TED Talks have long been the go-to source for inspiring, original ideas. You’ve watched them; I’ve watched them. Let’s not pretend we ALL haven’t gotten sucked into more than a few TED Talks.

And now TED Books (published with Simon & Schuster) are taking those ideas to the printed page. The books are intended to be “long enough to explore a powerful idea but short enough to read in a single sitting,” and they are precisely that.

We previously covered the mind-blowing Why Dinosaurs Matter by Kenneth Lacovara, which was an extension of his TED Talk on the same topic. And that’s exactly the “hook” of these book: they pick up where the talks leave off.

But Nnedi Okorafor is not here to conform to expectations or do what is “expected.” Author of the Binti trilogy and Lagoon (among others), Okorafor has taken Afrofuturism mainstream and dared to write about worlds in which Africa and Africans not only exist but also represent a truly progressive view of the future.

Africa isn’t some nebulous place primarily known for being the “cradle of civilization.” It isn’t trapped in a stereotypical, colonialist view of what the continent was like mid-20th century. And – most important, in my opinion – it’s not a single place. It is home to 54 separate and distinct countries.

Okorafor’s TED talk “Sci-fi Stories That Imagine a Future Africa,” from TEDGlobal 2017, touches on her approach to science fiction and the future she captures in her stories.

But her new book from TED Books (and her first work of nonfiction), Broken Places & Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected, is not an extension of that talk. It’s a deeply personal account of how she became a writer – how she woke up from surgery to find herself paralyzed from the waist down, how she needed to learn to walk again, and how she learned to grow into something bigger…something stronger…something entirely new after her body and her world became broken.

What we perceive as limitations have the potential to become strengths greater than what we had when we were “normal” or unbroken. In much of science fiction, when something breaks, something greater often emerges from the cracks.

Afflicted with a fairly severe case of scoliosis for much of her life, Okorafor was still a tennis phenom, track star, and budding entomologist by college. All that stood in her way was her curved spine – and a relatively simple surgery could solve that. However, since it was a procedure with the spine, there was still a chance something unexpected could happen.

It was just a 1 percent chance, the doctors told her. So she fell asleep on the operating table confident that everything would be alright.

But young Nnedi Okorafor found out that sometimes, however unlikely, the odds DO land on that 1%.

She woke up and couldn’t move her legs. She was paralyzed. Not only did her dreams of tennis or track stardom vanish in a blink, but her entire world seemed to be broken. She needed to start over with so many things.

And as she relearned to walk and do most of the “basic” everyday things most of us take for granted, she found that she could ease her troubled mind by putting pen to paper and stringing words into sentences into paragraphs into stories into entire worlds.

She felt broken, but she wouldn’t let that define her. Indeed, she would pull herself together and become something entirely new with the pieces. She would find her superpower and destroy any so-called limitations that stood in her way.

Broken Places & Outer Spaces is an incredibly inspiring book for how creativity can help mend what’s broken. It’s a clarion call to reject limitations and perceived weaknesses. Find strength in your Breaking and grow into something more powerful than you could have been before.

This may be Okorafor’s origin story, but – like all good superhero origins – it’s universal and incredibly relevant.

(Disclosure: Simon &  Schuster provided a review copy of this book. All opinions remain my own.)