Here’s the fourth in a series of posts reviewing the 2026 Nebula Awards short-listed works in the Best Novel category. To see the complete list, go HERE. I’m on a mission to read and review all seven of these novels before the Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) announces the winner at the Nebula awards ceremony on June 6, 2026. It will take place at the SFWA 61st annual conference, held this year in Chicago. I’m reading the novels alphabetically by author. If I have time, I’ll read a few others nominated in other categories.

The short-listed novels for the 2026 Nebula Awards:

When We Were Real, by Daryl Gregory (Saga)–see my review HERE

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga; Titan UK)—see my review HERE

Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)–see my review HERE

Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor (Morrow; Gollancz)–reviewed in this post

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh (Tor; Orbit UK)
Sour Cherry, by Natalia Theodoridou (Tin House; Wildfire)
Wearing the Lion, by John Wiswell (DAW; Arcadia)

Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor (Morrow; Gollancz)

Death of the Author, an Afrofuturist SF novel (although Okorafor prefers the term Africanfuturism to Afrofuturism), presents its readers with two stories, one nested inside the other. In the first, outer story, a young African-American writer, the daughter of two Nigerian immigrants from different backgrounds, struggles with her physical disability, her writer’s block, and her sense of identity. In the second, nested narrative, a robot pitted against other robots wages a desperate war to save the earth.

Okorafor’s novel has already achieved a huge amount of buzz and was highly anticipated. She is the author of Binti (2015), which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novella.

I really enjoyed Death of an Author. This intricate novel ends in a surprise, which I will not reveal here. If you’ve followed these posts, you know how much I despise an unearned surprise ending. Okorafor’s ending is very much earned, and very skillfully orchestrated.

Both the outer and inner nested stories are set in the future. The writer Zelu’s world is near-future and very realistic, while the robot Ankara’s story is set in the far future. My only problem with the novel is this: I enjoyed Zelu’s story far more than Ankara’s. By the end of the novel, I understood how they intersected, but Ankara isn’t a truly compelling character–at least not to me.

Zelu, on the other hand, is fierce, funny, stubborn, wildly creative, brave, vulnerable–fascinating, in other words. The dynamics of her large family are complicated. As in Binti, the main character is one of many children in a large, complex, loving, frequently contentious family which prizes staying at home and being with family over adventuring away from the family unit and its culture.

In Death of the Author, these familial relationships become ever more complicated through the often uncomfortable meeting of African and mainstream American culture–the classic immigrant dilemma in the so-called (now very much threatened–and fictional? aspirational?) melting pot environment of the U.S. Keep your ethnic identity, or blend in?

Zelu’s family is defined by the clash between the very different Yoruba and Igbo cultures of their Nigerian homeland, now transported to a near-future U.S. where the main character’s disability benefits from technological advances that disturb her traditional family. The clash of cultures is fueled by class differences as well. Add a sexy Zulu man from South Africa into the mix, and the combination is explosive. Explosive in a good way.

I loved this outer story. Zelu’s character is well-rounded and very real to me. The intersectionality (see a quick definition HERE) of the story is beautifully evoked–race, gender, class, physical ability, nationality, culture, religion, and more–all the many frequently conflicting elements that make up a person’s identity. Okorfor doesn’t preach at the reader or over-explain. She just shows us a character we can believe in as a real person in all her warring, energetic, enriching aspects, situated in her very real, specific cultural and physical environment. We need stories like this. We need the empathy they bring.

The inner story about the robots pales beside it. I guess this is the danger of two parallel stories in a single novel–one may be stronger than the other, especially when the inner story is one the main character of the outer story is supposedly telling. I’m reminded of other complex stories-within-stories: all the frame stories, of course, like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but also novels and other literary objects where the enclosed story is its own kind of meta-literary artifact.

The classic example is the play-within-the play in Hamlet. Wuthering Heights, much in the news at the moment, is a story told to the narrator of the novel, who then tells it to us. Frankenstein works in a similar way. In speculative fiction, I think of the brave (but in my opinion failed) attempt of Scott Lynch’s The Republic of Thieves to include a play that the characters are putting on, complete with most of (too much of) the dialogue (but it’s otherwise a great novel, part of Lynch’s fantastic Gentleman Bastards series). A really shining example is the faux but very convincing Victorian poetry of A. S. Byatt’s Possession. Another, in a slightly different way, is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future (see my mini-review HERE), where news stories, memos, and other pieces of writing rub against and enrich the main narrative. Still another is Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s amazing Chain-Gang All-Stars (see my review HERE), where the main narrative is illuminated by a ton of footnotes, some real, others made up. Yet another: the double narrative in Ian McEwan’s recently-published dystopian novel What We Can Know.

These kinds of stories are very tricky to bring off. I’m not saying the inner story of Okorafor’s novel doesn’t work. It does. It serves as sort of a metaphor or commentary on the outer, which is very interesting–and the twist at the end makes Okorafor’s inner tale more interesting still. I’m just saying the vibrancy of the outer story overshadows it.

You may very well disagree with me, readers. If you have already read Death of the Author, you may have loved the inner story as much as you love the outer one. After all, as Okorafor’s novel makes clear, each story enters each one of us, and we make that story our own.

Next up: My review of The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh (Tor; Orbit UK)