The power is uncontrollable: soon, in a sudden, regrettable childish rage, she kills her whole family and village.Īnd she destroys her name too: “Sankofa forgot her real name on the day that she lost everything. But, as she gets angrier, the range of her fatal glow expands unpredictably. When she is merely annoyed, the glow acts like a bug zapper. The power has the side effect of making her luminous like a TV remote control in the dark, giving her one of her nicknames and the book its title.īuzzed by mosquitoes who have previously given her malaria at regular intervals, Fatima gets annoyed and glows green - emitting enough death to kill the pests. Through unexplained means, the seed conveys fatal power to the young girl. A strange green “seed” falls from the sky just by Fatima’s house and burrows under the tree she loves to sit in. The earliest events of Remote Control take place on a shea tree farm in Wulugu - a small village in northern Ghana. There’s no such optimism in Remote Control, where the protagonist brings only death. Until now, her protagonists have bounced back from multiple setbacks, absorbed elements of the cultures they have met, and driven onward to change society for the better.
In her previous work, Okorafor championed magic, science, and the ability of young African women to embrace change. Remote Control is Okorafor’s first book for an adult audience since the award-winning Binti series ended, and it takes a dark turn.
In addition to her award-winning graphic novel Laguardia, she followed Ta-Nehisi Coates as a guest writer for Marvel’s Black Panther series.
In the short time since finishing her popular Binti trilogy in January 2018, Okorafor has been signed to make an HBO version of her novel Who Fears Death, to co-write a screenplay for Amazon from Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, and to write a screen treatment of Binti for Hulu. Okorafor’s bright stories have drawn wide acclaim and broad appeal. Sankofa’s tale unfolds in the same future world as Okorafor's Who Fears Death and The Book of Phoenix, and it is the latest in her series of Africanfuturist books to imbue the world of tomorrow with the languages, customs, and flavors of Africa. She is known and feared, but fed and clothed as she walks around rural Ghana. Nnedi Okorafor’s new novella, Remote Control, opens with the itinerant 14-year-old Sankofa walking up to a strange house and announcing herself as an unwanted Christmas guest.
0 kommentar(er)
