• Blog
  • About
  • Reviews
  • Great Series Read Project
  • Archive

SciFi Mind

Visions of Future Worlds

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Goodreads
  • Mastodon
You are here: Home / SciFiMonth / Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor – A Review

Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor – A Review

By John Folk-Williams

From the brilliant opening of Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control, when we meet the confident Sankofa, just fourteen, walking a road in rural Ghana (“Small swift steps made with small swift feet”) the hints of her extraordinary power are everywhere. She is a subject of rumor, people hide from her approach, she wears adult clothes though she has the frame of a ten year-old, a strange species of red fox follows her everywhere, and she knocks on the door of a wealthy family’s house, saying “Death has come to visit.”

Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor

I was completely captivated by this short novel from that masterful opening to its last sentence, but, as Okorafor describes Remote Control, there is a much broader context to this and most of her other books. She says that this is a prequel to a prequel, and that the three books were written backwards in time. First, she wrote Who Fears Death, then to explore the origins of that world, wrote The Book of Phoenix. Remote Control is the closest to our own time, set a few decades from now. And before those three books, she wrote the Binti series, in which Africans go to the stars in a far future. So as far as time and generations go, she wrote them in reverse order. There are ideas and themes connecting them all, and they are suffused with Okorafor’s concept of Africanfuturism. Here’s a brief part of her explanation of that idea – please read her full blog post to get a better understanding of what it is and why she felt compelled to create this approach to science fiction:

Africanfuturism is concerned with visions of the future, is interested in technology, leaves the earth, skews optimistic, is centered on and predominantly written by people of African descent (black people) and it is rooted first and foremost in Africa. It’s less concerned with “what could have been” and more concerned with “what is and can/will be”. It acknowledges, grapples with and carries “what has been”. 

Nnedi’s Wahala Zone Blog: African Futurism Defined

Remote Control is a wonderful blend of legend, myth, a portrait of near future Ghana, a young girl’s coming of age, the impact of technology, the long reach of corporate control and the arrival of alien artifacts and power. It works for me on so many levels. Perhaps the most moving is the story of a five year-old girl, whose world is destroyed through no fault of her own and who must strike out by herself and learn to live as an outcast.

A power she absorbed through contact with an alien artifact gives her the stunning ability to emit a glow that kills people around her. Before she learns to control that power, she has inadvertently taken the lives of many who are close to her, leaving her truly alone. And when she touches any technology, like a drone or a self-driving car, it immediately breaks. So her only way to get around is by walking, and walk she must to track down the artifact that has been stolen from her. She follows its movements not because she wants to get it back but simply because it calls to her and lets her know through an inner GPS where it is.

She finds respite from that endless long walk in a few places where she can live with a friend or by herself in the forest, but those restorative interludes are always cut short, sometimes brutally.

After the search for the artifact comes to an end, she has another goal, to return to the hometown and the house she left behind after the first catastrophe she lived through. So it’s also a moving story of coming home, for someone who has lost everything that made that place the welcoming center of her childhood.

When I started reading Remote Control, I recalled something the late Tewa anthropologist, Alfonso Ortiz, told me about his travels in Mexico. He would often see a lone elder walking along a remote road, and he wondered where that indigenous person might be coming from and where they might be headed. It made him think of all the fractured native cultures that had survived the long history of conquest, slavery, forced assimilation, ongoing discrimination and technological change. There were so many individuals forced out of their traditional ways of life, forced to wander, but where could they go?

The girl Sankofa, the adopted daughter of Death, gains power to resist the corporate controlled technologies taking hold in her native Ghana, but we are left at the end with a sense of the immensity of the task she would face. But this is not a story of rebellion, it is a story of survival, of coming to terms with a terribly broken life, of learning to master the power that is more burden than gift.

I find Remote Control incredibly moving and beautiful, and it pushes me to read The Book of Phoenix and Who Fears Death and to reread the Binti series. Okorafor’s Africa is a dazzling world, and this story of a young girl empowered in a dangerous and costly way is one of her best.

Related Posts

  • Slipping by Mohamed Kheir
    Slipping by Mohamed Kheir - A Review for #SciFiMonth

    Mohamed Kheir has written in Slipping a brilliant series of stories that drop their characters…

  • #SciFiMonth The Fallen by Ada Hoffman
    The Fallen by Ada Hoffman - A Review for #SciFiMonth

    As the second book in Ada Hoffman’s The Outside series, The Fallen picks up where…

  • The Quantum War by Derek Kunsken #scifimonth
    The Quantum War by Derek Künsken - A Review for #SciFiMonth

    Derek Künsken’s The Quantum War, the third book in The Quantum Evolution series, continues the…

Filed Under: SciFiMonth Tagged With: Africanfuturism, alien technology, corporate dystopia, legend, Nnedi Okorafor, power, technology

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Subscribe to SciFi Mind Posts



About SciFi Mind

nebula SciFiMind

Something is struggling to be born in this damaged and inspiring world, and I believe science fiction and its speculative cousins are helping us figure out what it is. It’s pushing the imaginations of fiction writers to bend and twist familiar forms to try to capture the forces that are hurling us into a barely conceivable future. This blog is my small way of exploring the half-perceived … Read More about About

Search SciFi Mind

Recent Posts

  • Furious Heaven by Kate ElliottFurious Heaven by Kate Elliott – Book 2 of The Sun Chronicles
  • The Mimicking of Known SuccessesThe Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older
  • The Crane Husband by Kelly BarnhillThe Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill
  • Untethered Sky by Fonda LeeUntethered Sky by Fonda Lee

Categories

Twitter

John Folk-Williams Follow

SFMind

JL Thank you for following me!!

Reply on Twitter 1638350925340327941 Retweet on Twitter 1638350925340327941 Like on Twitter 1638350925340327941 Twitter 1638350925340327941

The Fiction Addiction 📚 Thank you for following me!!

Reply on Twitter 1638199805301121024 Retweet on Twitter 1638199805301121024 Like on Twitter 1638199805301121024 Twitter 1638199805301121024

A fine review - this book is next on my list: nerds of a feather, flock together: Review: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh http://www.nerds-feather.com/2023/03/review-some-desperate-glory-by-emily.html?spref=tw

Reply on Twitter 1637788987266940932 Retweet on Twitter 1637788987266940932 Like on Twitter 1637788987266940932 1 Twitter 1637788987266940932

Thanks for introducing me to another fine author: INFINITY GATE by M.R. Carey - Review https://booksbonesbuffy.com/2023/03/20/infinity-gate-by-m-r-carey-review/ via @tammy_sparks

Reply on Twitter 1637788691161546752 Retweet on Twitter 1637788691161546752 Like on Twitter 1637788691161546752 4 Twitter 1637788691161546752

Sounds like an incredible book: Why You Need to Read: "Assassin of Reality" https://mistyaquavenatus.com/2023/03/18/why-you-need-to-read-assassin-of-reality/ via @AquaVenatus #scifi #sff

Reply on Twitter 1637432091053813760 Retweet on Twitter 1637432091053813760 Like on Twitter 1637432091053813760 4 Twitter 1637432091053813760
Load More...

About the Author

A late-comer to the worlds of science fiction, John Folk-Williams circled around it, first by blogging (primarily through Storied Mind) about inner struggles and the mind’s way of distorting reality. Then he turned directly to SFF as an amazing medium for re-envisioning the mind and the worlds it creates. He started this blog as a way to experiment with writing science fiction and to learn from its many masterful practitioners.

Follow

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Goodreads
  • Mastodon

Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Cookie Policy

Cookie Policy

© 2023 Copyright by John Folk-Williams · Dynamik-Gen On Genesis Framework