How do you think Frederick Douglass would make sense of this moment with Donald Trump and his white supremacist movement and regime? We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. Frederick Douglass is one of America's greatest founding fathers, I would say. We are chatting about your new book 'Riot Baby' on Feb. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. 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. 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. 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. 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.īut '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.

'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. Stevens called the story 'wholly captivating' in her review. Stark, sharp, and brutal.' And Salon's Ashlie D. 'Riot Baby' has also been praised for its 'fantastical originality with his incredible worldbuilding and devastating prose. Tochi Onyebuchi's new book ' Riot Baby' has been described as a 'staggering story' and 'political speculative fiction at its finest'.

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi