Death of the Author

by Nnedi Okorafor

The reader decides what it’s about, right? Isn’t that what you said ‘death of the author’ meant?” Then he’d smiled a very annoying and smug smile.

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.

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.

She’d finished writing only one book before, a literary novel about a young man who hated everyone and traveled to Nigeria to meet his family only to realize he hated all of them, too. In the end, he’d returned home to become a partner at the law firm where he worked and live happily ever after. The novel’s plot was there, but it was thin, the dialogue was self-indulgent, and her main character was the same asshole at the end that he had been at the beginning.

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.

We cannot escape our creators. I keep saying this. You can’t erase that which made you. Even when they are gone, their spirit remains. This should be okay.

When he walked away, she watched him go. He’d lived so many decades able to walk. She was glad for him. She’d only had twelve years.