★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Remote Control
• Author: Nnedi Okorafor
• Year: 2020 (mine was 2020 library hardcover)
• Pages: 159
• Genre: Fantasy, africanfuturist
• Publisher: Tor Books (Macmillan)
• ISBN 978-1-250-77280-0 (hardcover)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

Set in Ghana, Remote Control is a quickly-flowing novella about a young girl — she is 14 at the beginning, then the rest of the book is a flashback, starting when she is five and bringing the reader back to 14 again — who contracts a sort of magical death power from an alien “seed”. Originally named Fatima, the girl at one point forgets her name and renames herself Sankofa (after a bird). Sankofa is horrified by what her powers can do, but eventually learns to control them and use them for good — or at least for survival. There is a red fox named Movenpick who follows Sankofa everywhere.

The setting is clearly the future, though the tech of the future hasn’t fully penetrated every nook and cranny of Ghana just yet. In the larger towns and cities, there are robotic traffic cops who use drones to watch for potential accidents and keep people safe, there is wireless internet even in rural areas, and self-driving autos are common, but these are mostly background items.

 

The Good

My summary above doesn’t do the story justice. It flows nicely and draws the reader in with colors and foods and sounds. The action seems to naturally flow from the situations. I don’t know whether the dialog sounds natural for the country the story is set in; it very well could be. I like that the tech stuff is mostly left in the background and that the story focuses only on Sankofa and her experiences.

 

Points Off For...

More of this was clear to me than in a few of Okorafor’s previous books. There were places in the Binti stories where I just wasn’t sure what was going on, and had to either wait 50 pages to find out or just forget it, but that didn’t happen here. Except for one thing. The main thing. Despite a few hints about the original source of Sankofa’s power — the “seed” — the reader is never given enough to know what it is or where it came from or how it imbued the girl with such power or how she could sense it miles away to follow it. So it ends up being unexplained magic, despite the veneer that it is possibly alien tech.

 

Conclusion

If I had to rank this against other Okorafor books, I’d put it just above the Binti stories but beneath Who Fears Death, which was just shy of five stars for me.

 

Note:

The author, Okorafor, tweeted in March 2019 that she does not want the term “afrofuturism” applied to her work. Until seeing that tweet, I had assumed (incorrectly) that she was the one who had coined the term — I’ve seen it in reviews of her books and even on their dust jackets. Now that I know that assumption was incorrect, I will use the term she suggested in the tweet, which is “africanfuturist”. I don’t know what the difference is, but am perfectly happy to use the genre terms specified by authors. Here is a screenshot of her tweet: