She recalls a scene when Fatima’s brother asks her to hold a wasp as he watches her reaction to pain.

Okorafor notes that even some of the smaller moments in the book were difficult. “By the time I got to writing her and her story, I knew to relax even with the things that made me uncomfortable, because there are a lot of things in this novella that are really uncomfortable and disturbing.” “I’ve written many novels now, many stories, and because of that experience I’ve learned to kind of relax and let the characters be who they are and let the stories be what they will be,” says Okorafor. In time, Sankofa’s story, which involves a quest, painful loss and the development of great power, revealed itself to the author. “Over the years, she’s spoken to me a lot and we’ve had a lot of conversations and she’s told me her story.” “My characters talk to me,” Okorafor says. The character, who is known first as Fatima and then as Sankofa after her transformation, has been in Okorafor’s head for over six years. The discovery of the object, which becomes her prized possession, leads to a string of life-changing events as the child comes to realize that she has an immense power that will make her both feared and revered. In “Remote Control,” published last month by Tor, a young girl in Ghana finds a green seed after a meteor shower.

“It’s amazing how much they got right,” she says of pandemic fiction. “There are times where I’m just like, ‘Didn’t you all see this coming? You really didn’t see that coming?’ Come on, it’s been written about how many times.” “That’s one of the functions of it,” says Okorafor, adding with a chuckle. Science fiction, its fans and readers might argue, has been calling our attention to problems that are on the horizon for a long time. So any futures that we’re writing have to include this.” “This is not science fiction anymore this is now.

“I had that thing that almost every science fiction writer who is writing something set in the future has to contend with,” says Okorafor by phone from Chicago, referring to how a frequent premise of science fiction - a pandemic - had become a reality. The award-winning author of the Binti trilogy, the Akata series and works such as “Lagoon” and “Who Fears Death,” Okorafor was finishing up edits on “Remote Control” during a COVID-19 lockdown.

In her latest work, “Remote Control,” author Nnedi Okorafor notes the 2020 pandemic in passing, referring to it as a moment in history that’s being recalled years later in a fictional future.

Remote control nnedi okorafor