Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi
Publisher – Tor
Published – Out Now
Price –£15.99 hardcover £6.96 Kindle eBook
Ella has a Thing. She sees a classmate grow up to become a caring nurse. A neighbor's son murdered in a drive-by shooting. Things that haven't happened yet. Kev, born while Los Angeles burned around them, wants to protect his sister from a power that could destroy her. But when Kev is incarcerated, Ella must decide what it means to watch her brother suffer while holding the ability to wreck cities in her hands.
Rooted in the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is as much an intimate family story as a global dystopian narrative. It burns fearlessly toward revolution and has quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.
Ella and Kev are both shockingly human and immeasurably powerful. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by racism. Their futures might alter the world.
For me great science fiction helps the reader understand the present. How did we get here and where might we be going towards? In the past a lot of SF has been very technology focused but a great many authors now use this genre to explore society. Sometimes a book can really really capture the moment and this I can definitely say is what the brilliant Riot baby by Tochi Onyebuchi has delivered with a tale of siblings in a society that is definitely our own and I think captures many of the pains we saw highlighted in 2020 delivering a tale both eloquently and angrily that no reader can look away from.
Ella is a young child in 90’s LA even as a child noting the gangs that torment school buses. But Elle has a secret she can look at someone and see their fate. A baby that will be killed by mistake in a gang attack many years later. These visions start having an impact on her body initially with nosebleeds the collapses. But her pregnant mother is forced into labour as the LA Riots commence around her in the wake of the police being acquitted of the Rodney King attack they were filmed on camera. Kev is born and their mother decides that they need a new start so the three move to New York to stay safe. This does not happen. The bright Kev finds himself in a world where society has judged him on his skin-colour; and this leads to him finding solace with other groups of kids that just for being on street corners attract the attention of a racist police force. Kev makes mistakes and this leads to a long-term incarceration in a system that is all about punishment and not rehabilitation. Ella’s powers grow she can move matter and travel in time or across space. She visits the scene of various atrocities that have been caused by this society in particular the police forces of the US which are never actioned upon; she visits Kev to keep him having some form of hope and her powers continue to reach a increasingly higher level. If society is not willing to change she will help it.
No moment exists in a bubble and this novel highlight that a society that is fundamentally racist is not going to deliver great outcomes for the people of colour who have to live within in. This smart tale notes that issues we may be increasingly aware of from the tragedies that led to the Black Lives Matter movement last year are not sudden and with Kev’s date of birth being so poignant we can see injustice is a key aspect going back over thirty years. Kev is likeable and able but as we see the society has influenced the path he takes as he is already suspected of being a criminal. With Ella’s manifestations at various police shootings where we see that a regular pattern of state atrocities is being ignored. At one stage visiting her mother’s past and seeing casual racism in hospitals and even her older family generations has always been there In the final act we move a few years into the future and it’s even worse. Police using ‘smart’ AI to control the streets even more and what it forces prisoners such as Kev to do is indeed the kind of racist evil I could see a number of governments adopting. Onyebuchi’s writing plays these events matter of fact these are daily events and for the people affected it’s something they have to live and survive through rather than overflow. The causal disregard we see from authority figures makes it more chilling - highlighting fo many they have no choice.
The heart though is Kev and Elle’s relationship. Onyebuchi makes this family come to life. They care for one another. They are likeable and sympathetic characters trying to work their lives out. For Kev it’s a good person who makes bad choices and yet isn’t given any room to get out of them without powers he has to confront the years ahead alone the most patt an it’s a system that grinds you down to feel hopeless. Elle changes as her powers grow but in some ways is the more dangerous as she doesn’t yet know what she wants to do with them. Their love for each other and desire for each to survive the challenges they face really support the novel.
Anger in a novel is hard to get right. Too many authors go for lazy satire and the obvious. It needs precision; to make the reader not look away and actually see the victim’s point of view from a society we are benefiting from via more luck than skill. Brilliant authors who have delivered on this are Terry Pratchett in later Discworlds, Nnedi Okorafar’s The Book of the Phoenix and N K Jemisin’s Broken Earth. Books that make you say ‘you thinking we are a civilised advanced society and yet this happens daily, and we do nothing about it. Do we actually deserve to be saved?’ I easily class Riot Baby in that category of storytelling. It is such a gripping reading experience and one that does the important thing in science fiction – make you think and understand why change is needed. Strongly recommended.
