Book #24
Death of the Author
By Nnedi Okorafor
This book was exactly what I was looking for. I have been musing a lot about storytelling and technology lately and this book combines the two.
It has two storylines; that of a fictional author and the contents of the science fiction book she creates. It is a book within a book. The story that the fictional author writes is about a robot traversing a post-human world. I found myself being emotionally affected by both storylines, even though the protagonist of the latter is non-human.
The Relatability of Non-Human Things
If I were to ask myself which of these protagonists I related to more, I would probably say the robot. But it was fairly equal. It is interesting how we can see ourselves in non-human things. We get attached to it. Human emotions certainly don’t just extend to other humans. We tend to get sad when an animal dies or we laugh at a cartoon character’s antics. We get inspired by the hobbits’ journey in The Lord of the Rings and they are non-human and not real.
We can even relate to inanimate objects like art, for example. Even the most abstract of art that just involves random lines and blotches. We can relate to the energy of these pictures. We interpret their meaning based on our own point of view.
Or, if a man’s car gets wrecked, sometimes he responds in a way that isn’t entirely based in practicality, but rather emotion. A person like that doesn’t just get frustrated over the inconvenience of having to get their car fixed, there seems to be something else in their reaction. As if they take the car’s wound a little personally. Some people even give their cars names. And they were doing this before cars were as technologically advanced as they are now.
Is There Reciprocity?
Robots, I suppose, are just an extension of this. We can project our human emotions onto them. We can relate to them, or at least feel like we do. We can relate to them but they cannot relate to us, in the same way we can relate to a fictional human character, an artwork, or a car and they cannot relate to us. Our interpretation of non-human things is meaningful, if not truly reciprocal.
It is not entirely non-reciprocal though.
Animals can reciprocate our love to a certain extent. I wonder how to define the relationship between humans and AI as well. Each feeds off of the other’s responses, after all. Does this count as reciprocal? It is cooperative and interdependent sure, but it is not reciprocal in an emotional sense. The emotions are only in one direction.
Humans Project Their Emotions onto a Lot of Things
This book made me think more deeply about the wide range of things that I apply my own emotions to. Throughout this blog post, I have tried to come up with a better word than “things” to describe everything that I relate to, but what other word is there for a category that contains real and fictional humans and animals, robots, inanimate objects, and fictional characters like hobbits? Is there a catch-all term for so many scattered, seemingly unrelated things?
Messy Bun Book Lover
(Originally posted on July 5, 2025)
Read Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor → https://amzn.to/4nlyydW
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