User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
It's May 10th and, yes, I've actually read this novella, so my review is honest. It's fantastic.
Rating: really liked it
"Later she would understand that it wasn't just a pain. It was a beginning. And this beginning annihilated all that came before it." Remote Control is a beautiful tale of Afrofuturism, following Sankofa as she seeks to find the mysterious seed that bestowed upon her the power of death that follows her like a shadow. She is revered as the Adopted Daughter of Death, but she is also feared as many people do not understand the nature of Sankofa's power.
Nnedi Okorafor's writing is stunningly beautiful, being able to immerse you in her words and weaving rich cultures and histories within this novella, the worldbuilding is equally as phenomenal. She makes you feel for these characters in such a short space of time, showing how effective her writing is in characterisation.
This novella is a beautiful story surrounding purpose, the feeling of hopelessness after losing it, and embodying a new purpose in a world that expects many things from you.
Rating: really liked it
“Sankofa felt the town staring at her as she walked. It was hoping, wishing, praying that she would pass through, a wraith in the darkness.”
Once upon a time, in the near-future Ghana, little Fatima was a little girl who liked watching stars from the branches of her parents’ shea tree. Now she’s Sankofa, one of the new myths and legends, walking the roads from town to town, admired and feared because the legends portray her as Death’s adopted daughter. You see, she can emanate a strange green light that will take the life of those who happen to be in her path if they cross her.
And it all started with a strange seed that came from the sky with the meteor shower.
It’s a mesmerizing internally-focused quiet novella blending folk tale and magical realism and just a hint of science-fictional happenings deep under its roots. It does not have a defined streamlined plot but instead is almost episodic, weaving itself along with Sankofa’s slow journey, slowly building up to something more, something that we just glimpse in the end.
“She’d broken the bird just as she’d broken her family and her entire hometown.”
At its heart, is the exploration of grief, trauma, facing your past, search for normalcy and belonging in decidedly abnormal circumstances. And it’s a story of a young girl growing up and coming to terms with herself. And it also is a story of betrayals, because the world is full of them, big and small.
“It is me,” she called. “Death has come to visit.”
In Okorafor’s world Sankofa walks the boundary between modern life and folk tales, the interplay between organic and technological. This is the place where drones and self-driving cars and hashtags and “jelli-telli” coexist with religion and legends and mud huts and shea tree farms. There are robocops and foxes. There are stories of Daughter of Death and sure signs of pervasive corporate reach. There is the age-old coexistence of fear and admiration when others meet the girl with the deadly green glow — the combination action out of which legends are born. All while Sankofa is on the quest that takes her to unexpected places —
but also, like the sankofa bird suggests, back to the roots - literal and metaphorical. “Go back and get it.” “And this time, she did it on purpose.”
I wonder if Okorafor plans to continue this story, given the buildup to the open ending, the stronger hints of science fiction by the end. I’ll be thrilled if she does, but if she chooses to leave this story as is, the ambiguous notes in the ending are strong enough to not need conventional resolution. It’s a novella, and brevity is the key, even if you really long for further developments and firmer resolutions.
4 stars.
Rating: really liked it
‘
She wondered what story it would weave about her and how far the story would carry.’
There’s something I really enjoy about novellas. It is like the poem version of a novel, stripping down to the bare necessities while still expanding voluminously in your mind. Nnedi Okorafor excels at this in
Remote Control, leaving signposts that evince a much larger and sinister world at play while confining the story to a sharp and singular tale within it. An Aftrofuturist book set amidst the shea fields of Ghana,
Remote Control follows the young girl Sankofa--dubbed the ‘
adopted child of the Angel of Death’ in the legends that surround her--as she travels seeking something stolen from her. Her lost seed that fell from the sky has given her a great power of death. A green glow emanates from her when in danger and kills all it touches and just the simple touch of her hand disables all electronics. Leaving behind her village and the countless dead, she walks the land with only a fox as her companion. This tightly woven tale combines fantasy, sci-fi and culture in a brief but dazzling story about corporate imperialism under the guise of aid and the way legends shape us while we, through retellings, shape them.
The day the young girl, seven at the time, lost her family and the life she knew, she also lost her name. In the aftermath of a terrible tragedy, she renames herself Sankofa. Sankofa is one of the ‘
sky words’ she would carve in the land to map the stars--which may or may have called down the mysterious seed which fell from space and gifted its curse upon her--and is associated with a proverb that translates as ‘
t is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten’ as a message about drawing from the past to shape the future.
In Ghana, the symbol of a bird with its head turned backwards to pick up an egg represents Sankofa, and her brother’s wooden Sankofa carving with the broken neck that the girl brings when she leaves her village is a chilling reminder of the destruction she unintentionally caused.
‘
I am Sankofa, I belong wherever I want to belong.’
The storyline meanders like a journey, tracing her life back and forth as she weaves across the country following her internal pull towards her lost seed and leaving a trail of bodies behind her. Her reputation precedes her, with folks cowering in fear when she passes through town and spreading the legend of her far and wide and turning her into as much a mythological figure as actual flesh-and-blood. Her story has connotations with wandering witches, but the bringer of death may also be one of peace for those who are long suffering. Sankofa works almost as an inverse of the stories of Jesus traveling about and healing or raising people from the dead as she is often implored to put grant rest to the sick and dying. ‘
I don’t know it to be evil,’ she says of her powers. Though it brings death she also thinks death is natural, ‘
the world is euthanasia.’
While Sankofa only uses the power to kill, ‘
when people threaten my life,’ (and one instance when she arrives with the intention to kill for vengeance) the power still kills beyond her control. While it is seen that being kind to one with such power is often the path to safety from her, misunderstandings lead to the death of those closest to her. She resents being powerless in the face of her power that is, ultimately, more powerful than one person should be able to hold. But still it is her. ‘
It hurt because so much of it was terrible,’ Okorafor writes, ‘
and still it was hers. Regardless.’
The foil to her character is the Robocop that protects the aptly named Robotown, a market village that thrives on sales of advanced tech. The robot keeps the town safe, but the process of doing so is creating a database of each citizen, scanning the data that passes along with them in their phones and other tech. Putting their entire safety structure on the shoulders of one superhero-like robot is not unlike trusting in Sankofa’s powers and expecting to never be harmed by it. Not only will their society break into chaos is the robot malfunctions but it is likely sending all their data to LifeGen, ‘
that fucking big American corporation that’s probably going to eventually destroy the world.’ What seems to confuse the algorithm most is lacking any personal data to collect. Sankofa with her inability to touch electronics is an enigma, furthering LifeGen’s interest in following her and upsetting the social order of data-driven decision making upon which the robocop functions.
This brushes upon modern social anxieties over private data and corporate social engineering. While fear of Sankofa influences behavior, as social psychologist Dr. Shoshana Zuboff discusses, ‘
Personal information is increasingly used to enforce standards of behavior,’ and the robocop is reshaping village life presumably around the world in a way that benefits LifeGen. There seems to be an uneasy relationship between tradition and technology, best exemplified by a vendor Sankofa see’s with ‘
tattoos of circuitry’ that ‘
run up both arms like a disease.’ Slowly LifeGen is creeping across Africa, coming in like a true colonizer with one hand outstretched with the promise of improving life to distract from the other hand clutching a knife behind their back, as hinted at in passing references such as their desire to obtain Sankofa’s mystery seed or carved graffiti she sees stating ‘
#AfricansAreNotLabRats’:
’LifeGen made a lot of the drugs patients took. The LifeGen symbol was a hand grasping lightning. But clearly, their drugs didn’t work very well. And clearly, pharmaceuticals weren’t their only focus.’
Where Okorafor most shines is her examination of the legends and the stories we tell and how they are shaped by our context for wanting to tell them. ‘
Her story travelled like an ancestor, always ahead of, beside and behind her’. Sankofa hear’s many versions of her own story which always arrive in the villages she passes before her, some more accurate than others. Some versions are meant to scare, some are meant to be used for the benefit of the teller, such as the boys using the story to try and seduce Sankofa--not knowing it is her--by claiming they know how to stop the witch. ‘
If there was one rule she lived by it was the fact that Stories were soothsayers, truth-tellers and liars.’ This is an apt description of fiction in general, where in every elaborate fiction there is a kernel of truth and an avenue to critique the world around us through transformation into stories. Okorafor wields this power well with her own crisp and effective writing where the implied travels further than the actual words on the page and build a lush landscape of the imagination.
This is a smart, sharp and fun little novella that hits all the right notes of succinct sci-fi and is perfect for fans of books like N.K. Jemisin's
Broken Earth books. It is quite dark and intense, and the violence is very stylized to some pretty amazingly disturbing imagery. This is a world that feels so much larger than the reader is currently shown, and could be the launching point for a whole slew of works set in the world, though if not it wouldn’t feel like a waste. Okorafor’s use of shrouding the outside in translucent mystery is part of what makes this feel so dynamic and immersive without having to get into much, it is masterful really, and all her points have been aptly made without need to spell them out further. It feels reflective of sinister things lurking in our own world that we brush aside or relegate to the peripheries to avoid confronting due to the inconvenience of the systemic changes it would requite to properly address them. This is my first adventure into her work and I am already eager to check out her impressive back-catalogue.
4/5‘
In Sankofa's years on the road, she'd learned that people were complicated. They wore masks and guises to protect or hide their real selves. They reinvented themselves. They destroyed themselves. They built on themselves. She understood people and their often contradictory ways.’
Rating: really liked it
Who decided this was Science Fiction???When I think of science fiction, I think of advanced technologies, aliens, spaceships, quantum physics, wormholes, and an unfortunate astronaut trying to survive when his crew abandons him on the surface of Mars.
Am I wrong for expecting at least one of those things in a book that's purportedly science fiction?
Maybe. So I Googled "definition of science fiction" and the first thing it gave me, from Oxford Languages, is this:
"fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes, frequently portraying space or time travel and life on other planets."Ok, so yeh, that's kinda what I had in mind.
So how the heck did anyone think this book is Science Fiction???It's a nice enough story.... a young girl gets a weird seed in a box which makes her glow green, endowing her with power to kill people. (view spoiler)
[She accidentally kills her whole family after someone takes her seed away. Not really a spoiler because it happens near the beginning.) (hide spoiler)]She sets off to find the seed and the entire book is her walking around Ghana in search of the seed, followed by a companion fox, and occasionally using her powers to commit euthanasia when asked to do so.
There's no explanation of what this seed is or how it gives her the Green Curse of Death. No exciting made-up science-y bits to describe her power. Nothing, niente, nada.
Wait, you say, what about aliens? Are there any aliens in the story?
Good question. To which I would reply, No.
Ok then, you say. What about major social or environmental changes? Are there any of those in the book? To which I again would reply, No.
Space travel, you persist. Surely there's space travel if there aren't any of those other things!
Again, no. No space travel, no space ships. No humans walking around on other planets. No flying to other solar systems. Nothing like that.
Hmmm... it's not sounding very science fictiony, you reply. But there's still advanced technology; is there any tech in this book?
Well, yes. There is one
itty bitty bit of technology. It comes in the form of a Robocop.
How exciting, you say. I loved that movie!
Don't get your hopes up too high, my friend. The Robocop in this book is little more than a glorified traffic light. It has three drones which act as its eyes and it lets people know when to cross the street and when the light for cars turns green.
That's it. I guess it's that itty bitty bit of calling a traffic light a Robocop that landed this book firmly in the lap of a science fiction publisher, because it's the
only thing even remotely science fictiony about it.
Such a let down.
As for the story, it's okay. Nothing amazing but, you know. It held my interest. The writing is okay, nothing remarkable but not terrible either. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't expected physics or spaceships or technology more advanced than a (semi)smart traffic light.
I wonder if this is a re-telling of a Ghanaian tale, in which case I might appreciate it more. However, as science fiction, it doesn't work. It's
not science fiction and I really wish we could go back to science fiction being about space travel and physics and aliens and flying through wormholes into other dimensions. You know, science fiction with science.
Is that too much to ask?
P.S. The cover is gorgeous and science fictiony, so at least there's that.
Rating: really liked it
Thank you so much to Tor.com for providing me a copy of this book for review. All thoughts are my own.
As the new year approached I made a silent commitment to myself to try out a little more science fiction this year. I'm not a stranger to the genre; however, I've always felt as though I could read more. When I was given the opportunity to review this book, I jumped at the chance to read something new from Nnedi Okorafor. Although I've only read
Binti and her children's picture book, I knew that Okorafor was bound to do something amazing with this novella.
Remote Control surpassed my expectations in both character development and plot development. Though short in length, it explores so many interesting and dynamic themes. Sankofa known as the adopted child of death, is granted strange, yet fascinating powers with dire consequences. The novella moves fast in highlighting various parts of her early childhood bringing the reader to the climatic event that shapes the rest of her entire life. You can't help but to root for and admire Sankofa. As a child she navigates grief, fear, death, freedom, harmony with nature, compassion in a balanced way surpassing the emotional capabilities of most adults. She's been given a life that she has not chosen and yet she seems to take in strides and earnestly attempts to make the best of it. She spends most of the novella searching for answers encountering a full cast of characters human, animal, and non-human (AI). These characters ultimately challenge and make readers question the basic meanings of humanity. Regardless of age, Sankofa finds harm doers as much as she finds those who are compassionate. I will be quite honest and say that I had tons of theories about where Sankofa acquired her powers, but I don't know if Okorafor intended that to be the central focus of the novella. This felt more like a science-fiction based study of human behavior which I ended up loving.
Although I haven't read much by Okorafor, I will say that this novella appears to be a good place to start if a reader is interested in exploring her writing. It also feels like a great inroduction into afrofuturism. I recently heard that this may be tied to
Who Fears Death so I'll be picking up that series soon. Overall, this was a great read and I definitely recommend checking it out.
Rating: really liked it
Now a Goodreads Choice finalist in Science Fiction! I was planning on reading this anyways, but the fact that it’s a 4 hour audiobook was the reason I decided to listen to it right before the end of this year’s Goodreads Challenge. That said, fans of Nnedi Okorafor’s other works won’t be disappointed by this Africanfuturist novella.
All of the classic Okorafor themes are there—a girl, Sankofa, that’s been ostracized by her community and is surviving on her own. Society’s fear of the unknown about her being the major point of conflict, with that ‘unknown’ ability also being her source of empowerment. And the underlying evil of it all being less the other-worldly elements, but instead the greed and inhumanity of corporate capitalist entities which seek to control and harness anything that may be useful. (view spoiler)
[Although this plot line seems to be dropped by the end (hide spoiler)]It’s not super long, but Okorafor has never needed a huge page count to tell a compelling story. It is a good deal sadder than the other books of hers I read, because of the level of tragedy befalling a girl so young.
Remote Control features that ‘not-so-distant-future’ setting that’s been more popular in science fiction lately, and which I find a lot more approachable than the stereotypical space opera associated with the genre.
(On a side note I saw maybe the dumbest review on this website which was just some lady with a cat avatar complaining that this book wasn’t “science fictiony” enough because it wasn’t set in space. Lol…….k.)
I’d recommend
Remote Control to fans of the author or anyone trying to fit in a couple interesting reads before the end of the year!
**For more book talk & reviews, follow me on Instagram at @elle_mentbooks!
Rating: really liked it
3.5 StarsThis was a unique piece of African futurism that read more like a folktale, than science fiction. The young girl was a likeable character with a sympathetic backstory. My favourite aspect of the narrative was learning how others reacted to her abilities, both fearing and worshipping her.
Overall, this novella had a compelling premise, but I was not completely immersed in the story itself. I would recommend this one to readers who love myths and folktales. Personally, my reading tastes lean towards scifi and I found myself wishing that those elements had played deeper into the story rather than being simply peripheral aesthetics. However I did appreciate the African setting which provided a more unique perspective.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher, Tor.com.
Rating: really liked it
Sankofa is given a dangerous gift that isolates her from her community. It also makes her a mystery to the drones who can't figure her out enough to include her in their surveillance. Set in near-future Ghana with possible aliens, this is Nnedi Okorafor's newest work and a interesting take on African Futurism. I heard it might tie to Who Fears Death but it's been ten years since I read that.
It reminds me of the emotional tone of The Obelisk Gate where you have this person who has supernatural ability, including the ability to wipe out groups of people.
I had a copy from the publisher through Edelweiss; it came out January 19.
Rating: really liked it
I went into this not knowing it was a novella so that’s my bad. After reading reviews I guess this is more of an African folktale so within that genre I suppose it works?
I just don’t know what the point of everything was. Was there a purpose to her powers? Why were there nods to an evil corporation that then did nothing for the story? Why was the fox there? What was learned in the end?
An interesting premise but this did nothing for me. Almost kind of felt like a not-fully-fleshed-out prequel to something bigger.
Rating: really liked it
One of the things that I appreciate about Okorafor's writing is her ability to completely and quickly immerse me into her stories and characters which is why she is among a handful of authors whose novellas I can count on to be satisfying. Remote Control explores how a really young girl comes to know and accept unexplained powers and the fear and reverence it brings when she doesn't understand it herself. I'm a fan of characters taking a literal and/or emotional journey in order to figure out themselves and their situations in life and in this little novella I didn't feel cheated in that there wasn't a prolonged and well explored experience. Sankofa renames herself, finds the ability to be confident even when she makes decisions that should be beyond her, and finally has to deal with something more powerful than she is. There's a lot packed into 159 pages and I know that I will be doing a reread at some point to see if I missed anything.
I received an ARC from Tor in exchange for an honest review
Where you can find me:
•(♥).•*Monica Is Reading*•.(♥)•
Twitter: @monicaisreading
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Goodreads Group: The Black Bookcase
Rating: really liked it
3.5 stars
Rating: really liked it
Remote Control may not be genre-busting in the scifi department but the protagonist and story immediately came to stunning life as soon as it began.
Full review to come on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/hollyheartsbooks
Rating: really liked it
[Girl loses control of her powers and kills people including her family (hide spoiler)]
Rating: really liked it
Remote Control is an interesting blend of sci-fi with a mythological feel plus coming of age story. It follows a girl called the Daughter of Death because of the destruction she can wield, but the source is less arcane and more alien. We follow her story from the beginning, learning how it all began and what happened next. It's a quieter story that is both creative and in many ways tragic, about a girl who comes in contact with something larger than life, something that can bring death. It explores faith, power, and what it means to have or not have a digital footprint. It's a short novella, but a lot is packed into it.
