Today I bring you two books of different times – one with a story of a post-human future, one of an alternate past. Both have exciting and thought-provoking stories that deal with what it is to be human as well as some of today’s big ideas – AI and colonizing the moon.

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor. William Morrow, 2025. ISBN 978-0063391147. Read from a library copy.
This is a literary yet approachable story, with one narrative set mostly in a time that’s either the present day or very near future. Zelu is an author and writing teacher from a large Nigerian-American family. The rest of her siblings have careers as doctors or lawyers and are married, so that they see wheelchair-bound and single Zelu as someone who needs to be taken care of. Meanwhile, she’s too outspoken and Black for the college where she teaches writing. One night, fueled by weed and despair, Zelu comes up with the idea for a novel so compelling that it flows out of her, sells, and becomes an instant bestseller. But fame has its own complications, and Zelu’s life changes but doesn’t get simpler as she manages her family, publishers, reporters, and lovers and would-be lovers. Her story is only partly told from her own present-day point of view – often it’s told through interviews with people she knows, looking back on the past.

Zelu’s narrative is interspersed with interviews of her family members and other people close to her, and – though the story never says so outright – that of the book she’s writing, Rusted Robots, a post-humanity novel set in what was Nigeria, told from the point of view of Ankara, a human-shaped robot who collects human stories. In Ankara’s day, doom is hurtling to Earth from space – but only if the human-shaped robots and bodiless AIs stop their ongoing fighting can anything be done about it. The interviews with Zelu’s family and friends made me especially uneasy, as I spent most of the book wondering when she was going to die – but for those who are as tenderhearted as I, a spoiler: the death of the author is metaphorical. All the narratives seem very separate until the end, when they come together in a way that I probably should have seen coming, but didn’t. Overall, I liked Ankara better than I liked Zelu; overall, this felt like a really impressive piece of writing, one that deserves an analytical reread. Unfortunately, I personally am rarely in the mood for that kind of reading – but if meta writing about the meaning of humanity from this lens is your cup of tea, then this is an excellent specimen.

The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal. Tor, 2020. ISBN 978-1250236968. Read from a library copy.

As I ever so slowly work my way through the Lady Astronaut series, rereading the first two, I read the third book for the first time. While the first two are from the point of Elma York, the original Lady Astronaut, The Relentless Moon is told from the point of view of Nicole Wargin, another of the lady astronauts and experienced politician’s wife. While Elma is on her way to Mars, Nicole is one of the first group of settlers on the moon, working on setting up the colony while rotating back to Kansas often enough to fulfill her duties to her husband, Kenneth, governor of Kansas and presidential hopeful. And while they’d never let the Mars crews know what’s happening, life is far from simple either on Earth or on the Moon Base. Space is pricey, and the current president is being swayed by loud Earth First protesters – who are also starting to target the space program and astronauts directly. There is a traitor somewhere, slowly sabotaging the moon base, racial tensions especially between the white South Africans and the African-American couple that Nicole and Elma are good friends with – while in this world without a polio vaccine, the deadly virus has found its way to the moon. All the while, Nicole frets about her husband’s health and their relationship, understandably experiencing some strain as they are both ambitious people with different goals, even as they adore each other.

There is really a lot going on – at 540 pages, this book is significantly longer than the previous two entries in the series. The action never bogs down, though, with the plot moved along by the skillful mix of science, politics, social awareness, and intrigue. Like all of the Lady Astronauts, Nicole is exceptionally intelligent, a scientist and pilot. She was also raised in political family, with deep training in etiquette and how to use courtesy and fashion as weapons. These are things we mostly picked up about her in previous books. Now, from her own point of view, we also learn about her weaknesses – the anorexia she’s mostly beaten but that always lurks, ready to come out in particularly stressful times, the obliviousness of her privilege, and her fondness for her cat. This is thrilling, soul-searching, hilarious, and devastating. I really wish the audiobooks were not Audible exclusives, as this is a series I’d love to see more widely read, and many people I recommend books to only do audiobooks and try to boycott Amazon. That is a relatively minor annoyance, though, for an excellent entry in a series I highly recommend. Now I just need to read a half dozen other books on my TBR so I can get to the most recent book, The Martian Contingency.