Book Review Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

 

 Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

176 pages, Hardcover
Published January, 2020 by Tordotcom

 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novella (2021), Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novella (2020), Locus Award Nominee for Best Novella (2021), World Fantasy Award for Novella (2021), ALA Alex Award (2021), Connecticut Book Award Nominee for Fiction (2021), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Science Fiction (2020), NAACP Image Award Nominee for Fiction (2021), Nommo Award Nominee for Best Novella (2021), Ignyte Award for Best Novella (2021)

Super late to the party on this book but not the author, I read the 2022 novel Goliath when it came out.  It was a hell of an introduction to Tochi Onyebuchi, a novel that I compared to Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner.  That one was a radical Cli-fi novel that was a brutal and literary David Versus Goliath re-mix. I also remember one aspect I loved, which was that it felt like the voice of a singular author, one that was unique. I have been meaning to get around to Riot Baby for a while and when I saw an article in the Routledge CoFutures textbook I decided to read it, when it said the book was an expression of black rage, so I could check back with the article. 

Riot Baby is a novel that came out in 2020, and how about a book that speaks to the time, this is an angry book in all the right ways.  A socially aware tale that uses science fiction to highlight worlds that need to be brought into the light. This world is not some faraway place, it is just one we don’t see represented in enough fiction.  It comments on a larger world but does so with a focus on two siblings, really one family.

The story of Ella and Kev who was born during the Rodney King riots.  Ella has certain supernatural abilities, she and her family call it “her thing.”  She had growing power at a time when racism and police brutality, class warfare around them are growing out of control. The narrative is seen through her eyes and that of her brother, Kev who eventually ends up in prison.

There are some amazing moments when Ella uses her “Thing” to visit him in prison. The lonely feeling in prison is something this novel captures, mostly in these visits.  There is also a very powerful scene between Ella and her mother when she goes back to witness her own birth. That might have been my favorite scene of the book.

Ella and Kev are strong characters that make this contained story, short on word count feel more epic. His other novel Goliath was a masterpiece of world-building, and this one has good world-building but it lives and dies on the Power of Ella and Kev. This novel is a speculative look at the black experience and black coming on the heals of Trayvon Martin that got unleashed the year George Floyd.

They live in Watts and Harlem, witness to to many unfortunate events. That serves to disempower Ella throughout her life leading to this powerful moment. Her experience as a black woman, and speaks to the feminism of the novel.

“It's not till she's outside that she realizes what she was looking for in there. What she's been looking for all these years. What she realizes now she no longer needs.

Permission.

I am the locusts, Ella sends the thought out like a concussive wave, so that it hits every surveillance orb in the neighborhood, every wired cop, every crabtank in the nearby precinct. I am the locusts and the frogs and the rivers of blood.

I'm here now.”

Riot Baby is filled with radical moments. Radical Science Fiction, reaching to radical injustice, which the pages constantly shine a light on. This moment when Ella empowers herself is what much of the story builds towards.

“And outside Watts, a dozen more shootings produce a dozen more weeping families that have to struggle stoically through their black grief or that can stand behind microphones and declare their black anger, and the bodies pile higher and higher and higher, and so does the frustration with the impunity 'because,' says the district attorney in St. Louis in Kansas City in Staten Island in Dayton in Gary in Albuquerque in Oakland, 'you can’t indict an algorithm.” 

I don’t want to talk about what happens at the end but it should not surprise readers, and it should be satisfying.  

So how about this article that inspired me to read this now? “Coming Together, Free, Whole, decolonized. Reading Black Feminisms in Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby” by Parker Alexander Miles. Is a fantastic read as well that highlights many things the author got out of multiple reads of Riot Baby. “Maybe, Blac folks will not use telekinetic powers to destroy white supremacy, but speculative fiction like Riot Baby helps imagine that it is possible to do so.”