Who Fears Death

"I think Nnedi Okorafor tends to think of herself as a science fiction writer rather than a writer of fantasy books. It’s one of those books where my question about ‘what happens when you read it as…’ works really well, both ways. For me, it does have that kind of post-apocalyptic, ‘what if the future turns out this way?’ but, at the same time, people can turn into vultures and come back from the dead and so on. It’s powerfully fantasy as well as successfully science fiction. Okorafor is American but her parents both came from Nigeria and she spent a lot of her childhood going back and forth. She was pretty much immersed in some of the cultures of her family and neighbours there, and often turns to them in her work. I think almost all of her work is rooted in African landscapes, tribal tensions, cultures, beliefs, and so on. Who Fears Death is clearly one of those stories on one level, although she has also said that it’s thoroughly contemporary. It’s drawn right out of today’s headlines because it has to do with ethnic wars and the terrible things that people do in those wars, including weaponised rape. That’s the central driver of the narrative in her story. In a way, perhaps, the book enables readers who might otherwise find it difficult to confront these contemporary realities with a way to enter into the terrible things that are happening around us right now. This goes back to that structural meaning I was talking about. You can take the structure of that situation—which is almost impossible to face directly in real-world situations—and you can see what’s happening. This is maybe where we can intervene and make it not happen. Very clearly, based on many measures, including the many movie and television franchises made recently. Superhero movies are a form of fantasy, as are the Lord of the Rings movies, of course. Or take a recent example like the new TV series, The Sandman . Even the Harry Potter series—which I always thought was fairly derivative but which had a lot of charm—became a global phenomenon. It used to be those of us in the fantasy field would have to stand up for or defend our subject matter, insisting that this is important, it is good stuff. I don’t feel like we have to do that kind of apology anymore. Most people will say, ‘Well, yes, of course!’ Even those who might have resisted a few years ago are starting to come around to Game of Thrones or Neil Gaiman and so on. It’s not only a boom in fantasy, it’s also a broadening of fantasy, and that includes bringing in writers from backgrounds who would probably not have taken part in it 20 years ago. I’ve been studying fantasy from the time when you could pretty much read all the fantasy books in the field, and there was a time that you could make general statements about it based on that. I don’t think I can do that anymore. If you say one thing about this branch of fantasy, somebody else can come along and say something quite different about African-based fantasies or Australian-based fantasies. There are ever-increasing numbers of Native American -based fantasies and a whole bunch of South Asian and East Asian writing that is excellent. All of this branching out has a lot in common. It tends to look back to the same kind of origins as the Eurocentric fantasy that many of us grew up with but it’s so different!"