Noor

Noor is a science fiction novel by Nnedi Okorafor, published in 2021, and its hero is a woman with extensive cybernetic augmentation who has decided to stop apologising for her body. AO lives in a future Nigeria where prosthetics like hers are made by a single megacorporation and where every public space is watched, recorded and streamed.

The novel treats its technology as ordinary and its politics as the real problem. AO's augmentations make her faster and stronger than the men who attack her in a market, and when she fights back she becomes a criminal in a system built to protect property and reputation rather than people. Her companion, a Fulani herdsman who goes by DNA, is running from a killing of his own.

Okorafor has said that she wrote the book with people who call themselves cyborgs in mind, and the novel carries that argument into its world-building, where wind farms, drones and body modification sit alongside older systems of kinship and belief. The Red Eye, the sandstorm that has swallowed the north, supplies the journey with its weather and its stakes, and AO's body, which she has spent her life defending from other people's judgements, is the thing that keeps her alive. It is a short, fast and deliberately confrontational book about who gets to count as natural.