SATA

• War Girls Razorbill (New York, NY), 2019
• Rebel Sisters ( sequel to War Girls) Razorbill (New York, NY), 2020
• Riot Baby Tor (New York, NY), 2020

1. Rebel sisters LCCN 2020023214 Type of material Book Personal name Onyebuchi, Tochi, author. Main title Rebel sisters / Tochi Onyebuchi. Published/Produced New York : Razorbill, 2020. Projected pub date 2010 Description pages cm ISBN 9781984835062 (hardcover) (ebook) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Riot baby LCCN 2019041049 Type of material Book Personal name Onyebuchi, Tochi, author. Main title Riot baby / Tochi Onyebuchi. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : A Tom Doherty Associates Book, 2020. ©2019 Description 176 pages ; 21 cm ISBN 9781250214751 (hardcover) (ebook) CALL NUMBER PS3615.N93 R56 2020 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 3. War girls LCCN 2019016805 Type of material Book Personal name Onyebuchi, Tochi, author. Main title War girls / Tochi Onyebuchi. Published/Produced New York : Razorbill, 2019. ©2019 Description 450 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780451481672 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PZ7.1.O66 War 2019 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Tochi Onyebuchi website - https://www.tochionyebuchi.com

  Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of Beasts Made of Night, its sequel Crown of Thunder, War Girls, and his adult fiction. debut Riot Baby, published by Tor.com in January 2020. He has graduated from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and L’institut d’études politiques with a Masters degree in Global Business Law.

  His short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Omenana, Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America, and elsewhere. His non-fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Nowhere Magazine, Tor.com and the Harvard Journal of African-American Public Policy. He is the winner of the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African and has appeared in Locus Magazine's Recommended Reading list.

  Born in Massachusetts and raised in Connecticut, Tochi is a consummate New Englander, preferring the way the tree leaves turn the color of fire on I-84 to mosquitoes and being able to boil eggs on pavement. He has worked in criminal justice, the tech industry, and immigration law, and prays every day for a new album from System of a Down.

• Los Angeles Public Library website - https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/interview-author-tochi-onyebuchi

  Interview With an Author: Tochi OnyebuchiDaryl M., Librarian, West Valley Regional Branch Library, Thursday, January 16, 2020

  email
  Tochi Onyebuchi and his adult fiction debut novel, Riot Baby
  Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African, its sequel, Crown of Thunder, and War Girls. He holds a B.A. from Yale, a M.F.A. in screenwriting from the Tisch School of the Arts, a Master's degree in droit économique from Sciences Po, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. His fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, Omenana Magazine, Uncanny, and Lightspeed. His non-fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Nowhere Magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. Riot Baby is his adult fiction debut and he recently agreed to talk about with Daryl Maxwell for the LAPL Blog.

  What was your inspiration for Riot Baby?
  It began in earnest as a response to the spate of officer-involved killings of black Americans, video evidence of which had started to proliferate in 2014-2015. Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Natasha McKenna, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald. At the time, I felt a hideous sense of powerlessness. There was also the sense—borne of the connection with older generations—of this, not as a new or unique phenomenon, but rather the continuance of an existing dynamic between repressive state forces and black Americans. That idea of this as the continuance of history augmented the powerlessness I felt. Friends, at the time, were marching and protesting and getting arrested and doing all sorts of things. But I knew I was a writer and that I was good at it and that maybe that’s where my service lay. So, in a manner of speaking, Riot Baby began as an act of service. To myself, to a wider purpose, I’m not sure. Perhaps both. My hope is that, to this day, it remains a result of that act. That this story can exist in the service of others and service of the greater cause of liberation.

  Are Ella, Kev or any of the characters inspired by or based on specific individuals?
  Kev has a more direct analog to the real world than Ella does. Because of certain aspects of my life, I know quite a few people who have gone through jail or prison or who are still incarcerated. I knew that this would be a central part of Kev’s narrative, and I drew from those people as well as the work I had done in the legal field with regards to incarceration. Ella’s inspiration is a bit more amorphous. She gets her name from a very revolutionary-minded former law school classmate of mine (we were in different years), but her journey was much more of an imagining than Kev’s.

  How did the novella evolve and change as you wrote and revised it? Are there any characters or scenes that were lost in the process that you wish had made it to the published version?
  When it was initially acquired, it had a very different structure. The main foci were Rikers and Watts, with a little bit of the Harlem chapter sprinkled in. It wasn’t until the editing phase that I figured out the location-based structure of the book. Also, it very much began as Kev’s story with Ella as something of a witness or someone very much wanting to save her brother but, for some reason, unable to do so. Subsequent rounds of edits turned it into Ella’s story and ended up birthing the South Central chapter that begins the book. There was a character in the middle versions between first and last, who made a reappearance later on in the book in a very different form. She was to be a part of Kev’s journey, but her scenes opened up the door to too many issues I had neither the time nor space to truly explore without coming across as exploitative. This was the first time I’d encountered such a situation, or, rather, that this concern was brought to my attention. The subsequent conversations with my editor were highly instructive. I’d always fancied myself a sensitive writer, someone attuned to issues and cognizant enough of existing power dynamics to avoid exhibitionism and exploitation in my writing. But here was an instance where I may have been trying for something out of reach if that makes sense. Including her would have meant having to contend with issues of consent and womanhood and Islamophobia and sex, and Riot Baby is already so pregnant with issues that the further inclusion of this character might have left the thing misshapen. I’m ever so grateful to Ruoxi for her guidance and wisdom on this. I might have strutted straight into a sandpit otherwise.

  Riot Baby is an unflinching, and unvarnished, look at contemporary life in the US for people of color. Yet, the ending of the novella is more hopeful than dystopian (although it is clear there is a lot to work through before the work is done). Do you think it’s possible to get to where we need to be without relying on those with “Things” to get us there?
  I wish this weren’t currently the case. Still, I think there’s some level of reliance required for there to be any positive change in the situation of people of color and specifically black people in America. It’s just that the reliance isn’t on people with the psychokinesis but rather people with another superpower: whiteness. Even a cursory glance at American history will reveal that black Americans have tried just about everything to try to remove or even lessen the yoke of white oppression: marching, establishing their communities, becoming legislators (federal or local), violent self-defense, the list goes on. James Baldwin was once asked in an interview with Esquire Magazine, (paraphrasing) “what’s it gonna take for black people to cool it?” His reply: “It’s not for black people to cool it.” Until there’s a proper reckoning among white Americans and a proper holding-to-accounts, I don’t see any real, true, structural amelioration happening. And a genuinely deleterious byproduct of the unwillingness of those with the superpower of whiteness to enact any real change is that other communities of color are drawn into the battle and splintered and disrupted and poisoned by this idea of betterment via proximity to whiteness. If anything, imagining a young black woman with the powers of telepathy and psychokinesis seems the more plausible fantasy.

  What’s currently on your nightstand?
  I’m currently reading The Ventriloquists by E.R. Ramzipoor, and it is such a fun and rollicking read. Though it is set in Belgium during WWII, it has a lot to say about press and press freedom and propaganda. Reading it is also part of an effort of mine to inject more fun and humor into my reads. I’m drawn to tragedies and emotionally devastating books, and for a while, that was my barometer for gauging a book’s power. How well could it break my heart or lift me to emotional heights unimaginable? But I’m learning what a difficult and satisfying thing it is to write a laughter-provoking story or at least something that gets you smiling at the page. And this book very much fits the bill.

  What was your favorite book when you were a child?
  Actually, the manga series Blade of the Immortal. Epic in every sense of the word. The art was gorgeous, and it was one of the first stories that portrayed emotional complexity. What began as simple revenge quest morphed into a gorgeously sanguine exploration of self and violence and family.

  Was there a book you felt you needed to hide from your parents?
  Hah! Mom and Dad were very lax with regards to that. To be honest, I faced more restrictions in my movie and TV intake.

  Can you name your top five favorite or most influential authors?
  Katsuhiro Otomo—Akira made visual storytelling an essential part of my process with what is depicted. As much as I love words, I’m very much guided by imagery, and I will never forget what it looks like to see a city fall from the sky.
  John Le Carré—For a period in college, all I wrote were international spy thrillers. I even had two books about terrorists and arms dealers set in the Balkans. As much as the gunfights thrilled me to write, what I wanted to capture was the vast interiority of these characters, and that was what struck me immediately about Le Carré’s work when I first encountered it in high school. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is essentially a closed-room mystery, and yet it manages to move like a thriller and be this titanic dissection of class anxiety in postwar England. The Constant Gardener is, to my mind, this guy at the height of his powers. And The Little Drummer Girl might be the best novel I’ve read about the Palestine-Israel conflict not written by a Palestinian or Israeli. What I learned from him was how to use genre as a vessel for exploration of the human condition. A Perfect Spy is a spy novel the same way that Moby Dick is a book about a whale.
  Marilynne Robinson—Name a better prose stylist currently working in American letters. I dare you.
  Elizabeth Bear—I’m still astounded by her range. She went from a cyberpunk trilogy about a damaged Canadian merc to urban fantasy about Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe to a generation ship trilogy to Norse epic fantasy, and those are just her multi-book cycles. That isn’t even to talk about her mind-bending brilliance at short stories. Bear was the first SFF writer I consciously sought to emulate and learn from. I mean, look at her White Space series (Ancestral Night and Machine, forthcoming) and her Lotus Kingdom books (The Stone in the Skull and The Red-Stained Wings so far)! Boom boom boom boom. The crossover AND the jump shot.
  Ian McDonald—The Dervish House and River of Gods were the first times I’d seen a specific set in the developing world. I read River of Gods first and couldn’t believe it. There were more ideas on one page of that book than I’d seen in many trilogies! There was so much dope stuff, but the really powerful thing to me was that it all felt seamlessly integrated into a carefully constructed Indian society. Same with The Dervish House and Turkey. It never felt orientalist, never othering. The man is a wonder at writing not just about developing economies but within them. I can’t remember reading a specific book before River of Gods that was set in a science-heavy world featuring non-whites who weren’t aliens or in some fundamental way inhuman.
  What is a book you've faked reading?
  The Harry Potter series.

  Can you name a book you've bought for the cover?
  The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney.

  Is there a book that changed your life?
  The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. It’s my favorite book of all time. I was in the midst of reading it while studying abroad in France during high school. And a random trip out of Paris with my roommate to Dumas’s estate revealed to me that the man was black. That the man who had written this glorious story of adventure and swashbuckling and hidden identities and revenge was the same color as me, did more to encourage me as a writer than all the validation I received from teachers. At that age, I wasn’t terribly interested in the books we were obligated to read, no matter how important and meaningful they would be later on in life for me. Invisible Man, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Native Son did much less for me as a high schooler than they did for me as an adult man. I wanted adventure. And Dumas was the first guy to show me that, if I’m black, I have permission to write adventure.

  Can you name a book for which you are an evangelist (and you think everyone should read)?
  A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. The AUDACITY of that book. It’s As I Lay Dying but the centering event, instead of being Addie Bundren’s funeral, is a 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley?! And it’s written 85% in Jamaican patois?! How the hell does a book like that exist?! I’m incapable of speaking in any even-handed way about that book.

  Is there a book you would most want to read again for the first time?
  The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. Because of That Moment.

  What is your idea of THE perfect day (where you could go anywhere/meet with anyone)?
  A lazy morning waking up in the same room as a loved one. A sun-dappled afternoon spent reading in a curved bench where the Marais abuts the Seine. Then an evening spent smoking shisha and writing a story I’m besotted with. That’d do it.

  What is the question that you’re always hoping you’ll be asked, but never have been? What is your answer?
  I have to say, I am particularly overjoyed with people asking me about craft. I love analyzing pieces of writing, breaking down scene structure, picking apart the journey in an essay. How does the writer use leitmotifs? How did they come up with the idea to use a recurring joke as the spine of that essay? Why are their chapter lengths the way they are? How on earth did they manage that button? I love talking shop with other writers. And I hope that with Riot Baby some more of those questions can come to the fore.

  What are you working on now?
  I’m currently at work on the sequel to my recently-released YA novel, War Girls. And it is a journey! After that, I have two more books with Tor.com, and they are straight fire. I cannot wait for readers to get their hands on them.

• PEN America - https://pen.org/pen-ten-interview-with-tochi-onyebuchi/

  THE PEN TEN: AN INTERVIEW WITH TOCHI ONYEBUCHI
  By: Lily Philpott
  January 16, 2020
  The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, Lily Philpott speaks with Tochi Onyebuchi, author of the forthcoming Riot Baby (Tor.com, 2020).

  Tochi Onyebuchi

  1. What was the first book or piece of writing that had a profound impact on you?
  There are a couple, clustered in my high school years. The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan was the book that made me want to be a writer. In the years prior, I had discovered I loved storytelling, and the external validation I got from my creative writing teachers in seventh and eighth grade seemed to indicate that I had a knack for it. But The Dragon Reborn, Book 3 in a fantasy saga I had been swallowed up by, was the first book that made me realize there was a someone behind the curtain, some being in corporeal form that had orchestrated this thing, this whole story and my emotional reaction to it upon finishing the book. I closed the book and saw the end scene in front of me still, an honest-to-God vision, and I realized that someone had done that to me. And if someone had done that to me, maybe I could do that to someone else. The other book is John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It set off my spy thriller obsession in high school and college and 1. taught me that some people lie simply because they are good at it and 2. you can write beautifully about geopolitical conflicts. The Cold War and terrorism and big pharma in Africa aren’t just about spycraft and gunrunning and the machinations Great Powers; there’s human drama in the midst—perhaps even at the center—of these things.

  “As some are drawn to bars and others to churches, I’m drawn to bookstores and libraries. They’re sanctuaries. They’re sanctuary. Hope germinates in me that osmosis will take place and whatever goodness is in those books that got them a place on those shelves will leak into me and I’ll produce something that could someday go there.”

  2. How does your writing navigate truth? What is the relationship between truth and fiction?
  I fell in love with fiction long before I discovered narrative nonfiction (which wouldn’t happen until a year or two after college), so fiction was, and in many ways remains, the most effective method for me to write past the facts of an issue and into the heart of the matter. Often, that matter is myself and my own emotional preoccupations. My father passed when I was 10 years old, and it’s no coincidence that much of my early writing is caught up in the business of father-son relations. And in film school, I wrote a screenplay about a recovering alcoholic writer trying to make amends to his boxer brother by returning home to their post-industrial factory town, and the chaos that his arrival brings about. Writing was a way into my fears and acted as a sort of clarifying agent. My anxieties tend toward the apocalyptic; whether job-related or in the context of romantic relationships, the slightest worry (do I need to get another job to make rent on time; she didn’t like my Instagram post tagging her, will she leave me?) snowballs into cataclysm. Writing assumes many of the dynamics of talk therapy in that respect. Outside of myself, it’s another way of getting into the human drama at the center of government policy or socioeconomical analysis. I think part of the reason Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” (though not fiction) was so successful is that it’s, among other things, the story of Clyde Ross. Same with “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Sure, fiction can be argument, but when it’s purely screed, it loses, I think, much of what enables that empathetic impulse. Which is kind of why I drifted away from John Le Carré’s later work, post-The Constant Gardener/Absolute Friends. The truth of Ozark destitution in Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone is, I think, more effective in getting us to care about the people there and their complication and their dramas than any New York Times or Atlantic exposé. I don’t know that I’ve come across a more devastating takedown of empire and its capitalistic engine than what I found in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy. The Turner House by Angela Flournoy told me more about Detroit than the dozens of deep-dive analyses I’d read in everywhere from The New Yorker to Business Insider. An article or essay can tell us ‘why,’ but a piece of fiction can tell us why.

  Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi, Book cover3. What does your creative process look like? How do you maintain momentum and remain inspired?
  Because I’m often working on so many things simultaneously and in different states of completion, an idea has enough time to germinate in my mind and find form by the time I’m able to put keystrokes to Scrivener. Momentum is interesting in that respect, because when the idea first strikes (whether in the form of an image or a question I want to explore), I’ll want to write it right away on some love-at-first-sight tip. But I’ll be contractually obligated to complete other work in the meantime, so I’ll have to let both me and the idea mature a bit before we can get into the business of truly loving each other. In terms of creative process, I’ll put together the broad brushstrokes of the idea (main character/s, place or what the place is based on, story arc), then I’ll start doing a chapter-by-chapter outline. And while I’m putting together the outline, I’ll begin drafting so that my headlights only show me the bit of road directly ahead of me and I can still be surprised by things that pop up in the drafting that may affect me later down the line. With Beasts Made of Night, Crown of Thunder, and War Girls, I had the outlines all the way done before I sat down to draft, and part of that is just the relationship I have with my editor on those books, with the understanding that the outline is a living document. Riot Baby had no outline. It came to me out-of-order too. The Harlem chapter and some Rikers scenes were originally part of a larger work and a writer-friend convinced me that there was a separate story there. When I broke it out, Watts came. And that was the version that initially sold. It was all jumbled up differently too. And working with Ruoxi, I figured out its current structure. South Central was the last piece of the puzzle and once that clicked into place, I had the whole book in front of me. As far as momentum, I love writing. It’s a genre of spiritual communion for me. I go to the same place I go when I’m deep into prayer or when I hear a rendition of “O, Holy Night” that lifts me out of my body. Chariots of Fire is one of my favorite movies, and there’s a character—a China-born Scottish missionary training for the 1924 Olympics—and after one training montage, his sister airs her concerns that he’s so caught up in running and training that he’s neglected his responsibility to take up the family mission in China. And he tells her “I know God made me for a purpose. But I also know he made me fast. And when I run, I feel His presence.” That’s it. That’s the tweet, so to speak. The story I’m telling excites me, but the telling of it—the act of writing—excites me even more. It feels…good. Almost narcotic. I also love getting better at it. Shooting in the gym. And when I can pull a craft-thing off that I couldn’t before…the only feeling that’s come close has been finally beating a boss I spent 17 hours on in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

  4. How can writers affect resistance movements?
  Writers are in the business of mythmaking and imaginings, and imaginings are what, among other things, power resistance movements. Things can be better is an act of imagining, and writing concretizes that in very discrete fashion. Another element of mythmaking, particularly among marginalized communities, is an unveiling. Black writers revealing to a wider audience the interiority—the SOULS—of black folk. Trans narratives unveiling for a wider audience the multiplicity of their experience. In a way, the other side of things can be better is I didn’t know it was like this. Those are the two parties on opposite sides of the table, and writing is the table. That’s why journalists get thrown in prison or jail. It’s why, say, a school or library might try to ban Angie Thomas’s books. There’s an unveiling that the status quo considers dangerous, because, then, those who previously suffered from a poverty of imagination (oppressors, knowing and unknowing) can or are forced to reckon with that I didn’t know it was like this that can then turn into things can be better. Writing’s far from the only ingredient (organizers, insurgent law makers, student activists and the professors/administrators who can choose to be on the right side of history are also other elements of the stew), but there is no President Barack Obama without Toni Morrison. At the same time, there’s the temptation to look to writers as oracles. Black writers called to give talks on “the race question in America” for instance, who then get asked by perhaps well-meaning white folk “how do we solve the problem of race in America” and it’s like, look, this book was inspired by anger at police shootings and anime, I can’t tell you how exactly you can enact change in your community, you gotta figure that out on your own. Some writers are able to do it. Baldwin was able to do it. Arundhati Roy was and is able to do it.

  “I think in America, the biggest threat to free expression is, paradoxically, American publishing.”

  5. What is your favorite bookstore, or library?
  Early on during my time as a film student at NYU, I was perpetually poor and hungry and angry. I was learning a lot, about story and recovery and drama and myself, and I was occasionally sleeping on the couch on our program’s floor (I believe it was the seventh floor of our building) when I couldn’t find anywhere else. During off-hours, I would wander to The Strand and just walk and be around books. It was only a few blocks north so I didn’t need to use any subway credit to get there. And my hometown library was a 3.5hr bus ride plus 15-20 mins in a taxi away. As some are drawn to bars and others to churches, I’m drawn to bookstores and libraries. They’re sanctuaries. They’re sanctuary. Hope germinates in me that osmosis will take place and whatever goodness is in those books that got them a place on those shelves will leak into me and I’ll produce something that could someday go there. That was my thinking in 2010-2011. Of course, I would want to buy some of those books, simply to possess them, to take a piece of that peace with me and hold it whenever I couldn’t be there. But a book purchased sometimes meant a meal foregone. Occasionally, it was worth it. Still, a stroll, however brief, through The Strand was enough to cure whatever spiritual malady I was suffering from at the time, even if only for a time. Almost as though nothing bad could touch me there. I was struggling to figure out screenplays and stageplays, but I knew books. I knew how to write them. And reading them never felt like struggling to decipher hieroglyphics. The Strand was always there waiting for me. As incredible and welcoming as every bookstore and library I’ve been to in my journey as a published writer, this place was there when I needed a place like it. I will love it forever.

  6. What do you consider to be the biggest threat to free expression today? Have there been times when your right to free expression has been challenged?
  In some places, it’s direct government repression, of course. But I think in America, the biggest threat to free expression is, paradoxically, American publishing. On the journalism front, you have these media conglomerates gobbling up and cannibalizing local news to put in place homogenized messaging that eradicates the ability of local journalists to raise local concerns. And in our paper of record, myopic both-sides-ism wearing the cloak of majestic neutrality has become perhaps the greatest trick the devil ever pulled re: journalism. In disregarding the existing power dynamics that privilege straight white male voices off the rip, platforming them in the name of objectivity (or page views) diminishes if not outright obliterates minority viewpoints. Same thing re: Twitter where the automatic and systemic privileging of whiteness and maleness results in the harassing of others into their own silos or off the platform entirely. And when you ignore the warning signs raised by those voices on Twitter re Gamergate and #yourslipisshowing, you get a lot of what the current American political situation is. In November 2019, Publishers Weekly published their annual Salary Survey, and their graphs showed that American publishing is 84% white. Non-Hispanic black/African-Americans accounted for 2%. When the editors (acquiring and otherwise), marketing department, cover designers, publishing house presidents, copy editors, production editors, etc., are majority white, what hope is there for the unveiling of stories that don’t center or prioritize or accord themselves somehow to either the white experience or the White Gaze? Even when stories featuring black characters are told, the majority, in my experience, have been about the pain they endure, pain specific to their blackness. I know this isn’t a book, but it’d be dope to see a Marriage Story or The Irishman that had or was about black folk. The best season of Boardwalk Empire was Season 4 and I’m convinced that the show could have been the paradigm-shifting post-Sopranos juggernaut HBO wanted it to be if they’d made it Chalky’s story all along. Now, my journey so far as a career author has been very charmed. I’m lucky. I’ve been able to get away with writing exactly what I’ve wanted to write and to, so far, make a living at it. I’m only a few years in, though, so I’ll report back as I get deeper into this thing. Now, I know I just talked a lot about black pain in stories and Riot Baby is a book explicitly and specifically about black pain, but it’s a book I wanted to write and laden with influences I brought with me. Anime, the Bodega Boys, the X-Men, ScHoolboy Q, etc. And I’ve been lucky to work with people who, at every step of the way, have serviced my vision and helped me refine it and who have shouted the virtues of my story from the rooftops. That’s been my situation with Beasts, with Crown, and with War Girls. And it’s most certainly been my situation with Riot Baby. Shoutout to Ruoxi and Caro and Jaya and Irene. Rather than push back, they’ve all pushed me forward with their contributions. I’m lucky. My only wish is that this were the norm. It’s a unicorn situation, and it needs to be standard operating procedure across the entire industry. I hope more decision-makers ask themselves “who’s in our masthead?” and “who’s acquiring books for us?”

  7. How does your identity shape your writing? How does the history of where you are from affect your identity, and in turn, your writing?
  Beasts Made of Night was the very first book I wrote with my DNA and Nigerian heritage in it. And the book I wrote before that, Goliath, was the first book I wrote with a black protagonist. I was a good writer before, I knew that much. But when I wrote Goliath, I leveled up. In a serious way. Prose, the adventurous story structure, character insight, all of it, it felt like I’d gone Super Saiyan. I don’t know that writing about black people made me better, but I know that once I started doing that and writing more concretely into my own experience, I got better at this. Identity played an interesting role in my getting published, too. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two editors who acquired my debuts—my YA and adult debuts—were women of color. Not only did Tiff Liao, before she went to Henry Holt, take me on at Razorbill with Beasts, but she encouraged me to make it more Nigerian, to really lean into that as the story backdrop. She essentially pushed me to take ownership of this story. She took a chance on me and if she was swinging for the fences, she wanted me to swing similarly. And it’s a wonderful bit of serendipity and full-circle-itis that I’ll be working with Ruoxi again on Goliath, the book that started so much of this. Goliath was also the first book I wrote set in the city I live in. That screenplay about the alcoholic writer and his brother was based in my hometown, where I grew up, and this book had a familiar, non-New York, setting that I could draw from and that I felt a sense of permanent connection to. It was in my blood. I wasn’t writing a story set in a place I’d studied abroad in or worked in or went to see friends in. I was writing stories, suddenly, set in places that held distinct emotional memories tied to fundamental and permanent parts of me. I was writing about home. Several homes, but all of them under that umbrella of the word Home. That screenplay was Rock Lee taking off his leg weights during his fight with Gaara. Goliath was me unlocking the First of the Eight Gates, and by Beasts Made of Night, I could open a couple more of those joints. By the time I wrote War Girls, I was probably up to the Fifth Gate. With Riot Baby, I’m able to perform jutsus I never thought possible before.

  “There is such a glorious Eden of young poets of color blossoming right now.”

  8. What is the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words? Have you ever written something you wish you could take back?
  As far as what’s made it to print, I think the ending to Riot Baby might be it. And I won’t say why for those who haven’t yet read it. I think another candidate might be War Girls. A dual silence smothers the Biafran War that shattered Nigeria between 1967 and 1970. There’s the official government/societal silence; the war generally not taught in schools, and there’s been no public reckoning. Additionally, there’s the familial silence that, I think, is familiar to a lot of first- or second-gen writers who are now excavating the national traumas of their homelands through fiction. For our (grand)parents, the trauma may be too near, and that was a fear that dogged me through the writing of War Girls. My mother was a child at the outbreak of hostilities. Was I reinjuring her with this book? I don’t wish to take that story of sisters Onyii and Ify back, but it was the first time I was scared to write something because of how it might affect someone who wasn’t me. I do worry sometimes, though. I’ve spent much of my life angry, and anger still propels and blankets me, and I have to be cognizant that, in writing out of anger, I’m not exacting vengeance or vindictively beating down someone who can’t fight back. I have a power now that I didn’t have before, a platform. And if Auden’s poetry has taught me nothing else, it’s that a little bit of the dictator lives in all of us.

  9. Which writers working today are you most excited by?
  I will read anything and everything Leslie Jamison writes. My God, her X-ray vision, her self-awareness, her fearlessness. It’s all there in her prose and how she writes about the writing and researching and how she talks about her process; it’s electric. There is such a glorious Eden of young poets of color blossoming right now with Danez Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, Eve L. Ewing, Kaveh Akbar, Logan February, Ocean Vuong, Jericho Brown, Momtaza Mehri, Solmaz Sharif, I could go on. And what an incandescent thing that is to be able to say. Also, whenever any of the aforementioned writes prose, it feels less like a venturing than a gift-giving. An act of generosity. Lastly, I have to give a hearty and grateful shoutout to Ken Liu who has been almost single-handedly responsible for the cannonade of Chinese science-fiction newly available in the West over the past half-decade. On that front, perhaps the upcoming novel I’m jonesing hardest for is Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds.

  10. Why do you think people need stories?
  They provide relief. Sometimes, it’s the relief of the same genre as what we find in a church sanctuary when the minister ascends to the pulpit and late-morning sunlight is blasting through the windows behind him to gild him and the congregants before you as the choir reaches the climax of the doxology. Sometimes, it’s the relief of a kind yet somehow firm-and-gentle hand at the back of the neck, kneading away not sorrow but the loneliness that can attend it. Sometimes, it’s the relief of discovering you’re no longer bound by the laws of gravity and that, yes, you can actually fly. Sometimes, it’s an answer. Stories do all of these things for us. I’m convinced we’d be utterly lost without them.

  Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction by an African; its sequel, Crown of Thunder; and War Girls. He holds a B.A. from Yale, an M.F.A. in screenwriting from the Tisch School of the Arts, a master’s degree in economic law from Sciences Po, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. His fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, Omenana magazine, Lightspeed, and Uncanny. His nonfiction has appeared in Nowhere magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, Tor.com, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. Riot Baby is his adult fiction debut.

• NPR - https://www.npr.org/2020/01/26/798237707/this-isnt-new-questions-for-tochi-onyebuchi-author-of-riot-baby

  AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
  'This Isn't New': Questions For Tochi Onyebuchi, Author Of 'Riot Baby'
  January 26, 202010:00 AM ET
  Petra Mayer at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., May 21, 2019. (photo by Allison Shelley)
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  Riot Baby
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  When LA Erupted In Anger: A Look Back At The Rodney King Riots
  THE LOS ANGELES RIOTS, 25 YEARS ON
  When LA Erupted In Anger: A Look Back At The Rodney King Riots
  The "riot baby" in Tochi Onyebuchi's slim, devastating new novel is Kev, born amidst the chaos of the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. Kev is the sort of character who's often reduced to a statistic, in books or outside them: He's young, he's black, he's in prison — while out in the world, his sister Ella is the one who wields mysterious, terrifying magical powers.

  But Onyebuchi puts Kev at the center of the story, as a kind of conduit between the horrors of the past and a believably dystopian future. His life is hemmed in by structural and individual racism at every turn; Onyebuchi describes his encounters with predatory police officers with a chilling matter-of-factness.

  Over the course of the book, we follow Kev from childhood to prison to release into a near-future version of Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood that's become a sterile corporate holding pen for parolees, where a tiny chip implanted in his thumb controls his entire life. (For a while. Kev's future — and Ella's — well, that's another thing, and I won't spoil it for you.)

  Recently, I had an email conversation with Onyebuchi about the book and what inspired it.

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  Reading Kev's story, you get a sense that his experiences are part of a continuum of hatred and injustice, reaching backwards and forwards in time.

  That sense of continuum was absolutely intentional. After Michael Brown's shooting death at the hands of Darren Wilson, and after Eric Garner's murder at the hands of Officer Daniel Pantaleo, there was much talk, not only among the white commentariat, but also among whites that I knew in my own life that this problem was unique to the moment we lived in, this post-Trayvon epoch, as though Trayvon Martin's death at the hands of George Zimmerman and Zimmerman's subsequent acquittal served as this demarcation. You saw it too with the murder of Tamir Rice and Oscar Grant before him. This was supposedly some new problem or the newest iteration of a recent problem.

  Tochi Onyebuchi
  Christina Orlando
  But even the briefest of conversations among black Americans revealed a world-weariness. This wasn't new. I distinctly remember being in college and hearing about the shooting death of Sean Bell back in 2006. Plainclothes NYPD fired 50 shots into the guy's car, and the scene and references to it were on almost every rap mixtape I listened to at the time. ... The idea of police forces as little more than white militia employed to ensure a certain social stratification highlighted just how temporally ever-present police brutality is in American history. And I wanted to capture the intergenerationality of the national paroxysms, embodied in the riots and protests that followed so many of these killings.

  Ella, who lived through the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, at one point confronts a pastor who lived through the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, and he tries to nudge her in the direction of docility and forgiveness, but Ella sees how much the conflagration in Detroit mirrors 1992 LA mirrors Baltimore in 2015 after Freddie Gray. In 2014 and 2015, many of the (well-meaning) white folk in my life talked about a broken system, but what Ella sees is a system working just as designed. And it was the sense of futility that she feels that pushed me to write this story.

  Just as white society has proven itself incapable of understanding its past torment of black Americans, it remains blind to how its own walking into the future will trample the rest of us.

  It was important to me to show that, if so much of what has come before resembles what is going on now, then so would so much of what is to come. There's increasing awareness of racial and gender bias in algorithms. Women were given lower credit scores with the Apple card because of an opaque algorithm determining credit worthiness. Courts across the country are using algorithms to spit out "risk assessment" scores to make decisions about bail and parole, machines essentially dictating the terms of a person's freedom and whether or not they're to be granted it to begin with. ... "The past is never dead, it isn't even past," Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun. Just as white society has proven itself incapable of understanding its past torment of black Americans, it remains blind to how its own walking into the future will trample the rest of us.

  Tell me about Ella. I feel like in another book she'd be more the center of the story, more the Chosen One type, but you've done something different.

  I have to say, when I saw the finale of Watchmen, I felt very vindicated! There are a few reasons why I positioned Ella the way I did in the story, one craft-related and the other more caught up in the substance of issues I wanted to explore.

  In anime, whenever you have an overpowered character, the narrative designer must confront the challenge of how to make that character compelling ... I wanted Ella, my overpowered character, so to speak, to be one of the story's protagonistic foci, and the question arose: How to make God compelling. How do you make her interesting? Well, you give her something she wants to do but can't. As powerful as she is, she can't protect her little brother, Kev. That gave me the root of the drama, the story's conflict. It was Ella turning against the way the world spun. That friction was the story, or, at least, its engine.

  The second reason why Ella is positioned the way she is is that I knew incarceration would take up a significant portion of the story's real estate. My time in Ramallah working with Palestinian Arab detainees, my tenure as part of a client's habeas corpus team with Columbia Law School's Mass Incarceration Clinic, my work with the New York Attorney General's Office's Civil Rights Bureau, and my time with the Legal Aid Society's Parole Revocation Defense Unit had inundated me with displays of the human drama that occurs behind bars.

  ... the incarcerated are most qualified to speak about their own experiences, but I wanted to tell people some of what I saw and heard and read about in these places.

  I was wary of engaging in any sort of savior complex; the incarcerated are most qualified to speak about their own experiences, but I wanted to tell people some of what I saw and heard and read about in these places. I had to get it out of me. And, given my time in law school and as a legal professional who has dealt in these systems, I felt I had the kind of background that was needed to do this telling. This wasn't a faceless black mass I was trying to humanize, these were specific stories I needed to get out of me and felt were especially compelling. And I didn't want the reader to experience these things from any sort of remove. I wanted them to cognitively live in Rikers with Kev and not have the option of escape that Ella would have, given her powers.

  There's a lot of Biblical reference in the book, and I think it's interesting to look at Ella through the lens of a Chosen One or Anointed One. Ella comes to believe that she was prayed for, that she is the answer to a beseeching, that she is the vehicle for her people's deliverance. Which begs the question, whose Chosen One is she?

  I love the way you've structured the story — it's already sort of fragmented, so as I read, it took me a beat or two to notice that things were even weirder than I thought they were. Why did you choose to do it that way?

  As I was writing, I hadn't actually realized how much ground the book covers, years-wise. I was essentially just following the emotional beats and had a moment similar to Kev's when he realizes just how long he's been in Rikers. As I was writing into the latter part of the book, my thought was less "what would the near-future look like" and more "what would my near-future look like?" For some reason, that made it easier for me to extrapolate a lot of the trends I'd seen and ones I'd mentioned earlier into the future: The privatization of the carceral state, the application of military tech on the domestic population, algorithmic policing.

  Imagining A Dismal Future, 'Years And Years' Says Plenty About The Present
  TV REVIEWS
  Imagining A Dismal Future, 'Years And Years' Says Plenty About The Present
  One of the most terrifying shows I've watched in recent years was the HBO/BBC joint production, Years and Years, which follows the British Lyons family, episode after episode, into the near future. It starts in 2019 and ends 15 years later and, in the meantime, unveiled, in chilling and clarifying fashion, Trump nuking a Chinese territory, Brexit's impact on the refugee crisis, physical Snapchat filters, another bank run preceding economic collapse, and climate change's effects on domestic crop production ... the show gave the impression that it wasn't happening in the After, it was happening in the Now. I wanted Riot Baby to have that quality, that now-ness. Many have called the latter part of this book dystopian, which I've found fascinating because while dystopia is imagined future for some, it is lived reality for others.

  It's such a small book, but when I pick it up, the history weighs a ton — was that what you intended?

  I want [readers] to think about the last word in the book, and whether what it evokes in them is the same as what it evokes in others.

  Absolutely. I'm enamored of the novella format for precisely what it's able to do in this respect. It's literature's miniseries. Prime examples are John Crowley's "Great Work of Time" and Ted Chiang's "The Lifecycle of Software Objects". Another story that Riot Baby shares DNA with is Ken Liu's "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" and all of the aforementioned works cover large spans of time — at least a few decades — and do so with an expansiveness you're not really permitted with a 17,499-word word count limit. Yet these are all stories you can consume over the course of a weekend, which is nice because I'm not a particularly fast reader. It's impossible to capture the totality of white terror historically enacted on black Americans, further imagining it into the future — in part because each disaggregated experience of living within the strictures of a white supremacist society is specific to the person — but I did want to engender that sense of expansiveness, of repetition, that the reader can witness so that when they see Ella, burdened with hopelessness, make the decisions she makes, they will understand her.

  What do you want readers to feel when they put the book down?

  I want them to think about the last word in the book, and whether what it evokes in them is the same as what it evokes in others.

• The Nerd Daily - https://www.thenerddaily.com/tochi-onyebuchi-author-interview/

  Beth Mowbray·Writers' Corner·January 16, 2020·9 min read
  Q&A: Tochi Onyebuchi, Author of ‘Riot Baby’
  Tochi Onyebuchi Riot Baby Author Interview
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  Tochi Onyebuchi has clearly been working hard to make a name for himself in the literary world over the past several years, and boy is it paying off! You may recognise him as the author of the successful young adult novels Beasts Made of Night (2017) and War Girls (2019) – both only the first book in a series with more to come! Onyebuchi will also be starting off 2020 with a bang as his adult debut Riot Baby, a speculative fiction novella replete with political commentary on structural racism in the United States, hits bookstores on January 21st.

  The Nerd Daily had the great fortune of posing a few questions to Onyebuchi about everything from his upcoming release to his works in progress. Read on to learn more about this bright and brilliant writer, the light he aims to shine on the myriad ways racism and discrimination exist in our world, and the three books he would choose to keep him company on a desert island.

  Good day Mr. Onyebuchi and thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions for The Nerd Daily! Tell us a little bit about yourself and Riot Baby, your latest novella set to release on January 21st.
  Born and raised a New Englander. Trained as a lawyer. Proud member of the Toonami Generation. Child of the Internet. My novella, Riot Baby, is, among other things, the result of me in 2015 not searching hard enough on Etsy or Redbubble for a Magneto Was Right t-shirt.

  There is such a lovely video on YouTube of your reaction to seeing the cover of Riot Baby for the first time. You appear to be experiencing so many emotions all at once – it is quite moving! Could you share what was going through your mind when you first saw this beautiful cover?
  I had no idea what to expect. I had no idea there would be a face on the cover and that it would be hers and that, in its silence, it would say so much to me. It’s one of those things where so many elements of a book come together perfectly, and I feel like I/we got it truly, truly right. Christine Foltzer, the Art Director at Tor.com, and Jaya Miceli, our artist, captured the book perfectly. I knew I could trust publisher Irene Gallo’s stewardship. But it really felt like I’d hit the lottery. So, more than anything, what was going through my mind (and my body) was gratitude. Immense, overwhelming gratitude.

  The storyline in Riot Baby follows the main characters, Ella and Kev, through multiple worlds – both the physical world they live in, as well as the visions they have of both past and future worlds. With such broad landscapes to work with, how did you decide for Riot Baby to be a novella rather than a full-length novel? Do you think we might see Ella and Kev again in any of your future work?
  I think we ended on just the right note with the story of Ella and Kev. I’m a fan of the ambiguous, and one thing I can get away with in my adult fiction that I can’t quite manage in my young adult work is elision. I like that, here, I can get away with writing by implication. It really drives home the notion of a story being an endeavor that demands work of the reader, or at least, their participation. I don’t want to tell the reader what happens after the last page of Riot Baby. I want that to be a thing they’re constantly asking themselves (and the material that came before).

  I love the novella form. My first love is novels, but what I’ve often found is that the story is much more powerful when compressed. Say what you need to say and get out, that sort of thing. There was so much I wanted to do that there was no way Riot Baby could just be a short story unless it was written ENTIRELY by implication. But I didn’t want to stretch it out into a full-length novel because I didn’t want to dilute any of it. And I wanted it to be a thing a reader could conceivably digest in one sitting. I recently went through the whole thing again without breaks (I did get up for tea and water) and found myself profoundly moved by the end. Until then, I’d experienced the story in pieces or. As something to be worked on, to be edited, with phrases or words moved around or excised or added in. I’d experienced the piece as a fixer, and it wasn’t until a month or two before publication that I let myself finally experience it as a reader. That was all the confirmation. I needed to know I’d made the right choice re length.

  Why did you choose specific real life events such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the shooting of Sean Bell in 2006 as anchor points in Riot Baby, as opposed to other similar events which have occurred in the U.S.? The book obviously speaks out against structural racism and police violence in the U.S. Is there anything you would like to add or directly say here to your readers on this topic?
  I want to illustrate a continuity. When Trayvon Martin was shot and killed and his killer acquitted, when Michael Brown was shot and killed and his killer got away scot-free, when Eric Garner was murdered and his killer suffered no consequence, there was a lot of talk about how “bad it had gotten” with police. It was always that bad. I distinctly remember the Sean Bell shooting. I was in college, and you couldn’t put on a single rap mixtape without hearing a line about it. And it was one of the first times, oddly enough, that I’d seen rappers this united in sharing a specific and singular concern or topic. Everything in rap was about Sean Bell.

  I wanted to anchor Riot Baby in this world, but I wanted to touch on another dynamic that reared its head during the aforementioned events. The realization that a lot of non-black Americans had that their experience of America was not everyone’s experience of America. This whole Two Americas phenomenon. In the way that speculative fiction offers glimpses into alien worlds, I wanted Riot Baby to do the same. Offer a glimpse into a world alien to much of the American readership.

  Starting with the 1992 LA Uprising after the Rodney King verdict was simply another part of this idea of continuance. This isn’t just what’s happening. It’s what has happened.

  Riot Baby seems to fit into the recently popular realm of “magical realism,” as it weaves together historical events and the real world with fantastical or supernatural elements. What effect(s) did you hope this approach would have on the reader?
  I don’t know that I’d call it “magical realism”. To me, magical realism refers to the specific movement in Latin American literature that came about as a response to the dictatorships and attendant censorship throughout the 1900s. Isabel Allende, Borges, Miguel Asturias, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I’d distinguish them from say the animist realism of a lot of African authors because there’s a certain religious/spiritual/mythical component in the African work (frex, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow or Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi) I often find absent in the LatAm magical realist oeuvre. (Granted, all of this is said with the caveat that the very bestowing of such labels is a subjective endeavor, and my above classifications may elicit their own rebuttal.)

  But I do think an important component that tradition shares with Riot Baby is political critique. I wanted the world of Riot Baby to be recognizably our own. Suffocatingly so. I think one reason Black Mirror is as powerful an experience of science fiction as it is comes down to the fact that the realities depicted are two steps away from our own present, whether those steps are forward or sideways. It’s a way of tackling present anxieties without drowning the message in allegory. At the same time, with the fantastical, you can engage in extrapolation, push a joke or thought-experiment premise past its logical endpoint and you get fantastika. I wanted to actualize the obliteration of the police state. And speculative fiction is the perfect vehicle for that portrait.

  See also

  Writers' Corner
  Q&A: Erin Lindsey, Author of ‘The Silver Shooter’
  Tor.com Publishing recently acquired the rights to your upcoming full-length novel Goliath – in fact, you signed a two-book deal! Congratulations! Goliath has been described as “a post-apocalyptic epic… focused on a diverse cast of characters living in and around the once-thriving metropolis of New Haven, Conn” and Tor also said the second book was “pitched as a fantasy Get Out meets The Secret History.” These premises sound amazing! What continues to draw you to write about post-apocalyptic and dystopian worlds?
  Post-apocalypse is already the reality for many marginalized communities. In the event of Goliath, the focus is on the environmental dimension. You look at the water situation in Flint, MI (still) and in parts of Bridgeport, CT, and it’s dystopia. It’s a breakdown of so many of the institutional structures that are supposed to support a thriving civilization. Algorithmic policing enabled by partnerships between companies like Palantir and local police departments where they basically enact Minority Report but racist, that’s dystopia. Being a student of color from a lower class or lower-middle class background and sitting in a classroom with a classmate whose family owns a diamond mine and travels by helicopter, that’s a first-contact-with-aliens story if I’ve ever read one. So, I think it’s simply a matter of perspective. Aesthetically, I appreciate working in the post-apocalypse sandbox because there’s a clean-slate-desert-expanse-road-movie quality to how it looks in my mind, and a primordial part of me is drawn to westerns (having to ingest, at the same time, a lot of the poisonous imperialism of the genre). As far as dystopia, that’s just two sideways steps away from my reality.

  Much of your writing also addresses political unrest, racism, violence, and oppression or discrimination. In tackling these topics, what is most important for you to communicate to your readers?
  That these things exist in more ways than can be imagined.

  The list of degrees you have is fascinating – a B.A. from Yale, an MFA in Screenwriting from Tisch, a Masters degree in Global Economic Law from L’institut d’etudes politiques, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. How do these various areas of study impact your writing?
  The degrees are all testaments of things that I’ve been interested in. My B.A. was in Political Science, I got the M.F.A. to learn how to write movies, the Masters degree and the J.D. were attained simultaneously because law school, as the son of Nigerian immigrants, was my prophecy since a babe. And they all infect my writing because they color my perspective of things. I experience the world according to my socio-biological demographic group but also as a political scientist, French speaker, and lawyer.

  Your author bio indicates that you work in the tech industry. You have also been incredibly busy over the past few years writing novels, novellas, short fiction, and non-fiction pieces. How do you balance all of this? Do you follow a certain routine or schedule when you are writing?
  I’m still not entirely sure.

  Let’s Get Nerdy: Behind the Writer with 8 Quick Questions
  First book that made you fall in love with reading: The Ruby Knight by David Eddings
  3 books you would take on a desert island: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, The Water Margin by Shi Nai’an
  Movie that you know by heart: Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit
  Place that everyone should see in their lifetime: Outer space
  Introvert or extrovert: Both
  Coffee, tea, or neither: Coffee
  First job: Paperboy
  Person you admire most and why: Mom, because she’s done the impossible. Over and over and over again.

• Tor.com - https://www.tor.com/2020/02/18/watch-marlon-james-and-tochi-onyebuchi-interview-each-other-about-almost-everything/

  Watch Marlon James and Tochi Onyebuchi Interview Each Other About…Almost Everything
  Stubby the Rocket
  Tue Feb 18, 2020 11:30am 3 comments 2 Favorites [+]

  Screenshot: The Strand
  There’s a sense of heightened reality that occurs when you see Marlon James (author of the rich fantasy Black Leopard, Red Wolf) and Tochi Onyebuchi (author of the not-actually-dystopic superhero tale Riot Baby) sitting on a public stage, before a rapt crowd, speaking with each other. Either of them alone exhibits superhuman charm, but put the two of them together and they become a Super Saiyan of wit. A veritable Voltron of expertly-deployed shade. A drift compatible charisma Jaeger, if you will—except one half of the Jaeger’s wearing a shirt that says “Slipthot” on it, and the other half is super into Can.

  And lucky us, they got together for an event at the Strand! The two authors discussed writing, anime, and life in a violently white society, the X-Men, Sarah McLachlan?, and American Dirt, amongst a mosaic of topics. We’ve provided a transcript below.

  Marlon James: So we’re gonna talk about Riot Baby, we’re gonna talk about writing […] You know, the first thing I thought—because it’s almost the reverse of what I’m doing. I wrote this other kind of very contemporary novel, which is really insulting when people call it historical—I’m like, I lived through it, it’s not historical—and I moved to a fantasy kind of story. A lot of people look at this as a sort of a change in gears. Does it feel that way to you?

  Tochi Onyebuchi: I think the way in which it feels like a change is that it’s the first published adult work that I have. At the same time, when I was growing up, I wrote only stuff geared for an adult audience. You know, Beasts Made of Night, Crown of Thunder, War Girls, all of that was sort of a happy accident. I almost fell into YA. So Riot Baby very much felt like a homecoming. And it’s interesting—one of the most fascinating things that has happened with regards to talking to people about Riot Baby in interviews and what have you is they’ll constantly bring up the word “dystopia.” And there’s a part towards the end of the book that gets into the near-future, but the vast majority of it is set in the here and now, in the recent past, but they’ll still use that term “dystopian.” And it got me thinking, dystopian for whom? Because this is just stuff that I’ve seen. This is stuff that I know people have experienced and that I’ve witnessed and that I’ve heard, that I’ve watched people suffer through. What happened after Rodney King, is that dystopian? You know, dystopian for whom? And so that I think is a very interesting new dimension to what I’m having to consider with regards to the fiction that I’m writing that wasn’t necessarily like—you know, War Girls is set like hundreds of years into the future, so you could see it with that: “dystopian.” It doesn’t really work with Beasts or Crown, but it’s interesting seeing dystopian applied to aspects of the African-American experience.

  MJ: I thought of that as well, because I was reading it—the first time I read it, I read it with that in mind, and I was almost searching for the dystopian elements, because a lot of it’s like, What are you talking about? This shit is going on now. And I remember where I was when the Rodney King riot happened, the LA riots. I’m not even sure if we should be calling it riots. I’m curious about when did you realize this is a story that had to be told? Because usually with books, the good ones, you feel like this is a story that was waiting to be told. When did you realize that?

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  TO: Probably some time in 2015.

  MJ: [deadpan] What the hell was going on in 2015?

  TO: [laughs] So this was around the time that there was this flood of videographic evidence of police-involved shootings. So you had the security footage of Tamir Rice’s shooting, you had the dash-cam footage of Laquan McDonald, you had the footage of—oh my goodness, I’m blanking on his name, but the gentleman in North Charleston, South Carolina, who was shot while running away from cops—you had all this videographic evidence. Even Philando Castile’s final moments, which were broadcast on Facebook Live. And after so many of these instances of police-involved shootings, it was the same result: the perpetrator suffered no consequences. It got to the point where we were just asking for an indictment. Just, like, give us anything. Or like, at least give us a trial. Like, something. And we couldn’t even get that. So I was, by the end of 2015, I was in a very angry place. And I was working actually for the Civil Rights Bureau of the Office of the Attorney General. And I graduated from law school earlier in the year, and so I was ostensibly working in a position that was meant to enforce the civil rights protections for the people of the state of New York. And yet all this stuff was happening. I felt this immense powerlessness. And this story was a way out of that. And it’s interesting too, because there was one point I was like, Oh, am I writing this to, like, try to humanize black people in the eyes of a white audience? And I was like, No. I’m literally writing this because if I don’t get this out of me, something bad is going to happen to me. So it was very much driven by this impetus of catharsis. I just needed to get it out of me. And then, I was working on it, and then after we sold, and I was working with Ruoxi [Chen, the Tor.com Publishing acquiring editor for Riot Baby] on it, and we made the connection to South Central, and to Rodney King and all that, I was like, Wait a second, it’s a thing! It’s a thing that can become this incredible statement about a lot of what’s going on in Black America, and a lot of what has been going on.

  MJ: Even if we go back and forth with the term “dystopian,” there are elements of speculative, elements of sci-fi, even elements of, say, super-hero […] and I wondered, was that a response—I almost felt as if Ella’s powers came about almost in necessity, as a response to—and of course, at the end, homegirl responds in a major way. But if that’s why, let’s call it the superpower element, showed up.

  TO: So I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted the manifestation of her powers to be, because she does essentially grow into what you could call god-like capabilities. But I don’t necessarily want to have a personality-less Dr. Manhattan-type character.

  Marlon James and Tochi Onyebuchi interview at The Strand in January 2020

  MJ: Yeah, we don’t want a female Dr. Manhattan. Because they’re going to get one next season on Watchmen.

  TO: We could talk about that later! I wanted her to have powers that responded to the story and responded to instances, specific instances in the story, and responded to scenes, as a sort of narrative device, really. Like, I wanted her to have powers that would allow her to show Kev what she was trying to show him and to try to bring him along on her mission. Also, too, I wanted her powers to be something that she’s struggled with, something that she’s tried to figure out how to control, and that control being something that say, for instance, her mom or a pastor is trying to get her to get a hold on her anger because she thinks that she’s angry, then these powers will hurt people or what not. But at the end of the day, a lot of this was just me saying Magneto was right. [audience laughs] You read House of M, right?

  MJ: House of X, and Powers of X.

  TO: House of X, yeah. So when Magneto turns around and he’s like, You have new gods now, yo! Fam. Faaaaaam.

  MJ: I just really like the premise of Powers of X. Like, You know what? Humans are shit. And they’re never going to change, so let’s stop. Let’s just stop.

  TO: Yeah! No, but I think it’s really powerful to see that statement made, because I think with a lot of, you know, ‘race talk’ in America, particularly when it zooms in on interpersonal relations, and like, the individual and whatnot, you know, it’s the Rodney King thing, like Why can’t we just get along? and whatnot. But like, it’s sort of like with climate change, right, Oh, stop using single-use straws and whatnot when really, there’s like 43 dudes on the planet who are responsible for like 83 percent of global carbon emissions. And if we just went after them, we’d do a lot more in terms of stemming the tide of the apocalypse than compostable sporks.

  MJ: Rather than telling quadriplegic people, No, don’t eat.

  TO: Yeah, no, exactly! And so I feel like it’s a similar thing that I was trying to get at with Riot Baby, where so much of the dialog was along the lines of individuals and interpersonal relationships and, like, trying to change the mind of a single reader, or what have you, and I was like, No, it’s systems, you know? It’s systems.

  MJ: Yeah, and you get the sense in this novel—not “get a sense,” it is there—that the real, overriding villain is structural racism.

  TO: Absolutely.

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  MJ: And structural racism’s distant cousin, who I love that you mention, appears when Ella says, “When there isn’t a curfew. Pastor, this isn’t peace. This is order.” And I was like, Damn, MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail—

  TO: Absolutely.

  MJ:—where you think they’re allies, but they’re far more, basically, My desire for freedom and equality can out-trump your desire for order.

  TO: Absolutely. There was this essay in the New York Review of Books that Namwali Serpell, this incredible Zambian author, had written, and she was referencing an anecdote from either a German or a Polish woman who had lived near the gas chambers during WWII, and how she had complained to I think it was an officer, a German officer, if they could, like, get rid of them. Not because she was offended by what was happening to the Jews in there, but because she just didn’t want to have to deal, you know, aesthetically, with all that stuff that was going on. And so oftentimes, when I overhear or participate in discussions on race myself, you get from the other party a sense of annoyance, right? It’s like, they don’t want the problem to go away because they care about the person affected. They want the problem to go away because it’s spoiling their lunch. You know? It’s that sort of thing. And so who’s status quo are we talking about? If there’s no violence, there’s still some hierarchy going on. That means there’s always going to be somebody on the bottom, and is that a sustainable position to be in?

  MJ: The reason why it echoed for me is because of what the novel is and when it’s set, and we’re talking about the Rodney King protests and so on. The civil rights ally, the whatever ally, always distances when it turns to riots. Because again, they’re concerned with order over rights or concerns for justice.

  TO: Absolutely. We see it every time there’s any sort of protest movement and people start to come out of the woodwork to police it, right? Like, Oh, don’t block the freeway, like, Oh, that’s too disruptive. Or like, Oh, don’t kneel, that’s too disrespectful. Like, come on! Come on! Really? And so it’s like every single time—

  MJ: Yeah, we should protest at 4 in the morning, when there’s no traffic—

  TO: Exactly! Just protest when it’s convenient for me.

  MJ: And sing something so I can go, I was touched.

  TO: [laughs] No, you’ve got to have Sarah McLachlan playing in the background, that’s what you—

  MJ: You know what? I happen to like Sarah McLachlan. Anyway, so the characters literally move. But they also feel literally hemmed in. And I mean, if there is ever a metaphor for the black experience, there it is. How much of that contradiction do you think powers the novel? And the second part of that question is, is that also—because some parts of this novel, for something called “dystopian,” ties into a lot more narratives, like the “flying Negro.” Ella spends so much of this novel traveling, literally in flight, but everyone’s also so trapped and confined.

  TO: Yeah, that sense of claustrophobia was absolutely intentional. In each chapter, there’s a very specific location that the chapter is set in, and I wanted to physically deviate from that place as little as possible, because I wanted to give the reader that sense of claustrophobia and of being trapped. And when you’re trapped, it’s not as though you’re completely, like, bound, and can’t like move your arms or your feet. You can walk around the confines of your cell. Like, you can still move, but it’s still a cell. And so I wanted to look at different ways in which that would manifest. In some places, your cell is the corner outside the bodega. Like, that’s really where you live your life. In some places, your cell is the halfway house that you live in after you get put on parole. But it’s all a cell. You can’t leave that place or can’t really live a meaningful life outside of that place. And so that was absolutely intentional, trying to maintain that claustrophobia, but also trying to show how universal that feeling is across the country. It’s not just a LA thing, it’s not just New York thing, it’s felt all over the country.

  MJ: And for Kev, flight is almost always a mental thing.

  TO: Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

  MJ: It’s travel, but you’re still bound. Let’s talk about whiteness.

  TO: [chuckles]

  Marlon James and Tochi Onyebuchi interview at The Strand in January 2020

  MJ: I pause for dramatic effect. [Audience laughs.] Because we talk a lot about—not here, but you hear a lot of talk about the white gaze and so on, but Ella spends a lot of time literally gazing at whiteness.

  TO: Yeah, that was—oh man, that scene at the horse race was so much fun to write, because you could… So you could feel her disdain, right? And it’s like she’s completely invisible. And that’s the reality of so many people of color in the country and in the world and in this present-day reality. And she’s able to sort of literalize that and express through her superpower this just, like, dripping Look at you all. It was the feeling I got when whenever I would see a picture of—what’s his name? The guy that used to be 45’s advisor, Steve Bannon!—whenever I would see a picture of Steve Bannon on TV, this dude looked like a bag of Lay’s potato chips that had opened and left out in the sun for two days. [MJ: Yeah] And I’d be like, wait, you’re supposed to be the master race? Like [skeptical face]. [MJ laughing.] My guy. My guy. But being able to have a character express, being able to have a character look and gaze at white people, and just really, really not like them, I think that was a very interesting thing to delve into, because I don’t know that I’d seen that, or that I’d seen it from a position of power. This woman who’s walking among them could literally obliterate every single one of these people that she’s looking at, and it’s almost like she’s descending from the clouds and she’s just like walking amongst the subjects and just like, ugh.

  MJ: But what is she learning?

  TO: I think she’s reinforcing that perspective that she has, that What’s coming to you all, I feel no qualms about it. Because she’s, at that point in the book, not completely all the way there yet. But she does these walks to convince herself. And also like, during the context of this, her brother’s locked up in Rikers, right? So the person that she loves the most in her life is in this hellish environment. She’s watching all these white people walking around free and seeing what they do with their freedom, what they’ve done with their freedom, as a way of sort of convincing herself, Okay, when it gets time to go to the mattresses and do what I gotta do, you know, ain’t no half-stepping. And I think that’s what she’s telling herself in those moments.

  MJ: In a lot of ways, it feels like Ella is the Riot Baby.

  TO: Yeah, so the earliest incarnation of this story didn’t have the South Central chapter. So it started with Harlem and then it went to Rikers and then Watts. And the focus was much more on Kev, and the story was more about the ways in which technology and policing in the carceral state would intertwine to give us a picture of what that might look like in the future. Algorithmic policing and courts using risk-assessments to determine when you can go on parole or at any stage in the proceedings when you could get your freedom, drones, the use of military tech domestically, with regards to policing. But then I started having conversations with my genius editor Ruoxi, who I’m going to shout-out right over there [pointing out Ruoxi in audience] in the striped sweater: galaxy brain. Absolute galaxy brain. She very simply prodded me in a different direction. She was like, Well, what about Ella? Like, I’m not necessarily getting enough Ella here. Where does Ella come from? What’s her arc? Because before, it was very much about Kev and Ella sort of paying witness to what he was going through and not being able to protect him. But then, I started thinking, Well, what about Ella? Where did they come from? What was Ella’s story? What was Ella’s life like before Kev came along? And then, I started thinking about how old these characters were. And I was like, Wait a second, shit, they’d be alive for Rodney King! And even if they weren’t there for Rodney King, they would have seen Rodney King on TV. Because I just remember, being a kid, before I would go to school, I would see footage of the beating on like, The Today Show in the mornings before going to school. Which is like wild! I was like, y’all showed that on a morning show before kids went to school?

  MJ: How old were you?

  TO: I must have been like 8.

  MJ: Wow, I was on to my 3rd job. But go on…

  TO: [laughs] I mean, I was 8 in a Nigerian household so I was also on my third job.

  MJ: [laughs]

  TO: But that opened up so many new story possibilities, so many new opportunities to really deepen thematically what was going on in the story. So I was like, Wait a second, they’re there! They’re in South Central. They’re in LA for that. That’s their first riot. And then you have these flash-points throughout the book. It’s interesting. Kevin’s the one that’s born during the actual riot, but I think it is a lot like you say, where Ella is the one that embodies a lot of what I see when I look at that particular kind of conflagration.

  MJ: It’s kind of a baptism for her.

  TO: [nodding] yeah.

  MJ: People who were inevitably attacking this book would say it was a radicalization.

  TO: [laughing]

  MJ: [sarcastically] Because you know you black people are all terrorists.

  TO: Oh yeah, no, absolutely. It’s like, there’s always the joke about, you know, if you want gun control law, then start arming black people.

  MJ: Because it’s worked twice before.

  TO: [laughs] Yeah—

  MJ: I’m not even kidding. In history, the two times gun control happened was because of that.

  TO: Yeah.

  MJ: I was like, yeah just send somebody down any Main street, you got gun control in ten minutes.

  TO: My thing is, if they see this as radicalizing, I’ll just show them House of X. Or I’ll show them anything with Magneto in it. That’s your guy! That’s the guy right there. How is this any different than that?

  MJ: Well, I’m sure some people who have issues with House of X are like, Hold on, you’re saying Magneto was right all along?

  Marlon James and Tochi Onyebuchi interview at The Strand in January 2020

  TO: Yo, like, that was the thing! Alright, sorry, I’m going to get really excited for a second. [MJ laughing] So my introduction to the X-Men was through the animated series. And I remember it’s like the second or third episode where— In the previous episode, the X-Men tried to raid a sentinel facility, everything goes sideways, Beast gets captured, and in the following episode, at the very beginning of the episode, Magneto comes and he tries to break Beast out of jail. And he punches this huge hole in the wall and he’s like, Look, Beast, we gotta dip, and then Beast is like No, I’m going to submit myself to the human’s justice system, and they have this whole like, really explicit discussion about separatism vs. integration. Like, on a Saturday morning cartoon. They don’t disguise it or anything. But I distinctly remember even as a kid really glomming onto Magneto’s perspective, because I think even at that age, I’d seen that it was almost impossible— Even at that age, knowing the little bit of American history that I knew, it seemed almost impossible that you would get a critical mass of oppressors to change. And they would do it out of the willingness of their heart? Whenever I would come across like, Magneto was right, or an expression of that in those books, I was like, No, but actually. And so when House of X came along, Powers of X, it was almost a literalization of that. And I felt so vindicated, but yeah. So I’m a bit of a Magneto stan.

  MJ: Speaking of gaze, do you think you write for any gaze?

  TO: There are a few Easter eggs in there, but they’re mostly Easter eggs for black people, right? And not necessarily specific references or whatnot, but just like—

  MJ: I could see the Jamaican in Marlon. I’m just going to assume that’s based on me.

  TO: No, of course not. I know plenty of Jamaican Marlons.

  MJ: I actually believe you. One of my best friends is also named Marlon James, so I believe you.

  TO: See? There you go. I could have gotten away with it.

  MJ: You could’ve.

  TO: But even, just like, jokes and the way that we talk sometimes, and—

  MJ [to audience]: Also, that’s me proving that I read the whole book.

  TO: [laughs] You were faking it this entire time. No, but just like, various jokes and cadences and things of that sort. Or even just like off-hand references. Not just necessarily to other tragedies, but like, rap songs for instance. Like, I don’t say when a particular scene takes place, but I say that there’s a car that’s blasting Dipset Anthem on the radio as it’s rolling by, so if you were alive in 2003, you know exactly where and when that scene’s taking place. It’s that sort of thing. I wrote for myself. I was going to say I wrote for us, but I don’t necessarily— Like, “us” is such a big thing? The multiplicity of blackness is infinite, right? But it’s like, me and my people. I wrote for me and my people.

  MJ: Do you get the sense that Kev’s life could have turned out any other way than it did?

  TO: I mean, if he were lighter-skinned, maybe, but I really— So, when I was in film school, like, just down the street, and I was really poor and broke and I would occasionally for, like, spiritual rejuvenation, wander the stacks of The Strand, and this became like a second home to me, and even when I couldn’t afford to buy anything, it was still good to be here, so thank you Strand for having me. But when I was in film school, we studied a lot of plays and a lot of sort of Greek tragedy. And one of the things I really really latched on to was this idea of prophecy. Or like the inevitability of things. Reading Oedipus Rex, you see him constantly trying to fight against the things he knows is going to happen. Or anytime there’s a really well-pulled-off time-travel narrative. And you spend so much time trying to figure out how they’re going to get out of it, how they’re going to change their course, and you see them doing all these things, all these things that make it in your mind impossible for this out-come to actually happen that’s already predetermined, but somehow it’s still happening. And so I really appreciated that element that’s very pervasive in a lot of Greek Tragedy, and I see so much of it in the black experience in America, particularly the more tragic sort of aspects and elements of it. There is this, almost this feeling of inevitability, and that I think is one thing that I wanted to have fuel Ella’s sense of hopelessness, and certainly the hopelessness that I felt when I started writing this book. Because it seemed like this was constantly happening. Constantly constantly constantly happening. And it was almost as though there was this mockery being made, because I know in the past, when you would talk to people about police brutality, they’d always, like, want either out loud or in their head, evidence, right? There was always talk of, like, oh, you don’t know the cop’s side and you know, where’s the dash-cam footage, where’s the evidence? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then, it got to the point where we had all these instances of evidence, of videographic evidence, of unequivocal, like this is what happened here. And over and over and over, there would be this sort of reiteration of injustice. And for me, it’s very difficult to look at that. Particularly in the year 2015 or the year 2020, after everything that’s happened, and after all the record-keeping we’ve done as a society, like all the tweets all the receipts, all of that, right? To see that and know that the outcome is still going to be the same, it’s almost like— It’s Aeschylean. That to me is part of the height of drama and tragedy right there. It’s that inevitability. So I think that inevitability is very much Kev’s life. Like, that’s his destiny. You see it when Ella’s looking at other people and she sees their futures. It’s not as though she sees alternate futures. She sees what’s going to happen to then.

  MJ: Does this mean you’re fatalistic?

  TO: [breathes out heavily, then laughs] Well, it’s interesting because I have a very weird and interesting relationship with faith and with religious faith.

  Marlon James and Tochi Onyebuchi interview at The Strand in January 2020

  MJ: Faith or fate?

  TO: Actually, both. Now that I think about it. I’m the oldest of four, and my dad passed away when I was 10 years old, and it’s been my mom raising the four of us ever since. And she’s very religious. We grew up in a very religiously robust household. I got picture book versions of the bible read to me ever since I was a young warthog. But one thing that was really interesting to see was to watch her aftermath in my father’s passing, after everything that she’s had to endure and go through and everything, just cling to her faith. And it didn’t even, at least from my perspective, what was less important was what she believed in, what was more important was how fervently she believed. And how she felt that belief carried her through the roughest part of her entire life, and enabling her to endure that but also to take care of these four kids and put them in like the best schools in the country and all of that. So that was really powerful to me as a kid and even growing up and going through college. At the same time, I think with regards to fate, I think— I have a very fatalistic view of individual change. There’s this idea that books are empathy machines. And the way that I look at it is that if you’re walking by a lake and you see a kid that’s drowning, you don’t have to know physically what it’s like to drown to feel the urgency to jump in and save that kid. You feel this sort of moral empathy, like Let me go save this child. When you’re reading a book, and you’re cognitively living in the space of the characters, you may not necessarily feel the type of moral empathy that gets you like out in the streets afterwards. But you have this cognitive empathy. So there are like these two dimensions of empathy and it’s the type of thing where it’s not beyond the pale of imagination for me to see somebody on the sidewalk reading this book (although it would be really cool if I saw anyone on the sidewalk reading this book), and walking down St. Nicholas and you know get to that corner of St. Nicholas and 145th St, see a bunch of dudes like Kev and his homies hanging out there, and cross the street while reading this book. Those are the two different types of empathy at work, and so I just like— If you want somebody to change with regards to an issue of social justice, you have to force them to. If somebody’s in power, why would you just give that up out of the goodness of your heart?

  MJ: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like— We get to questions— Because it’s always been my sort of pet peeve, empathy, which I actually don’t believe in.

  TO: Interesting. Just like, at all?

  MJ: I think empathy as a force of change is a very silly idea. [Looks to crowd.] It got so quiet.

  TO: It just means that it complicates—

  MJ: Yeah!

  TO:—it complicates the discussion of why people write books.

  MJ: Did you say “why people” or “white people”?

  TO: [laughs, with crowd] I mean, we know why white people write books.

  MJ: I mean, if we’re going to talk about American Dirt now?

  TO: Shoe-horning it in because—

  MJ: We have a Q&A coming up!

  TO: [Laughing]

  Marlon James and Tochi Onyebuchi interview at The Strand in January 2020

  MJ: Okay, we’ll both have one statement each on American Dirt.

  TO: Mine’s gonna be a long statement.

  MJ: Somebody asked me the whole thing about writing the Other. How do you write the other? Two things: One, you need to let go of that word, “other.” And two, I said, You know what? Just put this in your head. What would Boo do? Go read Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers—

  TO: So good!

  MJ: —Read it again. Read it a third time. Then dash away any shit you just wrote, and be like her. And I was like— Because like— I can’t have this— I’m so tired of this thing. Like, I’ll ask people Well, how come the crime writers don’t fuck it up?

  TO: Nobody’s coming for George Pelecanos or Richard Price or Dennis Lehane and they’re writing all these characters of color. But they’re doing it right!

  MJ: Yeah, because they do research. Something Katherine Boo also said, and I’m sure I’m misquoting it, something about almost getting it right overrides getting it emotionally or with emotion so on. And usually the thing that Boo and Price and Pelecanos and Márquez all have in common is that they’re all journalists. Which is why, in my— Usually, if people are going to be doing creative writing in my class, I force them to do a journalism class. Anyway, what were you going to say?

  TO: I mean, I’ll—

  MJ: We have some questions; this can’t be 30 minutes.

  TO: This will be like a multi-part statement. I’ll preface this by saying, Look, if you paid me a million dollars, feel free to drag me to hell. [crowd laughs] All over Twitter, [MJ laughing] say whatever, like, if I ever got paid a million dollars for anything that I wrote, I—

  MJ: I got a mortgage, damn it.

  TO: I got student loans! Like, what do you want from me? No, but I think it’s one of those very fascinating things where personally, not being Latinx or Chicanx myself, it was one of those instances where I had to force myself to sort of pay witness to what was going on. And really think about what I was observing. And I know, because I’d been seeing the book cover everywhere in the months leading up. And it was always being publicized. I didn’t necessarily know what it was about at first, then as we got closer, it was like, Oh, this is like a migrant novel. And then it started coming out, or at least over MLK weekend, I started seeing the big like blow-up on Twitter. And I saw all the people that were praising it happened to be uh, I guess the word is monochromatic?

  MJ: Mm-hmm. [crowd chuckles]

  TO: And all the people that were castigating the book and a lot of the publishing apparatus that surrounded and supported the book happened to be people of color, largely Chicanx writers. And it was one of those things where I was like, Okay, like these people have actual skin in the game. Like, why are they not being listened to the way that the folks lauding this book in review publications are being listened to? And it’s almost like every single day when you think the whole thing can’t get worse, it like gets worse. There’s some other aspect of it that’s revealed—

  MJ: It’s like wow—

  TO: —And it’s not— I’m not saying Oh if you’re white you can’t write any other ethnicity or like whatever, you can’t write outside your experience. No, it’s just like Do it right. Like, don’t italicize every single Spanish word. Like, why would you italicize Spanish in the year of our Lord 2020? Come on!

  MJ: I went to her [does air-quotes] “abuela.”

  [TO and audience laughing]

• Lightspeed - https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-tochi-onyebuchi/

  Interview: Tochi Onyebuchi
  by CHRISTIAN A. COLEMAN

  PUBLISHED IN JAN. 2020 (ISSUE 116) | 5935 WORDS

  Tochi Onyebuchi holds a BA from Yale, an MFA in screenwriting from Tisch, a master’s degree in global economic law from L’institut d’études politiques, and a JD from Columbia Law School. His writing has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction and Ideomancer, among other places, and he is the author of the novels Beasts Made of Night and Crown of Thunder. Tochi resides in Connecticut.

  On your website, you wrote that novels are your first love. (You never forget your first!) Tell us a little about why that is.

  I’m drawn to scope. Expanse. Aesthetically, even before consideration of content, a thick spine will catch my eye faster than a thin one will. It really feels like I’m being offered a story I can live in, can lose myself in, even if I burn through those 700 pages in four days. Novels are how I fell in love with reading. Short stories were what we read in school, and novels were what I read for fun, and I think something of that dynamic—some primal part—has since been wired into my brain chemistry. Even the writing of short stories feels more like work than the jump-in-the-ballpit-ness of writing a full-length novel. Writing novels feels like I’m offering someone else the same promise of lengthy transport I myself seek when I’m reading.

  So Riot Baby, your long-form adult fiction debut, is a novella written with a novel’s scope. You take us from South Central to Harlem to Rikers Island and to Watts as Ella and her brother Kev, who’s incarcerated at Rikers, discover and hone their superpowers. At the same time, they’re contending with the racism that’s defined and destroyed their childhoods. How did the premise come together for you?

  In 2015, I was working on a novel—some postapocalyptic western—about a mother and her daughter, and in it was a novella-length interlude about the mother’s past as a child, then adolescent, then young woman living through and after that apocalypse. And I think that’s when the first Harlem scenes came to me. (I was living in Harlem at the time. Sugar Hill.) I believe Kev was there, too. But it was a story trapped within another. A conversation with a dear friend convinced me to break it out into its own story. This was in 2015, and another thing in the ether was videographic evidence of police violence, notably the proliferation of officer-involved killings of Black Americans. Much of the conversation surrounding these murders, and police brutality more broadly, centered “bad apples,” of course forgetting that the full saying is “a bad apple spoils the bunch.” We all knew the problem was systemic. That understanding and the attendant anger coalesced into this overwhelming lust for the whole system’s destruction. Not so much dismantling it as crushing it entirely, obliterating it in as crude and comprehensive a manner as possible. Now, going on Twitter and saying “No more cops” in your best Scarlet Witch voice is a quick way to get banned, so I figured: Let me make a character who gets to that place and who has the power I and so many others wished we had. Let’s literal-ize it. When I got to that place, I started to build the story out around Ella, who had her name from the very beginning, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  Reading your novella, I couldn’t help but think of James Baldwin, specifically this quote of his: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you.” Was his work an influence on Riot Baby?

  Very much so. In 2015, everybody was citing Baldwin, particularly that line. What’s funny is that I ended up researching that line for another project, and it comes in the context of a roundtable discussion about being an artist from a marginalized demographic and belonging to a community fighting oppression. Baldwin follows that quote with some words on the guilt that attends “Negro writers” who aren’t on the frontlines dismantling the ghettoes and marching and all that jazz, conceding at the end that there are others doing that work who are doing it much better than he could. While I don’t think he’s suggesting an abdication of responsibility, it did assuage some of the guilt that came from my spending my days behind a desk and not out in the streets.

  But perhaps Baldwin’s greatest influence on my work, and on Riot Baby in particular, was his unblinking stare at what Kiese Laymon calls “the worst of white folks.”

  Laymon writes:

  The worst of white folks, I understood, wasn’t some gang of rabid white people in crisp pillowcases and shaved heads. The worst of white folks was a pathetic, powerful “it.” […] The worst of white folks inherited disproportionate access to quality health care, food, wealth, fair trials, fair sentencing, college admittance, college graduations, promotions and second chances, yet still terrorized and shamed other Americans who lacked adequate access to healthy choices at all. White Americans were wholly responsible for the worst of white folks, though they would do all they could to make sure it never wholly defined them. (bit.ly/34ts6K1)

  Nonwhites are certainly terrorized by the actions of individual whites, but the system is what permits and encourages and actuates this macrocosmic oppression. And it was Baldwin who first opened my eyes to the enormity of that (bit.ly/33qiT3N).

  I was full of rage when I first started Riot Baby, and the process of writing and editing initiated a sort of cleansing or clarity of vision. You see the individual wrongdoers, but you also see the machine working to enable and encourage them. Controlling the rage so that it won’t destroy you is a lifelong project, and I am ever so grateful that I have writing as a tool to help me effectuate that.

  I also read that you’re a big fan of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. I got a Tetsuo/Kaneda vibe from Ella and Kev, except that both Ella and Kev have immeasurable powers. Was Akira a source of inspiration, too?

  No piece of literature has had a greater impact on my development and aesthetic and stylistic choices than Katsuhiro Otomo’s six-volume 2000+-page epic, Akira. It is in everything I write. I first watched the film adaptation as a child when the Sci-Fi Channel had their Saturday Anime block (with such wholesome fare as Vampire Hunter D and Demon City Shinjuku), and my response, like so many of my cohorts, was, “Um, what the entire fuck.” Then, in high school, I discovered it had first been a manga, and the local library had the volumes. I went through them all in a single blazing week. The story was so epic! And so visually stunning! This was before I could really grapple with the themes Otomo had embedded in his story: nuclear panic and the twin traumas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, alienation of youth, the military’s retrograde notions of honor in the face of an increasingly modern society. So I was much more besotted with the imagery. I mean, where else can you find a depiction of a city falling out of the sky? That image will haunt me for the rest of my days.

  But, yeah, I love Tetsuo. How lonely and misguided and angry and searching and powerful he is. What if there were no Kaneda, no domesticating influence? What if Tetsuo had won?

  What are some other favorite superpower stories of yours?

  The Dark Phoenix Saga. First ballot HoF entry.

  I love stories involving the “Deal with the Devil” trope, where the cost is your goodness/sanity. Sasuke in Naruto, Majin Vegeta, etc. All those characters have love affairs with villainy that go beyond mere flirtation but involve actual consummation. They’re the antagonist. That’s also why major X-stories involving Magneto always appeal to me.

  I also love superpower stories with large scale. “Age of Apocalypse”-style shit. And I think that’s why the Dark Phoenix Saga appeals to me as much as it does. It’s intergalactic, but more importantly, it’s about someone who becomes a vessel for the most powerful being in the universe struggling to contain her worst impulses, and I just find that super relatable. (Not the being possessed part.)

  How did you come up with the characters of Ella and Kev?

  They came to me fully formed and as a pair, a really magical thing in the life of a writer. I wanted to have a character with God-like powers struggle to protect something precious to her. That, to me, was the core of the narrative conflict.

  The narrative conflict plays out in the way you alternate between their POVs. How did you decide to write Ella’s parts in third person and Kev’s in first person? Was there a specific effect you were going for?

  I knew Kev was going to be our window into American incarceration and I wanted to make that experience as intimate and exacting as possible. I also felt first person for Kev was a way to kind of blow up perceptions about the incarcerated. With first person, I could really radiate a character’s fullness outward. There’s a forced identification going on, some sort of transference between character and reader. In Rikers, Kev is angry, scared, bored, joking, sorrowful, protective—all of these things. Also, in the previous section set in Harlem, I wanted to show his transformation and felt first person was the most effective way to get that across. It also displayed a nice stylistic break from the Ella sections.

  I wrote Ella’s sections in third person because, while I wanted a tight POV for her, I wanted to write sensations and experiences she was feeling that she might not necessarily have the words to describe. Also, I saw Ella as human but also as human+. And I felt a certain bit of distance, however liminal, was necessary to emphasize that plus-ness. She’s different, and part of her experience really is unknowable. There’s mystery there, an aspect of “you will never know what we’ve gone through, what we’re going through, what it’s like to be Black in this country” that I wanted my non-Black readers, particularly my white readers, to experience.

  The most salient reason for the difference to me, however, was the contrast. I wanted a quick way to signal to the reader “you’re in an Ella scene now” and “now we’re with Kev.”

  That makes me think of something you said at the “Magic X Mayhem” panel at this year’s New York Comic Con. You talked about how, as a fan of anime, you’re interested in how magic systems allow you to play with language on a sentence level and the exchange of serious consequences for gaining magical abilities. I was wondering if you could tell us about how the magic system you devised in Riot Baby let you play with the prose.

  I love this question.

  One gift Ella’s power gave me was the ability to write a scopic story intimately without having fifty million POVs covering as broad a patchwork as possible of the Black American experience. I could time travel with my prose, and it was such a beautiful challenge to confront, capturing the entirety of a person’s life experience in a single paragraph. It was a really cool way of exploring the idea of showing and the idea of telling in a story. When Kev’s in the therapy session in Watts and he starts to see fellow ex-detainee Davis’s story play out on a street corner in Philly, that was me trying to show a lot with a little. Before that, when Kev meets Calvin in Watts after getting out from Rikers, Calvin tells Kev he’s from “Florissant,” and that unspools this whole paragraph about what it might have been like to come up in that place and it has all this associative baggage, all this implied experience, that you have to show to make an impact but that you have to tell in order to capture its immensity and not come out to 500 pages of prose.

  And I learned how to do that by writing into Ella’s powers. Her ability to literalize not just memory but premonition, writing that over and over in her scenes honed my own writing ability to the point of being able to write the “Florissant” paragraph or the scene about Davis and the traumatic episode he endures. Ella’s power allows her to “see” in all directions, a sort of transportation, and being able to write that was like having a whole world of possibility opened up to me. So much that I knew of the world, so much that I had learned in the half-decade prior, I could put here.

  Ella and Kev’s story starts in the early ’90s and continues through a too-close-for-comfort dystopian future of a police state. South Central, Harlem, Rikers, Watts—these are all places where historic rioting and racial unrest happened. It’s in these environments where their superpowers develop, but it’s also where both of them are abjectly disempowered on a societal level as Black people. It’s this Catch-22 of having power and no power at the same time.

  That’s it! Black people are not just the vertebrae of this country; they’re the tendons connecting past and present, South with North and Midwest, etc., etc.; they’re the immune system that fights valiantly but often without success to keep the country from getting too sick to survive, all of it. Black people dictate culture in many ways. The thing is, by the time the tradition or phrase or way of moving or storytelling trope or music or whatever makes its way to a mainstream white audience, it has been unseasoned beyond recognition, distorted and is now without citation. Remember Kim Kardashian and her “Bo Derek” braids?!

  All of that is to say there is IMMENSE power in the cultural capital that Black people contain in this country. The real stars of Vine were the dope and hilarious Black kids creating memes and popularizing dance moves, and when Vine stars essentially wanted to unionize and get paid, Twitter came in like Jon Taffer in Bar Rescue: “SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOWN!” The cleverest parts of Twitter are all Black, yet our tweets and our ideas (especially those of Black women) will be mined by “content creators” at publications or news outlets or producers for TV shows or whatever, and that’s where the money goes. Right there is a crystallization of that paradox of having power and yet not having any, all at the same time.

  It’s often why “buy Black” feels less like affirmation than threat. If there were enough coordination and opportunity, and suddenly financial capital flowed almost entirely through Black American hands, it would fundamentally reorder American society and upend the status quo. And that’s why, as much as it may seem otherwise in 2019, Black people aren’t really free. Baldwin put it incredibly well in a 1968 interview with Esquire Magazine (bit.ly/2rAquiU): “[I]f the American Negro, the American black man, is going to become a free person in this country, the people of this country have to give up something. If they don’t give it up, it will be taken from them.”

  On a more personal level, this is a comment on individual achievement contrasted against collective deprivation. Jay-Z says, “I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them, so I got rich and gave back to me. That’s a win-win.” He becomes this self-proclaimed billionaire and, in 2019, is doing deals with the NFL that basically amount to trying to rehabilitate their image after they’ve blackballed Colin Kaepernick and basically trampled on efforts by players to protest police injustice. You escape and turn your back on where you came from.

  On the complete opposite end of the spectrum is someone like Nipsey Hussle, who blew up and then stayed in his community, invested in it, and was this sort of paragon of what-all we mean when we say “Black-owned business.” And it killed him.

  So, what happens when you get power but you can’t do the one thing you want to do most with it? Do you turn your back on that desire or do you fight to fulfill it, even if it means your death or the destruction of your world? Black Americans are out here living through the quandaries posed by Greek myth!

  Yes! And living through them in a volatile, hostile setting. Speaking of which, this isn’t the first time you’ve written about siblings separated by a volatile and hostile setting. Here, it’s brother and sister separated—in physical form, anyway—by racist policing and mass incarceration. In your YA novel War Girls, two sisters are torn apart by war in a future Nigeria. Their lives are also marked by violence and political unrest. What draws you to this type of story?

  I’m the oldest of four, and just before I turned eleven, our father passed away from leukemia. Everyone—family and not—was telling me how I was now the “man of the family” and informing me of my myriad responsibilities now that the family patriarch was no longer with us. In the way that children do, I internalized the letter of the law rather than its spirit, much to our collective detriment in the years that followed (lol). But I love my family more than anything, more than writing, even. And one of my greatest fears is losing them. In film school, I discovered that when I wrote into my fears, I produced my best work. So, I think War Girls and Riot Baby are part of that same literary project. It’s not quite that I think imagining horrors enacted on my loved ones is a way of reaffirming my love for them so much as it is a constant asking; it’s the “why does this scare me so much?” that I’m trying to get at with each story. While there’s no substitute for therapy, I’ve found this quite therapeutic. [insert nervous laughter]

  One of the hostile settings is Rikers Island. You worked with parolees there. How did this experience influence Kev’s incarceration scenes and his character arc in general?

  Directly.

  My knowledge of Rikers is taken directly from my experience working within its fences. The trip that Ella makes on the buses to visit Kev is a trip I made constantly over the course of working in that job. And many of the details in the parole process in Riot Baby are taken straight from what actually happens to parolees in that jail.

  Also, Rikers is a really unique place as far as carceral facilities go. It’s technically a jail, so you’re really only supposed to be there for pre-trial or for sentences less than a year or if you’re being transferred from one prison to another to serve a longer sentence. And the majority of Rikers detainees are pre-trial defendants on bail or remanded into custody. But Rikers is often this black hole into which people vanish for years and years and years. Unable to make bail, Kalief Browder was held in Rikers for three years, two of which were spent in solitary confinement. You can get trapped in a place like Rikers.

  Working with Legal Aid and even before that with New York Attorney General’s Office and, even before that, with Columbia Law School’s Mass Incarceration Clinic, I learned a lot about those traps, all the administrative issues that can turn your initial carceral sentence into an absurdity. How, if you’re sentenced to solitary confinement for a certain number of days and you get out before your sentence is up, your days in the Box roll over; how administrative infractions (like getting into a fight) can keep you in jail past your sentence; how you can be convicted of crimes for things that happen in jail while you’re awaiting trial for an unrelated offense. It is a nightmare and can easily spiral into a horror without end.

  I wanted the reader to experience all of that through Kev. But I also wanted to show the incarcerated are more than their suffering. They’re people. In America, you put someone behind bars, and it’s like you forget about them, or you’re supposed to. Listen to the way people talk about the jailed and imprisoned. It’s sickening. People still joke about prison rape. But everything that happens in those places is happening to human beings. Happening to people. There is so much humanity in these places, the ways in which people come together or fall apart or change or fight against change—it’s all there.

  We were defending one parolee who had been violated (term of art) by his PO and the Parole Revocation Specialist was shooting for their parole to be denied and for them to be sentenced to a notorious treatment facility. And our client was in despair, not because he didn’t want to go to the facility but because the sentence would mean he would miss Christmas with his family. He had been on parole, and now having this thing taken from him was what hurt the most.

  Another guy had a sister on the outside who worked tirelessly to put together materials for his parole board (letters from the school he’d gotten into that he’d attend if granted parole, character references from friends and family and former employers, addresses and contact info of nearby treatment centers, etc.) and he was so focused on working toward his release, you could tell it was two siblings fighting together solely with the aim of getting one of them out of jail. I really can’t do justice to what it was like to witness that.

  The book club in Riot Baby and the bit about gardening are real stories. The story about the guy playing chess with the prisoner in the next solitary confinement cell by screaming his moves through the wall? Real story.

  Kev doesn’t go to jail and become less human. He grows. It felt less like I was writing his story than I was paying witness to it.

  Paying witness to his story and to all the systemic forces hell-bent on crushing and discarding his humanity. There’s a line in one of Ella’s scenes that left me shook because it hit home so hard: “She doesn’t know what she would do; maybe it is safer for Kev in here. And suddenly the thought of him on the outside, where so much has happened without him, terrifies her.” Police state in, police state out. As a Black person, I think about this daily. Police officers who can roll up, ghost us, and bam!, we’re the next hashtag in the annals of social justice Twitter. White people who weaponize their phones to call said officers because we’re existing in “their space.” Is this line an observation you made when you worked in criminal justice?

  The ubiquity of animus toward Black people was an understanding that preceded the drafting of Riot Baby’s earliest parts, but only by a little.

  I think the dawning realization had something to do with the proliferation of video clips of Black death autoplaying on Facebook and Twitter timelines. It wasn’t just that this danger was everywhere, but evidence of it was everywhere, even in these online spaces highly self-curated for our own comfort. In that respect, 2014-2015 was a watershed moment for me and my personal relationship with my country. (I’d lived a relatively sheltered and charmed life prior and am still very comfortable in my current situation, but all of that is irrelevant in the face of this danger. Neither my Yale nor my Columbia Law School IDs are bulletproof vests.)

  But in many ways, the exoneration of George Zimmerman was the first moment of my “radicalization.” I think if you polled a lot of folks of our generation and younger, they’d point to that moment as the instant in which something fundamental changed for them about this country and how they saw it and what their place was in it. I think even Dylann Roof, in statements following the massacre he committed in Charleston, pointed to that episode, paradoxically enough, as a moment in which things changed for him.

  But the police state, for me, was simply a window into the almost all-encompassing matter of American animus toward Black folks. (The history of constitutional law in this country provided another prism. From Dred Scott to Prigg v. Pennsylvania to Brown v. Board of Education and its aftermath to cases litigating the Fair Housing Act, etc., etc., etc.) But there are many others. You have housing discrimination and the ways in which that is braided into criminal injustice. (Who will rent to you if you have to disclose your felony conviction? How will you get the job that will pay your rent if you have to disclose your felony conviction? Etc.) Education, and even the idea that schools should be funded via property tax when you have a country whose postwar residential order was basically built on redlining. Health! Look no further than Flint, Michigan. Also, everywhere in this country where there’s a lead poisoning crisis, there are likely Black Americans. If that is hyperbole, it isn’t by much.

  “America is addicted to hurting black people (bit.ly/37N71fU).”

  The police state and the state of policing were windows for me into the much broader topic of injustice toward Black Americans. In jail, Kev has routine, or at least some semblance of one. He’s acclimated himself to the rhythms of the place, knows how to move within it. One of the biggest problems with re-entry is that there’s no institutionalized or systemic way to helpfully get the formerly incarcerated to unlearn the behaviors that helped them survive inside, behaviors that, if displayed on the outside, could get them put back in or killed.

  As the police state takes over in the novella, technology invented for surveillance and policing emerges: the augments in Rikers, the surveillance orbs in the city, the geotagging implant in Kev when he moves to Watts. As someone who’s worked in the tech industry, what are your thoughts on how the technology that’s supposed to grant us a wondrous, streamlined future can reflect and reinforce systemic oppression?

  PHEW! I have thoughts. We already have algorithmic policing to a certain extent with Palantir’s involvement with local police departments. And that gets to the well-established truth at this point that algorithms carry the biases of their programmers, programmers who often feel themselves inoculated from prejudice and are thus doubly disinclined to course-correct. If I remember correctly, gunpowder was an accidental invention by Taoists looking for an elixir of life. Can you imagine gunpowder having medicinal applications? The instant connection we have with the Internet and cell phone coverage was supposed to bridge gaps all over the world and open up all sorts of possibilities. But it has provided the foundation for a pervasive surveillance apparatus (in addition to facilitating the growth of global racialist fascist movements). What’s fascinating is how the end goal will often differ across societies. In China, for instance, surveillance-via-app is used to correct behavior and get citizens to self-censor in accordance with Party principles. In the US, surveillance-via-app is geared almost exclusively toward getting us to buy shit. All that pernicious data mining simply to get you to click on that ad for a sweater in your Instagram feed. I mean, there’s also the Brexit stuff and the misinformation that flavored the 2016 presidential election in the US; but what I’ve found fascinating and horrifying is how quickly capitalistic impulses glom onto technological innovation. In an earlier age, I think we might have been afraid of military or martial application of new tech (e.g., the atom bomb), and now it’s all: “Okay, how is the money-making prime directive gonna leech all the fun out of this thing?”

  Now, I’m not saying we have a moral obligation to become Luddites. But I do think there needs to be more pervasive criticism or critical analysis of our tech and the demographic foundations on which it is being built. Black employees at what you could arguably call the world’s biggest company (bit.ly/37NU7yf) have complained of being nothing but window dressing (bit.ly/2LfhoiX). Twitter is constantly pilloried for its ineptitude—or perhaps lack of caring—in dealing with online abuse against marginalized groups. And when there has been, say, government intervention, it’s been something clumsy and morally hypocritical, like shutting down Backpage, and all the sex workers I know have been nearly unanimous in decrying the move, as it was one method of accountability in a poorly regulated industry and its removal has made things tangibly un-safer for them.

  Corporations are not going to try to make things safer for their customers (unless that’s the purpose of their project and they wanna sell it to you), and government is still run, in large part, by the people who tried to get Mortal Kombat banned. So they don’t inspire a lot of hope regarding regulation or guiding the application of tech away from effectuating the worst propensities of the powerful.

  But I am heartened by the increasingly public conversations about the role of tech in our lives. The Appeal, which produces and collects online journalism about criminal justice, has written very informative and incisive pieces on, say, facial recognition in San Francisco (bit.ly/37DcsOl) as well as the role Amazon and other tech companies play in the current administration’s immigration agenda (bit.ly/2L1xRqy).

  While Facebook has very publicly committed to not addressing misinformation in any substantive way, people were at least talking about the way propaganda spread on the platform and on WhatsApp to facilitate the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. So, the public is being more cognizant and publicly so, but there would have to be a changing of the guard in government such that we would finally see officials with enough political will to adequately regulate these companies, because what is personal safety or a robust democracy in the face of a bottom line?

  This is an epic debut for your long-form adult fiction. You’ve had several young-adult novels published before this this. Would you say this is a transition or progression from writing young-adult to adult fiction? Something else entirely? Too soon to tell?

  Beasts Made of Night was the first consciously young adult thing I’d written. Every other manuscript I’d produced for the fifteen-plus years prior had been adult, mostly spec fic with a few thrillers and a literary novel thrown in there. So, my home was always adult fiction. It was where I had learned to write, essentially. Writing-wise, Riot Baby feels very much like a return home. That isn’t to say kidlit represents any sort of exile; it’s been a superlative experience and one I’m eager to return to with the sequel to War Girls. But I got to work muscles with Riot Baby that I haven’t yet had the opportunity to do with any of my YA work. It’s like, sometimes you win by draining enough buckets and sometimes you win by performing the most difficult trick. Not like basketball is more difficult than a halfpipe competition in the Summer X-Games—they’re categorically different activities, and it’s been a long time since I’d been in a halfpipe. I’m curious what the reception will be.

  On that note, that’s one of the most thrilling parts of writing adult for me right now. I have no idea what the popular reaction will be. So far, people seem to love Riot Baby, and every time they tell me so, it fills my heart to bursting. At the end of the day, I told a story and I’m immensely proud of the way I told it, something I hope I can continue to say about everything I put my name to.

  What’s coming up next in the pipeline that you can tell us about?

  Well, the sequel to War Girls is currently scheduled for October 2020. And I recently sold two novels I am immensely excited about to Tor.com: the first a post-apocalyptic epic about some Black and Brown folk trying to forge community in a devastated New Haven, CT; and the second a horror-fantasy set at a boarding school. Hopefully, over the next few years, y’all don’t get sick of me.

  Cool! Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know about Riot Baby?

  I just want to shout out my Tor.com editor, Ruoxi Chen. She is a genius, and working with her on this project was a dream. A lot of the above insights and working-through of things are due to her input and her editorial acumen. I’m so grateful she said yes to this project. We’re an object case of what can happen when people of color work together in a variety of capacities in publishing. Together, we made a dope story, and the questions you’ve posted, informed as they are by your own experience, have made for, bar none, the best interview I’ve yet had about this book. This story very well might not have taken the shape and form it has taken absent Ruoxi’s involvement, so love you, Ruoxi!

• Clarkesworld - http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/onyebuchi_interview/

  Nanobots and Braincases:
  A Conversation with Tochi Onyebuchi

  — by ARLEY SORG —

  The future is always closer than we think: Star Trek’s communicators to smartphones; Aldous Huxley’s soma to Prozac; Ray Bradbury’s seashells to earbuds. Tochi Onyebuchi is a science fiction author with a head full of visions, from automated police response to brains used as media storage to mechs piloted by vengeful women. A master of dystopia, his visions encompass the fantastic as well as the all-too-possible.

  Riot Baby is a powerful, compact novella about siblings Ella and Kev, one with growing powers, the other thrown in prison. They must negotiate their fragile relationship with each other as Ella grapples with how she should use her increasingly dangerous abilities. The narrative journey moves through a visionary America grounded in the realities of our time, delivering both effective social critique and good science fiction.

  War Girls Onyii and Ify are young sisters caught in the Nigerian Civil War—in 2172. They scavenge and fight when they must, until they are separated in an attack. What follows is an action-driven but complex story about culture, conflict, and identity. It’s also a harrowing tale of survival and family in a postnuclear disaster world.

  Born in Massachusetts and raised in Connecticut, Tochi Onyebuchi is a consummate New Englander and “proud member of the Toonami Generation.” He graduated from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and L’institut d’études politiques with a masters degree in Global Business Law. He lives in Connecticut, where he works in the tech industry. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Omenana, Obsidian Journal, and more. Novella “Dust to Dust” and short story “Screamers” both landed on the Locus Recommended Reading list. His debut novel, Beasts Made of Night, won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel. War Girls (Razorbill, October 2019) is a 2019 Cybils Awards finalist. Riot Baby (Tor.com Publishing, Jan 2020) is featured on a host of “must-read” lists, including Book Riot’s and SyFy Wire’s.

  Both Riot Baby and War Girls blend science fiction with anime motifs, while still pulling off narratives that comport serious gravitas. How do you strike that balance?

  That’s a really good question. For me, it comes down to narrative logic. Dreams and nightmares, no matter how much their thermodynamic laws may differ from that of our lived reality, bear an internal logic, and it’s an internal logic I see in the speculative fiction I read and watch, so my aim (subconsciously, at least) has been to create a story with internal logic.

  As a kid, I watched X-Men: The Animated Series, and in maybe the second or third episode, Magneto tries to break Beast out of a prison cell after Beast has been captured during a failed operation on a Sentinel facility. And Magneto’s hovering in the air, surrounded by a sphere of sparking electricity, and this hairy blue man is crouching on his haunches, and they have this whole discussion about separatism versus integration. Gundam Wing introduced me to the concepts of pacifism and total war. So, it never struck me as strange or absurd to have fantastical elements of a story as vehicles for dealing with serious issues. I mean, Gundam pilots average, like, fifteen years old! It all had a narrative logic that I grokked early on in life.

  Much of my early diet as a storyteller was manga and anime. Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo and Blade of the Immortal by Hiroaki Samura. It never occurred to me that self-reattaching severed limbs and cities falling out of the sky couldn’t be vessels for human drama. There’s so much imagination there, and that has always been among the most important elements of story to me.

  Can you talk a bit about the process of breaking into the publishing industry? What was it like, how did it happen; were there lows, and if so, how did you deal with them?

  I’ll start by saying I am SO happy I’m not breaking in during the Age of Twitter. I was neurotic enough during my own analog era that I would’ve gone mad doing it now. I probably started trying to get published in the early 2000s or so. And back then, it seemed the model in the specfic world was 1) write short stories, 2) pub those stories in places like Abyss & Apex or Ideomancer or Asimov’s, 3) use your short stories to get the attention of an agent, 4) show that agent the novel you’ve had cooking this whole time.

  That was the process I witnessed at that age and with what limited exposure I had, but I was very impatient. I wanted a book on a shelf. So, instead of learning how to write short fiction and developing material and creds there, I spent most of my time on novels, writing book after book after book, averaging a novel a year for probably a decade and a half. My thinking at the time was: instead of work on the novel that got rejected, let me just write a better novel.

  Before websites like AgentQuery came along, I would peruse the Acknowledgements page of books I liked to see which agents got thanked. I would then look them up either online or in the annual Writer’s Market Guide to Literary Agents that I would save up every year to buy. (Them joints were like $26 a pop and I didn’t have that kind of money as a kid!) I’d research their submission guidelines, put together a query letter and synopsis, and mail them out with a self-addressed stamped envelope. I chuckle now at the fact that I was paying for my own rejections.

  But while I was slogging through novel rejections, an idea for a short would occur to me and I’d dash it off and sub it. “Dust to Dust” started out as a short story in John Crowley’s Intermediate Fiction Writing class in college. I think I subbed it at a few places, then let it collect . . . well . . . dust. Then, years later, I saw some novella-length sub requests on a website that served as a compendium for short fiction markets. So, I decided to expand the story, in part because I’d run out of short fiction markets to sub it to.

  Did a ton of research on the Cold War in Eastern Europe, and I workshopped the novella in pieces through the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (I’d been a member since middle school when it was sponsored by Del Rey and I was basically writing poorly-disguised Robert Jordan and Hiroaki Samura fan fic). Subbed it to a few places, and struck gold with the editor of the Panverse anthology series. Dario requested a round of edits and I happily obliged (the story was much stronger for it), and that was my first specfic sale. Before that, I’d sold a spy story to Crimespree Magazine (good luck finding it) and payment was two contributor copies that I never received.

  “Zen,” I wrote to procrastinate for my Constitutional Law final, then sat on it for a while before subbing, and I couldn’t believe it actually sold. It felt like an anomaly.

  “Place of Worship” was a sort of redo of an earlier short story that I couldn’t sell, and I wrote it more as an exorcism than anything else. I’d been going through some personal trials and tribulations in film school and going into law school, and writing that story served as catharsis. It seemed too literary for most specfic markets, and its novelette length seemed to make an even more difficult sell. But I shot my shot with Asimov’s, in part because they’d made things much easier with the move to online submissions, and, by God, Sheila said yes. That was the biggest check I’d received for my writing at that point and I nearly broke down in tears in the law school student service lobby.

  The first draft of “Screamers” was written in 2010. It sold in 2016.

  I started trying to get my stories published in maybe 2003 or so, and by 2014, I’d sold four stories, been paid money for three. And all this time, I’m picking up novel rejections. I’m easily past one hundred at this point (One book picked up nineteen rejections, another eighteen, another twenty-six, another picked up fifty-eight, and on and on).

  Beasts Made of Night came about as a result of a chance meeting with Tiff Liao, who would later become my editor on the project. She was a law school classmate’s college roommate and we met at a party my first semester of law school and began our friendship. This was in 2012. In 2015, after graduating from law school, I was struggling to sell Goliath, which I’d written that spring, and she offered to take a look at it. We chatted and Goliath didn’t sell but she opened the door to YA for me, and I started writing Beasts Made of Night and the rest, as they say, is history.

  There was never a time when I said to myself I’d hang up my cleats, but I did tell myself that if I didn’t sell a book by a certain age, I’d at least slow down a little. I’d been writing like my life depended on it, but as the realities of a legal career began to solidify around me, I told myself that I’d start to prioritize that and background the writing a bit, but there was never any thought given to pressing pause or, Heaven forbid, “stop” on my ambition to be published. I loved writing too much. Loved writing for writing’s sake. It was my favorite thing in the world, and still is. I couldn’t dream of a life where I didn’t have that. And that’s what kept me going through all the rejections, that and the fact that while I was querying, I was already working on the next, better thing. And I was always in love with what I was writing, even if none of the decision makers were yet.

  Does SF/F do something or work in some way that is different than non-genre fiction? Or are the definitions arbitrary and meaningless?

  I get that there’s a marketing impetus behind genre definitions. People need to know where in the bookstore to put all the books. Problems abound, however, when those distinctions become imbued with moral or intellectual judgments or when taxonomy becomes hierarchy. Personally, I appreciate the distinctions, in part because genres tend to operate with their own internal logic. Thrillers and detective fiction have their tropes and the subversion of those tropes works most powerfully when there’s an awareness of the tropes to begin with. Romance novels offer very specific contractual terms to a reader. Science fiction and fantasy novels are constantly in conversation with each other, in a much more concentrated fashion than what’s found in what we call literary fiction. It isn’t so much that classification is useless (I think it’s helpful to know exactly what is meant by “magical realism,” for instance), so much as I think the imbuing of any qualitative judgment on the basis of that classification is repugnant and meaningless. Mystic River the movie won Oscars, but Mystic River the book would’ve been laughed out of any Pulitzer conversation, which is a crying shame, because that is a beautiful fucking book.

  SF/F is powerful, for me, because it operates as reality and metaphor at the same time. All our stories are about us. Stories about androids and aliens are stories about us. Stories about time travel and Terminators are stories about us. You can use SF/F to make a point, a warning, a premonition and Trojan horse it with lasers or underwater cities or what have you. You can also have fun. That’s a thing I have to keep reminding myself with SF/F, is that it enables what few other genres offer, which is what I saw Elizabeth Bear once call sensawunda. We even got our own word for it.

  I don’t think sense of wonder should always come with the adjectival “childlike” before it. At all ages, we need and deserve it. And SF/F is the only genre I know that has a definitional mandate to provide it. I have yet to read the work of literary fiction or crime fiction or romance fiction that’s shown me what it’s like when a city falls from the sky.

  Do you feel like genre is seeing significant changes in attitudes toward publishing POC and, in particular, African voices/works?

  It feels particularly fortuitous to be asked this question days after Orbit Books acquired a magnificent trilogy inspired by ancient West African empires from Suyi Davies Okungbowa. Dr. Nnedi Okorafor has been in the trenches fighting battles for those of us who’ve come after for a long, long time now, and it fills me with such joy to see her getting the roses she’s getting now. And in the diaspora, you have Nisi Shawl’s Everfair (2016). On top of that, Tade Thompson wins the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Rosewater and Marlon James lands on the National Book Award shortlist for Black Leopard, Red Wolf, so it’s definitely an interesting and exciting time for stories of/by Africans.

  Whether diasporic or continental, authors are reaching a prominence we haven’t seen before, which is particularly heartening. And this isn’t even to mention the monster success that was Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, that being an excellent example of what it looks like when a publishing house actually puts its money behind a title and actively works to see it succeed. The Black Panther movie certainly served to convince decision makers and those holding purse strings that stories connected to the African continent could prove profitable, that there’s a market for them. Also, too, we can’t forget the work that Nalo Hopkinson and Tobias Buckell have been doing, Hopkinson for more than two decades.

  But there is a ton of complication in the above part of my answer. Because the majority of the authors I just named are diaspora, whether based in the US, the UK, or the Caribbean. The vast majority of speculative fiction by continental Africans still hasn’t made it to the US, not because it doesn’t exist, but because of structural barriers domestically and a veritable lack of interest in stories from them on the part of USians. Penguin Random House has a South Africa branch, but they don’t accept science fiction submissions. And what other Big 5 house has a presence on the continent?

  On the other side of the Atlantic, Cassava Republic (Nigeria) has an office in the UK but, to my knowledge, hasn’t been able to set one up in the US. NB Publishers is largely limited to South Africa’s book market as far as I can tell. So, if a continental African author like Helon Habila or Jennifer Makumbi wants a Western readership, they have to go through New York, London, or Paris. Now this opens out onto a larger discussion about whether to make more space for continental African writers in Western literary spaces or whether to contribute to the building of a more robust and versatile and adaptive publishing apparatus on a continent that houses about 1.3 billion people and about 3,000 ethnic groups speaking 2,100 different languages.

  I will say that, as far as genre spaces in the US, what I’ve noticed shares a bit of DNA with silkpunk and much East Asian-inspired specfic, is that it has rushed into a long-gestating hunger for non-Western fantasy and science fiction. Which is so refreshing after techno-orientalist fare like Blade Runner and Firefly and, arguably, Star Wars. As much as publishing likes to lose money, I do hope they recognize the opportunity presented by continuing and expanding opportunities for writers of non-Western backgrounds to tell stories inspired and influenced by those backgrounds.

  Is it important for fiction to discuss social issues—is it a necessary part of fiction? Or is it possible to write stories that are just “fun” stories, without a social or political stance?

  I think it’s a thing that happens whether the author intends it to or not. No work of fiction is apolitical. Strip a first-person shooter of any markers of religion or nationality and you’ll still have an interactive experience that tells you repeatedly that the only way to solve this puzzle is to shoot at it. Social issues may not be explicitly discussed in a particular work or alluded to, but voice is as much about what you leave out as it is about what you leave in.

  However unconscious your decision, if there are no queer people included in the future you’ve imagined, that is a statement. If the only people who can be heroes and major antagonists in your stories are descended from familial lines, that too is a statement. There’s no escaping it, because there is no escaping the reader who will read that in your story. So, you might as well be intentional in setting up the terms of the discussion.

  There’s the perception (largely from doom-mongers) that stories that make statements can’t also be fun. It’s either tentpole action flicks or ponderous Oscar-bait. But, as being a Millennial has taught me, we can multitask. As a writer, I write the stories I want to read. Also, my existence is a politicized fact in America. Being a Black man has a say in my experience at school(s), on the street, on Twitter; it flavors my interactions with classmates (especially being on scholarship), literature, police, the ballot box, everywhere. And it’s always cool when a story can meet me there. Also, too, a lot of this boils down to the reader. You can choose not to engage in the anti-war messaging of The Lord of the Rings or the gender politics of The Wheel of Time or ideas of genetic determinism in Star Wars. That doesn’t mean that those who do are less right or correct or valid than you. For the most part, there is no score being kept regarding our reading experiences.

  Discussion of social issues doesn’t need a work’s permission to happen. It is out of the author’s hands at that point.

  There’s nothing Hajime Isayama or Yasuko Kobayashi can do to prevent an anti-Semitic reading of the second half of season three of Attack on Titan. Doesn’t mean that’s the only reading, and it doesn’t mean that the reverse reading, a reading that sees in that very same story a condemnation of Nazism, is any less valid.

  You have an MFA in screenwriting from Tisch. What was your “learning to write” process? Did you simply adapt what you learned in screenwriting to the novel form? Did you take more classes, workshops, do critique circles? Was Tisch a good environment for speculative works?

  It was largely emulation. When I was in high school, I think, I bought this book whose title was, I think, How to Write a Damn Good Novel, and it picked specific books and gave a pretty cosmetic analysis as to why they were good and what they did right. Among those books were The Godfather by Mario Puzo and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I remember nothing from that book, but the books it chose as examples were highly instructive. So I learned how most painters do, by emulation. I saw what I liked and I tried to emulate that in my own fiction. I studied the craft through its products, reading and reading and reading, but I wouldn’t really learn story structure or any of its building blocks (at least, in the Western tradition) until film school. Before then, I had no idea what a three-act structure was or how central it was to the Western storytelling tradition.

  Film school taught me stories’ building blocks re structure of the larger work but also within scene. Film school is why I’m always hunting for the conflict in a scene and it has helped me more easily discover who in my story is meant to be the protagonist. I started asking questions like “who has the most to lose in this situation” and “how do these characters’ desires and purposes collide in this scene” and “where is the friction here.” Learning how to write plays taught me scene breakdowns and how to play with rhythms, and I then applied all of that to my prose (though I still write stage plays and screenplays). Most of the speculative I wrote during that period was on my own time, not because of any restrictions in the program, but because I also wanted to use that period to stretch my wings genre-wise. In my last semester, I ended up writing a Civil War-era Western, a family drama, and a crime thriller about a Kosovar Albanian arms dealer, all feature-length screenplays. So many things I learned during the course of that semester made their way into my fiction, in ways both explicit and implicit.

  Are there aspects of storytelling/writing that you feel are more challenging for you, things you struggle with? And how do you deal with those elements?

  My Act III’s are HORRIBLE! At least, during the first draft, they’re always too short and, though I know the very, very last part or line, I’m always stumbling toward the finish line.

  For me, your characters are stunning. How do you write interesting, compelling characters that feel grounded in the real world?

  Thank you! I try to choose who I think is, situationally, the most interesting character. Who has the most to lose or who’s at the bottom of the pile, so to speak? One reason I’m less interested these days in stories that foreground white characters is that in white stories there is categorically less conflict and drama than in a story with a nonwhite protagonist or with non-white characters. In True Detective’s third season, Mahershala Ali’s character was originally white. He auditioned for the part nonetheless and lobbied for the character to be changed, and that change made for a much more interesting show because now, during the course of the investigation that runs through the season, there are all these little interactions and gestures and expressions of a dynamic that wouldn’t have been there if his character were white.

  One moment when Ali and Stephen Dorff’s character go to interview a disappeared child’s father, the father instinctively turns to Dorff’s character, believing he’s the lead, and there’s a moment when he realizes Ali’s character is running point on the investigation, and that is such a small, powerful moment. The show isn’t a story about race per se, but it’s always there, an added level of drama that allows for particular moments of high tension. Story-wise, it’s magnificent. Imagine if Buffy were a hetero cis white male. So many of the inter-relational dynamics of the show would have been rendered less compelling.

  So, there’s situational thinking to my choices, but I also want characters who struggle internally and who enter the story with that struggle. Taj is the best at what he does, but that thing is literally what will kill him, and being good at it exacts a physical and spiritual tax on him. Onyii loves Ify more than anything in the world and knows some measure of peace with her, but she self-identifies as a proficient killer. Also, she’s, for all intents and purposes, a child. So not only are these characters spinning against the way the world turns, they’re spinning against the way they turn. That friction makes for compelling characters. Keeping them firmly planted in their worlds is a result of me constantly chasing that conflict and drama in my stories.

  You have also commented that the forthcoming Goliath, a book you wrote before Beasts Made of Night, was the first book you wrote with a Black protagonist. Does this mean there are other unpublished books and stories you wrote that do not have a Black protagonist? More importantly, what happened or changed that made you start writing with Nigerian viewpoints and Black protagonists?

  Everything I wrote before Goliath featured a white protagonist. It’s simply what I was reading. One book has, for its hero, a tortured former Mossad agent, and that stemmed from my much-abated obsession with Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon novels. (The virulent Islamophobia that started to appear turned me off greatly.)

  Goliath was actually the outgrowth of a short story I wrote in 2013, “Still Life with Hammers, a Broom, & a Brick Stacker” that was published in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora in 2016. I was living in Palestine at the time, working with a prisoners’ rights organization, and I found myself in the midst of an imagined short story collection, of which I’d envisioned “Place of Worship” and “Zen and the Art of an Android Beatdown” to be a part. All the stories would feature characters on a single space colony, and the stories would be intertwined through the use of recurring characters. A mosaic novel. I thought, why not have a story about the people left behind on Earth, playing with the idea that all the people in space are generally white. So I wrote “Still Life” . . . and couldn’t sell it anywhere.

  I sat on it and, a few years later, thought I could build the world out a bit and expand the story. I thought to write a sort of slim, amorphous book reminiscent of Tinkers by Paul Harding where every sentence would hold its own crystallized beauty. It was going to be a literary novel with a speculative premise (back then, I still held those demarcations in mind!), and it came out at a cool 57k words, WAY too short for the speculative market but just right, I figured, for a literary novel. I got my longest, wordiest rejections for that book, which meant I was making progress. Small press publishers were asking if I had anything else; that sort of thing. Goliath was the best thing I had written and it was the first story I wrote to feature Black characters. I don’t know which way the causal arrow points, but I do believe the two things are related. I was writing into experience in a way I wasn’t before.

  As far as the Nigerian element, Tiffany Liao, my initial editor for Beasts Made of Night, was the first to push me to really take ownership of my story like that. Beasts was initially a little more generic in its setting. A lot of the main elements were there, but the culture in the book wasn’t terribly specific. Tiff encouraged me to make the story mine in that respect, to imbue the place and the story with more of myself, and it blossomed as a result. I felt like I’d unlocked a new superpower. That gave me the encouragement to make my next project so specifically Nigerian, so Nigerian in fact that it would tackle one of the most verboten topics in Nigerian society: the civil war.

  In a neat bit of circularity, one of the markets that rejected “Still Life” will be publishing Goliath.

  War Girls puts female characters up front, with two main POV characters: Onyii and Ify. Riot Baby switches between Ella and Kev and actually opens with Ella, although Kev becomes the more prominent viewpoint. Is centering female points of view a deliberate choice, or is it more a matter of what feels right for the story?

  The initial choice is deliberate, and the rest of the story spins out from that choice. I want to write things I haven’t seen before or haven’t seen enough of, and these stories with Black female characters front and center are foremost among them. I think, with a lot more stories than people think, you can make the choice to have your protagonist be from a certain demographic, whether the choice is about race or gender or religion or disability. And the task of the storyteller is to make the story make sense from that choice. The rocket ship can be whatever shape you want. And you have the power to alter the laws of physics however you need in order to ensure that ship’s safe launch off the launchpad.

  On your website you say, “Short stories are tough as hell to write.” What is the biggest challenge for you in writing short fiction? What is the short story you are most proud of, and why?

  For a long time, my short stories would spin out into novels, as though it were all out of my control. When I was a kid, I wrote this short about an assassin with a metal arm that blew up into a whole novel (that borrowed HEAVILY from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty) that then exploded into a four-book series. So, for me, the challenge has always been in having a full world exhibited within the confines of 7,500 words or less, which requires a lot of writing-by-implication and, usually, tight focus on one character. Almost all of my earlier work was multi-POV. That was actually a super tough thing to deal with while writing Beasts, staying within Taj’s POV for the entirety of the story. So, it’s kind of heartening to see my longer published work start to expand, viewpoint-wise. Beasts Made of Night and Crown of Thunder were limited to one POV. War Girls and Riot Baby each sport two POVs, and Goliath promises a few more than that.

  As far as the short work I’m proudest of, I vacillate between “Place of Worship” and “Still Life.” I love both because I’m obsessed with prose styling. John Crowley’s Little, Big is an ideal I’m constantly reaching toward. It’s actually unfair how beautifully that whole-ass book is written. Every sentence sings. “Place of Worship” might edge ahead because 1) “Still Life” grew into a whole, new thing and 2) “Place of Worship” was and remains to this day the most personal story I’ve ever written. I wrote into my fears for that story pretty hard, and I was always worried that it wouldn’t be considered science-fictional enough for professional markets, so the payoff when it sold was particularly huge.

  What is important or special to you about both Riot Baby and War Girls, what do you really want readers to know about these works?

  I want readers to know that these works sell, and I want them to buy more (into) stories about Black people by Black people. Editors who read, agents who read, publicity departments that read, publishing house presidents who read, cover designers who read, I want them to know that stories like War Girls and Riot Baby sell and are a net good for the literary ecosystem. And I want them to buy more of these stories and to pay more for them. (Especially if I’m writing them :: wink :: .)

  I think what’s special about these stories is that they don’t center the white experience and they weren’t written for the White Gaze. Some days, that sounds like a small thing. Some days, it sounds like the loudest thing on the planet.

  What can you tell us about Goliath? What is important, special, and different about it? Do you have other stories or projects coming up?

  Oh, it’s such a special book. The most structurally daring thing I’ve written. I really feel like I was firing on all cylinders writing it. Ostensibly, it’s a postapocalyptic saga about a group of brick stackers trying to make a way in New Haven in the face of . . . some changes. But it’s got so much of America in there. And there’s one bit in there (that I hope survives edits) that is the most titanic thing that’s ever come out of me.

  And it’s set in a city I know and love that isn’t New York.

  As far as what I have coming up, later this year is the sequel to War Girls from Razorbill. Then confirmed for next year is my first longform nonfiction outing, a book called (S)kinfolk, which is, on its face, a critical analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah but also does triple duty as memoir and sociocultural inquiry. It’s about my mother’s journey to this country as well as my own sentimental and political education regarding Blackness in America, and I’m super proud of it. That’s forthcoming from Fiction Advocate.

  What have you read in genre lately (short or long) that really excited you, that you want everyone to read?

  This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone turned me inside out. It felt, for the first time in a long time, like a book written specifically for me. And it felt, perhaps more importantly, like Max and Amal had so much fun writing it. They truly gave us a gift with that book.

  I also have to say, I’m jonesing hard for Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds.

• Lit Hub - https://lithub.com/tochi-onyebuchi-on-unproductive-anger-and-respectability-politics/

  Tochi Onyebuchi on Unproductive Anger and Respectability Politics
  In Conversation with Rob Wolf on the New Books Network
  By New Books Network
  June 19, 2020
  Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby tells the story of two siblings—Ella, who is gifted with powers of precognition and telekinesis, and her younger brother Kevin, whose exuberant resistance to systemic racism earns him a one-way ticket to jail.

  Onyebuchi’s first novel for adults is as much a tale of the siblings’ bond as it is a portrait of white supremacy, police brutality, and the anger of Black Americans at centuries of injustice.

  The book’s publication just months before the murder of George Floyd and the Covid-19 pandemic might seem prescient, yet the novel could have been written at any point in the last several decades (or centuries) and still felt timely.

  Kev is born during the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of the police officers who brutally beat Rodney King. A few years later, the police killing of Sean Bell leads Ella to run away from home, afraid that her anger, harnessed to the supernatural powers she can’t yet control, might cause her to hurt those she loves.

  Onyebuchi rejects the notion that anger must be productive. “Black people have been playing the respectability politics game since time immemorial,” he says on New Books in Science Fiction. “And in the history of modern America, what has it gotten us? That was a lot of what powered the omnipresence of anger in the book, this idea that it doesn’t have to be productive.”

  Onyebuchi is the author of several books for young adults. He won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African and has appeared in Locus Magazine‘s Recommended Reading list. A graduate of Columbia Law School and L’institut d’études politiques with a master’s degree in global business law, he worked for many years as a lawyer before turning to writing full-time.

  *
  From the interview:

  Rob Wolf: I just read on Tor.com about how emotionally taxing the last two weeks have been for you personally, so I’m especially grateful that you’ve carved out time to talk. I know it’s been a hell of a couple weeks and months. So how are you tonight?

  Tochi Onyabuchi: I’m good. Busy but also blessed. I mean it’s a very peculiar time to be a Black creative in America. In previous instances, in conversations with friends in journalism, in fiction, et cetera, et cetera, when there’s been times of political upheaval in the country, particularly along racial lines, publications will reach out almost immediately and be like, “OK, what’s the Black angle on this?”

  It’s almost as though they’re sort of mining your pain and despair and anguish for your perspective and page clicks, but something interesting seems to be happening this time around where there are a lot of organizations, particularly in media and in fiction, that are reckoning on a very substantial and almost structural level with a lot of these underlying issues of racism. So it’s interesting to exist in this space now. I mean it’s emotionally taxing and mentally draining, but also very interesting. It seems as though something different is happening.

  RW: There’s been a lot of talk about how white people have to go through this process, too. It’s not a problem for black people to fix, and so maybe that has a little bit to do with what you’re talking about, this self-reflection and this effort that seems to be underway and, hopefully, will continue. It’s interesting to hear that it feels different to you.

  TO: Yeah, definitely. Even the fact that you have major book publishers putting out statements affirming Black Lives Matter, black stories matter, and we’ll see if structural change follows that. Every year, Lee & Low and Publishers Weekly put out their surveys about diversity in the publishing industry, and every single year, things are blindingly white. And so with these recent affirmations, hopefully momentum can be maintained with regards to diversity amongst the workforce, but also the domino effect of diversity in the types of stories that are being told.I mean the very fact that a story like Riot Baby could be published, I think, is a testament to that possibility.

  RW: Riot Baby is about Ella and her younger brother, Kevin, and their lives move among several different places: South Central Los Angeles and Harlem. And Kevin ends up in jail on Rikers Island in New York City. And it’s also about a lot of other things. It’s about the trauma of centuries of oppression and pain that echo through their lives. And that echo happens both psychologically, as historical trauma does, but also in some ways literally for Ella because she has these special powers, so she feels more deeply and sees more deeply than a regular person. … I thought maybe we could start by homing in on a particular moment when her life takes a crucial turn. She’s watching the news about the death of Sean Bell, a black man who is killed in Queens, New York, by the police on the morning before his wedding in 2006.

  TO: Ella is an interesting character. One of the things that I wanted to do with Riot Baby was write my own contemporaneity—to see what the future would be like for people my age and then work backwards from that. And so she’s about as old as I would have been during Rodney King, and she’s as old as I would have been in the 2000s when Sean Bell was killed, and she’s colored by all of those experiences. Looking back, those are my first real political experiences of America as a child, and I thought that was fascinating to have that be such a fundamental part of how you learn about America and what it is to exist in this country. And another thing that I wanted to illustrate in Riot Baby was a sense of continuity.

  When I first started writing Riot Baby in 2015-2016, there was this spate of video-graphic evidence of officer-involved killings. Given that these clips were proliferating across social media, a lot of people were seeing this for the first time. But if you were Black, you saw this as part of the pattern. This went back to Oscar Grant. This went back to Sean Bell. This went back to Amadou Diallo. Those are names that you heard in the house growing up, not as boogeymen but as cautionary tales.

  In that moment for Ella, when she’s watching it, I wanted to see if I could capture that newness of it, the “Oh, it’s happening right now”-ness of it. She’s at the age where she’s able to assimilate enough knowledge that seeing that—and married to the increasingly empathetic ability that she has—it snaps something in her. She’s changed as a result of having seen that in a way that I think a lot of people were changed when they saw footage of

  Laquan McDonald‘s death or Philando Castile’s, these immensely traumatic visual experiences. And that is something that Ella, by virtue of her powers, is able to go through for better or for worse.
  RW: Kevin’s born in 1993 and he’s nicknamed Riot Baby because he’s born during the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King. Ella has a precognition: she knows her mother’s going to give birth to a boy. And she associates his birth with the riots, this bad thing, and associates it with his being a boy. And she’s angry, so angry. Can we talk a little bit about that?

  TO: When I started writing Riot Baby I was very angry, and I feel like one of the things that happens during these periods of American unrest is, particularly along a racialized vector, is this idea of productivity, that the anger has to be productive. It can be as self-righteous as it wants, but if you’re not protesting properly—you know, the riots are unproductive, the looting is unproductive, it’s going to keep you from getting your goal of, I don’t know, policy change or whatever.

  And there was a part of me, a very large part of me, that while I was writing Riot Baby was essentially “Screw that. I’m not here for respectability politics.” Black people have been playing the respectability politics game since time immemorial. And in the history of modern America what has it gotten us? And that was a lot of what powered the omnipresence of anger in the book, this idea that it doesn’t have to be productive. What does anger that isn’t burdened by the mandate of productivity look like? And is it even useful? And I think the answer to that, at least for me, is yes. I did at the time find very personal catharsis in that sort of omni-directional anger that didn’t have to come with, “Okay, I’m going to channel this anger into marches” or “I’m going to channel this anger into finding an organization to donate to” because if you don’t do that, you feel guilty for feeling angry, and who does that serve?

  And so I just wanted to really, really, really dig into this idea of anger that’s justified and not burdened by this mandate of productivity.

• Salon - https://www.salon.com/2020/03/07/riot-baby-tochi-onyebuchi-interview/

  "Riot Baby" author on his novel of black superpowers: "I don't want justice. I want vengeance"
  Tochi Onyebuchi spoke to Salon about writng about white supremacy that's not for the white gaze
  By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
  MARCH 7, 2020 3:59PM (UTC)
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  Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi (Tor Publishing)
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  Tochi Onyebuchi's new book "Riot Baby" has been described as a "staggering story" and "political speculative fiction at its finest". "Riot Baby" has also been praised for its "fantastical originality with his incredible worldbuilding and devastating prose. Stark, sharp, and brutal." And Salon's Ashlie D. Stevens called the story "wholly captivating" in her review.

  These accolades are well-deserved. "Riot Baby" is a tightly written, provocative, and exciting exploration of humanity, race, justice, and resistance through a familial story about an African American brother and sister – and yes, superpowers.

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  If the best of science fiction and speculative fiction involve taking a familiar world and changing one detail in order to explore broader truths about human experience – both good and bad – Tochi Onyebuchi masterfully accomplishes that goal.

  But "Riot Baby" goes far beyond the counterfactual and the speculative premise of, "What if black people gained superpowers, and then what happens?" Onyebuchi's depiction of a black American with god-like powers is a powerful meditation on black people's humanity and what it means to be fully human outside of the narrow and flattening expectations of the White Gaze.

  In this conversation, Onyebuchi reflects on resistance across the color line in the Age of Trump and how white privilege and accompanying white "innocence" empowered Trump's authoritarian fascist movement and hobbles too many white Americans' resistance to it. He also explores how the experience of the Black Diaspora and its struggles against racism and white supremacy are a type of surreal dystopia and the challenges such a fact poses for science fiction across the color line.

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  Onyebuchi – who's also written the novels "Beasts Made of Night," "Crown of Thunder," and "War Girls," along with essays and other writing in Asimov's Science Fiction and at Tor.com – also shares how "Riot Baby" speaks to his personal truths about righteous black anger and black pain in an American society which all too often denies black people their full humanity, rights, and dignity.

  This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

  We are chatting about your new book "Riot Baby" on Feb. 14, Frederick Douglass' birthday.

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  Yes, it is. Frederick Douglass is one of America's greatest founding fathers, I would say.

  We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. How do you think Frederick Douglass would make sense of this moment with Donald Trump and his white supremacist movement and regime?

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  I feel like Douglass and his other compatriots who fought for black people's equal human rights would recognize the interminability of the struggle. I feel like they would look at this current moment and see how little has changed. Brother Douglass and Dr. King experienced seismic events during their lifetimes. They saw the expansion of the political franchise with Abolition and then bringing down Jim Crow. Those are two of the biggest seismic shifts in American history. And since then, what other types of great change in terms of the good on that scale have we seen in this country?

  I feel like they would look at the current moment and see how little has changed. I do wonder what they would advise in terms of action. More corporeal politics? Self-defense? That is part of why I wrote "Riot Baby." I wanted to literalize the obliteration of the police state.

  There is a deep discomfort, on both sides of the color line, with talking about black folks in America as well as across the Black Atlantic and our tradition of self-defense.

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  That fact is contrary to what is a tired and oppressive narrative of perpetual and always assumed black foregiveness for white racist violence and other crimes against us. Consider that evildoer Dylann Roof, white supremacist terrorist and a mass murderer – yet, black people were expected to forgive him. Ongoing police thuggery and brutality – again, black folks must always forgive. By comparison White America is never expected to forgive for crimes against it, be they real or imagined. Permission for rage and vengeance is exclusively allowed for white people in America.

  For the person who feels compelled to embark on that path of forgiveness, you grieve how you grieve, and you move forward how you move forward, and you process how you process. If that's what you have to do to continue going about the business of living in this world and of surviving, I get that, but at the same time what prompted me to write "Riot Baby" was black folks asking for justice for Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and so many other victims of police and other violence.

  We've been asking for justice and I was saying to myself, "You know what? Forget that! I want vengeance. I'm tired of asking for justice." We saw a version of this after Trump was elected in 2016. All this talk about about, "Oh, we reach out to these misguided voters or we have to convince them of this and convince them of that." No. They screwed over and hurt people I care about. I want to punish them. Trump's voters did this thing that hurt me personally or that hurt people that I love. There is this long tradition in America of doing everything possible to quell that impulse – especially in the marginalized because the power imbalance makes such sentiments so very dangerous. It's very dangerous to even say out loud, "I don't want justice. I want vengeance."

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  Another dimension to the Age of Trump is the gross triumph of white racial innocence. To believe that Trump is some type of surprise is really a privilege allowed to white Americans and other white people around the world. To sustain such a level of naivete can only be a function of willful white ignorance about the reality of America's past and present.

  I am of the opinion that white people know better. They fundamentally know better and it is willed ignorance. I would say that is true almost across the board. I think there might be the tendency to be like, "Oh, I'm not like those other white people." On a basic level, white people as a group know better. They just don't want to do what they know they would need to do to bring about a more equitable society. Given the easy availability of information there is no excuse for denying the realities of white supremacy and the harm it causes black and other nonwhite people.

  Here is a particularly pernicious example: there is this façade of, "I want to do better. I feel bad for the things that are happening to people of color in this country. What can I do as an upper middle class white person who's a member of Oprah's book club?" It's that feigned innocence. I can't wait for you to find it in your heart to do better. I've run out of patience for it. I don't have the time.

  Feigned ignorance is a cornerstone of white privilege, white supremacy and day-to-day racism. It is one of the primary ways through which "colorblind racism" works. Everything is some type of surprise even when it is an obvious truth.

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  Come on. Be real. Literally the only thing surprising is the fact that people who should know better are still surprised about the stuff that Trump is doing, and the stuff that he's getting away with, and the stuff that he knows he can get away with. The fact that there is still any surprise at the complicity of the entire Republican party and its entire apparatus in aiding and abetting Trump the bootleg emperor is what is really in fact surprising. It is so frustrating to keep watching these professional news media types and experts say things like, "Oh wow, I didn't know that it was like this."

  How do you reconcile what are already the dystopic and surreal aspects of black people's experiences in America and around the world with the genre conventions of science fiction?

  I think about a lot of this in a geometric way. Shapes are the fundamental building blocks of the story that I want to tell. In the science fiction and speculative fiction genres there are two dimensions, metaphor and reality. But I want to wield those elements in a recognizable way. For example, placing superpowers in the historical context of Rodney King being brutalized by the Los Angeles Police Department and the police-involved murders that have been happening over the past decade.

  I don't want to give any readers the opportunity to believe that the truth of my work, its meaning, is buried under so many layers of allegory that I cannot be understand or that my meaning can somehow be denied. "Riot Baby" is a story about white supremacy. You can't walk away from this story thinking it's about anything other than white supremacy.

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  There is a great deal of research by social psychologists and others which shows that many white people really do believe that black people have superpowers. We are impervious to pain. We are faster and stronger. We may have supernatural abilities. In your writing, how are you resolving that fact with your narrative and vision?

  I didn't write "Riot Baby" for white people. I wrote it for us, for black people. I also wrote it primarily for me. In writing "Riot Baby" for myself, I believe I was also writing it for people who I thought would get it, or people who I figured were feeling the same way that I felt. A sort of mélange of utility and fury that is roiling inside of us.

  Part of writing and finishing "Riot Baby" meant completely jettisoning any consideration of the White Gaze, not caring at all how white people would receive this book. And that was very liberating because then I didn't have to worry about things such as, "Oh, is this the type of thing that people are going to read, and then it's going to make it easier for them to dehumanize black folks by believing that there is this superhuman aspect of us. That the black boy or black man that they cross the street to avoid is some sort of monstrous entity, or closer to some sort of monstrous entity than they are to a human being."

  Or if a black woman is getting any sort of medical care and she says she's in pain but the doctors and nurses believe she's really not in as much pain as she said she is. I just jettisoned any and all concerns about that. Making all of that as a consideration would have been very constraining. "Riot Baby" would mean that I was writing a story for white people. And right now with the story that I need to get out of me, I can't consider white people as part of my audience at all. Maybe they will read it, maybe they will learn something from this. White folks are not who I'm writing this book for. That allowed me the sense of liberation to really delve into the question, what if black people had superpowers?

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  But also, now we must consider two other elements in the story. There's what if black people had superpowers, but they are still being conceptualizing as victims. Black men are bulletproof, but they are still being slotted in the role of being shot at. Black women are seen as being more impervious to pain, but now they are being slotted into situations where they are not being administered medical aid properly.

  What if we flip that? What if it was black people with superpowers and they could literally reduce an entire jail facility to ashes? What if it was black people with superpowers and they're walking amongst all of these lower-class whites, and they know for a fact that they could physically obliterate each and every one of them with a thought? What does that feel like? What does that look like? That was a question that I was very, very fascinated by. Magneto, the "X-Men" comic book character, was right. What then does it mean to follow that to its logical conclusion?

  How do we take the premise of black people with superpowers and make it into something productive as opposed to something hacky and obvious?

  For me the solution was to write into the dangerous part, my own fear. That goes back to what I was saying earlier about getting to a place emotionally where I didn't want justice anymore. I wanted vengeance, because I felt I denied that part of myself and I feel like a lot of black people are taught or coached to always preface self-preservation, are taught to deny that aspect of themselves where there is vengeance, because that's the ultimate fear that many white people have.

  It's a type of displacement where white people will look at black people and say to themselves, "If I had been treated the way that they're being treated, I would want to burn this whole thing down. Let me make sure that we punish them as soon as they voice any inkling of wanting to do exactly that same thing." In many ways that is now the norm in America and has been so for a very long time.

  Imagine if you could shoot laser beams out of your eyes. What if you had that liberation? You are a mutant. Other humans don't have that power. But these humans who don't have that power are going to try to convince me that they are in fact some type of "master race." That they are better than me? That difference became very tactile and tangible to me. That very visceral sense of superiority felt novel for me.

  With "Riot Baby" and your other work, how do you balance personal vulnerability and truth? Have you had moments where you are telling yourself, "Man, this is some dangerous truth. I don't know. I'm going somewhere dangerous and I may need to stop." How do you resolve those moments?

  I felt that way for much of writing "Riot Baby." It's the most dangerous thing I've written. That response sounds like it was a more intellectual exercise than it ultimately was. There was a lot of emotional thinking or perhaps even emotional compulsion that went into the book. And the hardest thing was I knew this was a story that I had to get out of me. I was saying to myself, "Oh, let me think about publication and everything later." I just know that I need to get this all on the page somehow. I need to get this outside of me.

  That concern overrode everything else, overrode any reservation that I had about telling this particular story.

  I am also very fortunate that I worked with Ruoxi Chen, my editor at Tor. She really pushed me to go further with the book and my truth because in reading earlier iterations she could tell that there were points at which I was holding back. She kept encouraging me to not hold back, to go to the dangerous place, to say the dangerous thing.

  I will be forever grateful for her encouragement. I think it's an object lesson in what happens when you put people of color together in a relationship as intimate as the editorial relationship.

  If not already, you will likely at some point be asked the following question: "Why would a white person read 'Riot Baby'"? Is it just self-flagellation? White guilt?

  I wonder about the exact same thing. What's the motivation? Is it that they really want to learn? On a cognitive level break through their own ignorance? I have also heard from white readers how it's given them a glimpse into the so-called "African American experience" that they hadn't otherwise experienced – particularly from fiction. But maybe that is a function of the African American fiction they have read?

  It is old but still very powerful language. Are you a "race man"?

  Blackness is just a fundamental part of who I am. I can't extricate it from anything that I do. It informs everything. Sometimes to a great degree. Sometimes to a much lesser degree. At the same time, a day is going to come where I write a non-black protagonist. Maybe it's going to turn some heads, but it's going to make absolute sense for me. I'm a writer, but at the same time, I'm unapologetically a black writer.

  You have to do it right? But at the end a person should write whatever they want -- but they should do it right.

  When "people" finish "Riot Baby" – the so-called "universal reader" – how do you want them to feel?

  I want them to feel whatever it is that they feel, because I know it's going to be different depending on who they are. People will bring different experiences and different baggage to "Riot Baby." Whatever the reader feels about "Riot Baby" I want it to be sincere and real. I want the reader to really feel their emotions.

• Den of Geek - https://www.denofgeek.com/books/author-tochi-onyebuchi-brings-anime-inspired-giant-robots-to-nigeria-in-war-girls/

  Author Tochi Onyebuchi Brings Anime-Inspired Giant Robots to Nigeria in War Girls
  We talked to speculative fiction author Tochi Onyebuchi about novellas War Girls and Riot Baby.

  By Megan Crouse
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  October 10, 2019
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  Author Tochi Onyebuchi and the cover for his book War Girls
  Tochi Onyebuchi brings a keen eye for world-building and momentum-filled action scenes to his young adult novels. From the Pokémon-like Beasts Made of Night duology to the upcoming fantasy novella Riot Baby, he’s making waves. At NYCC 2019, we sat down to talk to him about pop culture influences, the process of building a novel, and how he wants to push back against Western perceptions of African countries.

  Riot Baby will be available from Tor.com in January 2020. War Girls comes out on Oct. 15 from Penguin Random House.

  Den of Geek: Your latest book, War Girls, is a post-apocalyptic story involving both catastrophic change and nuclear war. What draws you to writing apocalypse while the real world feels so apocalyptic?

  Tochi Onyebuchi: Part of it is coping! Part of it is trying to imagine my way through crisis. Because the thing about climate change, or at least the discussion as it is happening now, has been very much dominated by Western voices. It has been very much focused on climate change in parts of the U.S., for instance. Or efforts to combat climate change in Western Europe. Whereas a lot of the really averse effects of climate change will most viscerally be felt on the African continent.

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  We’re already seeing it. You see the desertification of the Sahara. And that is pushing people on the lower end, particularly nomadic tribes, further down into densely populated countries. And so you see all this unrest that’s happening right now in northern Nigeria, because you have pastoral Fulani tribes that are being pushed down into farmland that is already populated by people. So all of a sudden there are these new clashes over land rights that would not necessarily have happened were it not for climate change.

  There are islands in the Pacific that are sinking. That won’t be here in 12 years or 20 years. So I was very interested in what people in those places would consider with regards to climate change. So that was why it was particularly interesting to think about issues of climate change and post-nuclear disaster in Nigeria.

  Tell us about the two sisters at the heart of the book. What made their story compelling?

  They both carry aspects of my mother. War Girls very much has its genesis in stories that I would hear from her of her time as an internally displaced person in the Biafran war, the Nigerian civil war, that waged in Nigeria from 1967 to 1970. She was either just finishing or just getting ready to start kindergarten at the outbreak of the war. She was a child living through this! That in many ways was the genesis of the book.

  I wanted to also write in a way about a lot of the other civil conflicts that raged throughout African countries in the 1990s and early 2000s and mid 2000s, and that’s where the issue of child soldiers comes in. Child soldiers weren’t necessarily prevalent in the Nigerian civil war in the 60s and 1970, but in a lot of the later conflicts in the 90s and the 2000s you saw prevalence of the instances in which adolescents and teenagers would be drawn into the conflict and faced to fight, forced to kill. I think particularly of the story of Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala, which was made into an extraordinary movie starring Idris Elba. It’s that sort of thing.

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  How do you deal with that afterwards, too? As a society, but also as the person who did those things. Because there is an after. There will be an after. What does that look like? Those are very fascinating questions to me.

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  War Girls is set in an alternate Nigeria. What kind of research or experiences lead to the way you portrayed it?

  While I did a lot of research on Nigeria, particularly the Biafran war, I also wanted to do a lot of research on other African countries. But one thing I wanted to make sure of was I wanted to write a specifically Nigerian story. And part of that entailed researching both conflicts and histories of other African countries.

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  One thing that I wanted to do also was make sure this wasn’t a doom-and-gloom, ‘everything is horrible in Africa’ story. Because a lot of the popular perception of Africa is it’s this entire uniform place that’s universally afflicted by starvation and civil war. It’s the picture of the kid with flies on their face and the bloated stomach from malnutrition. But there are 50-plus countries in Africa, many of whom have exponentially more ethnic identities in them. There are over 200 tribes in Nigeria alone. So that speaks to the diversity on every scale, whether it’s economic, social, tribal, what have you. It speaks to the overwhelming diversity of the continent. And that was something I wanted to get at.

  So, in researching other countries and other traditions, it became easier for me to pick bits from other cultures but use them specifically, and not just have them be this background of ‘African traditions’ and what not thrown into the story. It was very important to me that the story was specific, the references were specific, the geography was specific. That is a lot of what drove the research that I did.

  War Girls is marketed as Black Panther inspired. Tell me more about this connection and about what pop culture influences you.

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  One of the reasons Black Panther was so important, particularly to War Girls, is that it provided a reference point for a lot of people that might not have been familiar with a lot of the things that are going on in that book. War Girls is very much more inspired by Gundam Wing. I’m a huge, huge Gundam fan, so this book is very much a love letter to Gundam. When I pitched it to my agent, it was ‘Gundam in Nigeria.’

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  But at the same time I recognize that there’s a maybe somewhat limited fandom for Gundam. I feel like in the United States more people would recognize Black Panther. One of the beautiful things about it was that people could see Black Panther and have a reference point for this depiction of Africa as technological advanced. That, I think, was new to a lot of people. To see an Africa that maintains fidelity to certain traditions, and had high speed rail. That had hover cars. That had spaceships and what not. But also had specific music and dance traditions and fashion sense.

  So, in crafting a society that had all those things, it’s easier for people to understand.

  The Cover for Tochi Onyebuchi's Novella Riot Baby
  What is the idea at the core of Riot Baby, your upcoming novella?

  Riot Baby is the story of Ella and Kev, two siblings that grow up in the shadow of the L.A. Uprising in the 90s. Their story takes them from South Central, to Harlem, to Riker’s, and back to the Watts, and they have to deal with institutional racism and police violence and issues surrounding mass incarceration, while slowly discovering superpowers.

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  What have you learned about writing in the course of publishing four novels?

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  I’ve gotten much better at my act threes! [Note: Some of the audio in this section was disrupted. The author goes on to discuss gaining sensitivity to the quality of his own writing.]

  You can write something and you can feel that it’s right, even though you may not necessarily be able to articulate all the ways in which you feel it’s right, or why this particular choice is the correct one. You can direct the plot a certain way and feel you’ve made absolutely the right choice without necessarily knowing why. Developing that intuition after having internalized so much of the craft is very important. That’s an aspect of writing I’ve grown in.

  What is your process like? Do you outline?

  It often differs by book, and also by the relationship with whichever editor I’m working with at the time. Riot Baby came together in part out of disparate pieces of existing work, and then when it coalesced it grew more of itself. There wasn’t necessarily an outline involved in that. It started with writing pieces of it and the spine of the narrative came together. Then, the rest was a result of growing it out.

  Whereas with War Girls it was very schematic. I had the idea, I had a bucket of particular images in my head I wanted to figure out how to dramatize. Out of that came the outline, which of course changed shape over the course of the drafting. So I had the initial outline and then a revised outline. Then I started drafting, and events changed as I was writing.

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  Would you say to an aspiring writing that process matters? Do you need to write a certain way, or do different ways work for different people?

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  Whatever works, works. I think that’s the way to go. There is the temptation to fall prey to a lot of the dogma early on, particularly when you’re trying to figure yourself out with regards to voice, process, how to make this writing thing work.

  We hear people say write every day. But that’s not feasible for a lot of people. Whether it’s their school schedule, whether it’s child care, whether they have a particular job that doesn’t allow for that. People are dealing with different realities, so writing every day isn’t necessarily universally applicable.

  The only thing I feel confident in terms of advice to aspiring writers is to love writing. Whether it’s the act of putting sentences together, playing with that, or whether it’s the larger discipline of storytelling, certain aspects of that—if that gets your heart racing, if that gives you the same feeling as when you see your crush from across the room, that’ll get you so far in this. Because there’s so much nonsense you have to deal with in this, and so much conflicting advice. If at the end of the day you love doing this thing, hold on to that. That’s why you do this.

• Fantastic Fiction -

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  Tochi Onyebuchi

  Tochi Onyebuchi is a writer based in Connecticut. He holds a MFA in Screenwriting from Tisch and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. His writing has appeared in Asimov’s and Ideomancer, among other places. Beasts Made of Night is his debut.

  Genres: Young Adult Fantasy

  New Books
  September 2020
  (paperback)

  War Girls
  (War Girls, book 1)October 2020
  (hardback)

  Rebel Sisters
  (War Girls, book 2)
  Series
  Beasts Made of Night
  1. Beasts Made of Night (2017)
  2. Crown of Thunder (2018)
  thumbthumb

  War Girls
  1. War Girls (2019)
  2. Rebel Sisters (2020)
  thumbthumb

  Novels
  Riot Baby (2020)

• Wikipedia -

  Tochi Onyebuchi
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Jump to navigationJump to search
  Tochi Onyebuchi
  smiling bearded black man wearing glasses and blue T-shirt
  Onyebuchi at the 2017 Texas Book Festival
  Born October 4, 1987 (age 33)
  Northampton, Massachusetts
  Occupation Author, lawyer
  Nationality American
  Alma mater
  Yale University
  Tisch School of the Arts
  Instituts d'études politiques
  Columbia Law School
  Genre Fantasy, science fiction, young adult
  Notable works
  Beasts Made of Night
  Riot Baby
  Years active 2017–present
  Tochi Onyebuchi (born October 4, 1987) is an American science fiction writer and former civil rights lawyer of Nigerian descent. After publishing three books aimed at young adults, he released his first adult book, Riot Baby, in 2020.[1][2]

  Contents
  1 Early life and education
  2 Career
  3 Personal life
  4 Bibliography
  4.1 Novels
  4.2 Short fiction
  5 References
  6 External links
  Early life and education
  Onyebuchi was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, to Nigerian Igbo parents[3] Nnamdi Onyebuchi and Elizabeth Ihuegbu Onyebuchi, and has a brother, Chibuike, and two sisters, Chinoye and Uchechi. His first name means "praise God" in Igbo.[4] He lived in New Britain, Connecticut until 1998, when his father died at aged 39,[5] after which he grew up in Newington.[6]

  Onyebuchi was an avid reader growing up and was strongly influenced by X-Men comics. While he appreciated works by black authors he was required to read in high school, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, Invisible Man and Native Son, he preferred adventure and science fiction stories.[7][3] In high school, he studied abroad for a year in France, where he fell in love with Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo,[8] and was inspired when he learned Dumas was of African ancestry.[7]

  He majored in political science at Yale University, graduating in 2009.[9] He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Screenwriting from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, a master's degree in Global Economic Law from Instituts d'études politiques in France, and a law degree from Columbia Law School.[10]

  Career
  After earning his law degree, Onyebuchi began a career in civil right law, working in the Civil Rights Bureau of the New York State Attorney General's Office, as well as for New York City's Legal Aid Society. Onyebuchi felt burnt out within about two years of practice and became a domain expert at a high-tech firm, while keeping his civil rights interest alive through his writing.[6]

  Onyebuchi wrote extensively growing up and attempted to sell his first novel in high school. He had written 17 novels by the time he finally published his first novel, Beasts Made of Night, in 2017.[3][6] It won the 2018 Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African. He published a sequel, Crown of Thunder, in 2018, followed by War Girls in 2019.[8]

  In 2020, he published his first book aimed at an adult audience, Riot Baby, revolving around Kev, born during the 1992 Los Angeles riots and his sister, Ella, who possesses telekinetic powers.[1] Onyebuchi drew on his experience as a lawyer in setting much of the novel at Rikers Island in New York, where Kev is wrongfully incarcerated.[2]

  He has also written for Asimov's Science Fiction magazine and Ideomancer.[11]

  Personal life
  Onyebuchi resides in New Haven, Connecticut.[6]

  Bibliography
  This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.
  Novels
  Beasts Made of Night. Razorbill. 2017.
  Crown of Thunder. Razorbill. 2018.
  Riot Baby. St. Martin's Press. 2020.
  War Girls series
  War Girls. Razorbill. 2019.
  Rebel Sisters. Razorbill. 2020.

Onyebuchi, Tochi REBEL SISTERS Razorbill/Penguin (Teen None) $17.99 10, 20 ISBN: 978-1-984835-06-2

Ify and Uzo are connected by more than sharing an oppressive, war-torn country; they cross paths when Ify returns on a vital mission in this sequel to War Girls (2019).

It has been five years since the Biafran War ended, and Ify—in the Alabast Space Colony—isn’t eager to look back. She has climbed her way to the top and, at only 19, is set to become a doctor and assistant director, overseeing care for incoming refugees. When synths—humanoid machines that are given human memories—and cyberized refugee children suddenly lapse into comas after receiving deportation orders, Ify desperately wants answers. Tasked with returning to Nigeria, Ify must now confront the past she longed to leave behind. Uzo, a 15-year-old synth who yearns to belong, has been helping Enyemaka and Xifeng acquire and preserve memories of a war that the government wants to erase. Their paths collide, forcing Uzo and Ify to work together. Told in alternating viewpoints, the story examines the effects of trauma in a postwar society, colonization, immigration, and government distrust through the lens of two girls searching for answers. Third-person chapters that follow Ify are juxtaposed with Uzo’s logical and precise first-person narration; both are replete with descriptions of Nigerian culture. Ify and Uzo are Black; Xifeng is Han Chinese.

A thought-provoking, action-packed addition to the series. (Science fiction. 14-adult)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Onyebuchi, Tochi: REBEL SISTERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2020, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634467336/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a89faaee. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020.

War Girls

Tochi Onyebuchi. Razorbill, $18.99 (464p) ISBN 978-0-451-48167-2

In the year 2172, a civil war rages in Nigeria as the Republic of Biafra fights for independence in battles using advanced tech and giant mechs. War Girl Onyii, a Biafran rebel and former child soldier with a bionic arm, has made a safe place away from the war with her comrades and younger sister, Ify, a brilliant hacker who has created an Accent, a tiny technological wonder that "reveal[s] the series of lines and nodes of net connectivity that bind everything--and everyone--together." When their camp is attacked, Onyii is left alive and drawn back into the fight; Ify, captured, is taken to the glittering glass city of Abuja. Four years later, Ify is a trusted confidant to her now powerful kidnapper but questions the treatment of young Biafran prisoners, while Onyii has become a killing machine known as the Demon of Biafra. Their divergent paths, forged in violence, shape them indelibly, ensuring they will never be the same. Onyebuchi's action-packed, high-stakes tale of loyalty, sisterhood, and the transformative power of love and hope brims with imaginative future tech and asks important questions about the human cost of war, mechanization, and artificial intelligence. Set amid the horrors of war in a world ravaged by climate change and nuclear disaster, this heart-wrenching and complex page-turner, drawn from the 1960s Nigerian civil war, will leave readers stunned and awaiting the second installment. Ages 12--up.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"War Girls." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 48, 27 Nov. 2019, p. 77. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A607823401/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=78d5e28e. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020.

Riot Baby. By Tochi Onyebuchi. Jan. 2020.17Bp. Tor, $19.99 (9781250214751); e-book, $9.99(9781250214768).

Past, present and future clash in this ambitious novella inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and the continuing institutional violence toward young Black men. Kev was born during the riots in the aftermath of the Rodney King trial, and it's shortly after his birth that his older sister Ella begins to develop powers beyond her control. When they move to Harlem to escape South Central, her powers, which she calls the Thing, intensify, and she grapples with anger at the injustices happening around her. When Kev is incarcerated at Riker's Island, Ella is determined to create a different path for their futures. The story flows through history, from slavery and the civil rights movement to the modern-day issues of discrimination and mass incarceration. There is a richness and depth to Onyebuchi's prose that delivers an intricate and textured world at once rife with violence and teeming with familial love. Dystopian stories normally depict an untenable near or future society, but Onyebuchi demonstrates that dystopia for African Americans in the U.S. resides in the recent past and continues today.--Craig Clark

YA/M: Teens, especially existing fans, willing to explore dark but relevant topics willfollow Onyebuchi here. CC.

Clark, Craig

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
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Clark, Craig. "Riot Baby." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 6, 15 Nov. 2019, p. 36. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A608183710/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5c27ff9c. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020.

War Girls Tochi Onyebuchi. Razorbill, $18.99 (464p) ISBN 978-0-451-48167-2

In the year 2172, a civil war rages in Nigeria as the Republic of Biafra fights for independence in battles using advanced tech and giant mechs. War Girl Onyii, a Biafran rebel and former child soldier with a bionic arm, has made a safe place away from the war with her comrades and younger sister, Ify, a brilliant hacker who has created an Accent, a tiny technological wonder that "revealts] the series of lines and nodes of net connectivity that bind everything--and everyone--together." When their camp is attacked, Onyii is left alive and drawn back into the fight; Ify, captured, is taken ro the glittering glass city of Abuja. Four years later, Ify is a trusted confidant to her now powerful kidnapper but questions the treatment of young Biafran prisoners, while Onyii has become a killing machine known as the Demon of Biafra. Their divergent paths, forged in violence, shape them indelibly, ensuring they will never be the same. Onyebuchi's actionpacked, high-stakes tale of loyalty, sisterhood, and the transformative power of love and hope brims with imaginative future tech and asks important questions about the human cost of war, mechanization, and artificial intelligence. Set amid the horrors of war in a world ravaged by climate change and nuclear disaster, this heart-wrenching and complex pageturner, drawn from the 1960s Nigerian civil war, will leave readers stunned and awaiting the second installment. Ages 12--up. Agent: Noah Ballard, Curtis Brown Ltd. (Oct.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"War Girls." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 36, 9 Sept. 2019, p. 69. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A600790180/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d35c3330. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020.

ONYEBUCHI, Tochi. Riot Baby. 176p. Tor. Jan. 2020. Tr $19.99. ISBN 9781250214751; ebk. ISBN 9781250214768.

Gr 9 Up--Ella's Thing allows her to conjure orbs of light, whip up a stiff breeze, and even blow up rats crawling in the apartment she shares with her younger brother Kev--the book's narrator--and their mother. But before it's fully developed, the Thing is provoked by anger and leaves Ella frail and exhausted. She's a loving and protective older sister to the very smart Kev, and is often angered by injustices in her neighborhood. After Ella is particularly affected by the murder of a young Black man on the news, she vanishes to the desert where she hones her powers. Much of the book's setting alternates between the desert and Rikers Island jail, where Kev ends up for his questionable involvement in an attempted armed robbery. Ella is a powerful, omniscient protagonist who embodies Black Girl Magic and superhero strength. Yet she is weighed down by her experience of being a Black woman in America. She relives family members' traumas, including her mother's stillborn delivery by a disinterested doctor and her brother's time in Rikers. Elements of science fiction are blended with discomforting near-reality (for example, Kev is microchipped when he's released, through which he is monitored and medicated). Similarly, actual events propel the narrative: The LA Riots, the Charleston AME Church shooting, and confederate flag disputes are just a few examples. Strong language and drug use is present, but should not dissuade one from adding this short novel to their collection. VERDICT That Kev is a young adult through the bulk of the novel helps make this a compelling choice for those serving older teens.--Lindsay Jensen, Nashville P.L.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Jensen, Lindsay. "ONYEBUCHI, Tochi." School Library Journal, vol. 66, no. 11, Nov. 2020, p. 72. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A640013035/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a139c262. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020.

"Onyebuchi, Tochi: REBEL SISTERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2020, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634467336/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a89faaee. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020. "War Girls." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 48, 27 Nov. 2019, p. 77. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A607823401/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=78d5e28e. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020. Clark, Craig. "Riot Baby." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 6, 15 Nov. 2019, p. 36. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A608183710/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5c27ff9c. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020. "War Girls." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 36, 9 Sept. 2019, p. 69. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A600790180/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d35c3330. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020. Jensen, Lindsay. "ONYEBUCHI, Tochi." School Library Journal, vol. 66, no. 11, Nov. 2020, p. 72. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A640013035/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a139c262. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020.

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