No matter how far flung into the future or how deep into the past a story may be set, it’s always saying something about the time in which it was written. I think at the end of the day, science fiction and speculative fiction and genre in general is all about our now, about our present. And so I don’t know necessarily that science fiction novels can be any sort of handbook for how to how to fight the forces of evil, so to speak, whatever form they may take. Don’t develop X technology.” And inevitably, we see the William Gibson novels start to come true. We present these dystopian futures to say, “Don’t do this. I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about the idea of science fiction as a genre serving the social utility of prediction. Is this your prediction, your gut feeling about where things are going? Is it a cautionary tale, saying we don’t have to go there? It’s a dark future building on the facts of recent history. There’s a white supremacist nation out west. Rob Wolf: In Goliath, privileged people, who are mostly white, live on space stations that they call colonies, while the people on Earth, who couldn’t afford to go to the colonies, have to wear masks because the air is so polluted. It’s virgin territory.’ That in many ways is the animating impulse, of course, completely or almost completely disregarding the fact that Earth is already home to a lot of people.”

“They think, ‘Oh, if we just change the scenery, that’ll make things better, we’ll be able to start over.… We can make this work on Earth. In David and Jonathan’s case, their relationship is broken. ‘Oh, that’s where my fortune is.’ ‘Oh, there are no rules out there. You have people going out west historically for all sorts of reasons. “I’ve read a lot of westerns and western-inflected literature, and the ways in which people have written about the American West were very fundamental in how I approached the characters of David and Jonathan. Onyebuchi sees in the story of David and Jonathan-returnees from who take over a home in a Black and Brown community in New Haven-parallels to frontier narratives. Like the gentrifiers of today, who push out old-timers with high rents and coffee boutiques, Onyebuchi’s urban colonizers are taking over property in communities that have suffered from underinvestment and systemic racism.īut unlike gentrifiers of today, who often leave behind comfortable lives in the suburbs, the gentrifiers in Goliath are returning from comfortable lives on space stations where those with means had fled years earlier to escape pollution and environmental degradation on Earth.

Tochi Onyebuchi’s new novel, Goliath, features a phenomenon familiar to those of us who live in cities: gentrification.

Goliath by tochi onyebuchi