Q&A: Tochi Onyebuchi, Author of ‘Riot Baby’

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.

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.

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.

Will you be picking up Riot Baby? Tell us in the comments below!