I feel like in another book she'd be more the center of the story, more the Chosen One type, but you've done something different. Just as white society has proven itself incapable of understanding its past torment of black Americans, it remains blind to how its own walking into the future will trample the rest of us. 'The past is never dead, it isn't even past,' Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun. Courts across the country are using algorithms to spit out ' risk assessment' scores to make decisions about bail and parole, machines essentially dictating the terms of a person's freedom and whether or not they're to be granted it to begin with.

Women were given lower credit scores with the Apple card because of an opaque algorithm determining credit worthiness.

There's increasing awareness of racial and gender bias in algorithms. It was important to me to show that, if so much of what has come before resembles what is going on now, then so would so much of what is to come. Recently, I had an email conversation with Onyebuchi about the book and what inspired it. Kev's future - and Ella's - well, that's another thing, and I won't spoil it for you.) Over the course of the book, we follow Kev from childhood to prison to release into a near-future version of Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood that's become a sterile corporate holding pen for parolees, where a tiny chip implanted in his thumb controls his entire life. His life is hemmed in by structural and individual racism at every turn Onyebuchi describes his encounters with predatory police officers with a chilling matter-of-factness. Kev is the sort of character who's often reduced to a statistic, in books or outside them: He's young, he's black, he's in prison - while out in the world, his sister Ella is the one who wields mysterious, terrifying magical powers.īut Onyebuchi puts Kev at the center of the story, as a kind of conduit between the horrors of the past and a believably dystopian future. The 'riot baby' in Tochi Onyebuchi's slim, devastating new novel is Kev, born amidst the chaos of the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Riots, 25 Years On When LA Erupted In Anger: A Look Back At The Rodney King Riots

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi