative.”
Rewrite the narrative
Plus, it was so good to get out of the United States, away from its self-centeredness, its superiority complex, its vapid noise, and the constant pestering about book two. Even if some of that hype was here in Nigeria, the distance had definitely taken the edge off it.
“The writer writes well in the colonizer’s language but cannot speak the language of her countrymen. The future is strange,” he said.
She was the one who explained to me why the genre is so important. How it’s about being different, seeing more, examining human nature, and imagining tomorrow.
Stories are what holds all things together. They make things matter, they make all things be, exist.
Stories are the best thing they left behind . . . aside from us. You honor them.”
Many didn’t even believe in the sanctity of the creative process anymore; they wanted to eliminate it and usher in automation to do the work.
Zelu was part of several tribes—black, disabled, American, Yoruba, Igbo—but she also belonged to none.
I have come to understand that author, art, and audience all adore one another. They create a tissue, a web, a network. No death is required for this form of life.
