There’s a reason it’s less than 200 pages. It’s a book that exists at a very particular pitch and the baseline pitch of that book is almost screeching, and then by the end, it’s nails on the chalk board, right?

One of the things with Riot Baby was that it was so condensed and intentionally claustrophobic, that I didn’t get to really explore moments of joy and wonder that can come from the interaction between Black people in the world, particularly the natural world. Nicholas, right? I feel like it’s that sort of thing.Įxactly! It’s not my job to ameliorate your race consciousness, my advance was not big enough, and they don’t pay enough for that, but it was important to me. Maybe you feel empathy while you’re reading, but then as soon as you close the book, you cross the street when you see a group of Black dudes on the corner of 145th and St.

It’s something that I don’t really try to lean on in terms of the “why” of the writing of a thing, because when it comes to empathy, I think it’s a very sort of localized thing. Yeah, there is that empathetic component. How important is it to zoom in, to put a face, to humanize those that have been oppressed, forgotten, and left behind? It’s a good driver of empathy, isn’t it, when you’re able to do that? Or at least it should be. While the details of each of the particular stories may seem inconsequential, the collective messaging, the sum, is anything but. Goliath paints a morose time and place, made brighter through a series of interwoven “slice of life” tales of folks mostly living day to day. Brick by brick, their houses are sent to the colonies, what was once a home now a quaint reminder for the colonists of the world that they wrecked.Ī primal biblical epic flung into the future, Goliath weaves together disparate narratives-a space-dweller looking at New Haven, Connecticut as a chance to reconnect with his spiraling lover a group of laborers attempting to renew the promises of Earth’s crumbling cities a journalist attempting to capture the violence of the streets a marshal trying to solve a kidnapping-into a richly urgent mosaic about race, class, gentrification, and who is allowed to be the hero of any history. As they eke out an existence, their neighborhoods are being cannibalized.

Those left behind salvage what they can from the collapsing infrastructure. Those with the means and the privilege have departed the great cities of the United States for the more comfortable confines of space colonies.

In his adult novel debut, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Award finalist and ALA Alex and New England Book Award winner Tochi Onyebuchi delivers a sweeping science fiction epic in the vein of Samuel R. Today we’re pleased to welcome Tochi Onyebuchi to the WNDB blog for the second part of his interview about his sci-fi adult debut Goliath, out January 25, 2022! Read Part I here.

Goliath onyebuchi