Riot Baby (Tochi Onyebuchi)

Riot Baby
Tochi Onyebuchi
Tor
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Young Ella Jackson's always had odd ways about her, which she calls her Thing - which is how she knows that the day her baby brother is going to be born that there is going to be trouble in Los Angeles. She sees it, the same way she sees the hidden lives and eventual fates of passersby on the street, but she can do nothing to stop it. At least, not yet...
Kevin, or "Kev", was a bright boy growing up in Harlem, where the Jacksons moved after the Los Angeles riots in 1992. His sister's Thing is growing more powerful, consuming more and more of her and placing a greater burden on their overworked single mother. They're not just visions and nosebleeds anymore, but fits that fling objects around the room and even hurt anyone nearby. Maybe his bright mind can use science to understand it someday, and help everyone. But it's almost impossible to grow up in their neighborhood and not be pulled into problems, especially as algorithmically-driven police practices lead to more and more kids and teens landing in cuffs daily. Sure enough, by the time he's eighteen, Kevin is behind bars.
After disappearing for several years, Ella is slowly mastering her ever-growing Thing. She starts to visit her brother, in person and via astral projection, even as the system that sent him to jail and crushed so many non-white lives continues to grow stronger and more invulnerable to change and protest. Something has to change, and soon - and maybe the Jacksons are the ones to start it.

REVIEW: This 2020 novella was clearly a direct response to growing protests and demands for accountability on the disproportionate incarceration rates, assaults, and deaths of non-white people at the hands of law enforcement, and how all the petitions and demands and rage and calls for regulation ultimately seem incapable of stopping a system where the racism and violence are evidently essential components, considered features and not bugs to those with the actual power to change things. (See also: how things are going in June 2025...) It embodies a sense of anger and frustration, asking what it will take to truly end the suffering and the increasing spread of the police state into every aspect of existence.
It starts with Ella as a girl getting glimpses of the future, where a neighbor's infant boy won't live past the age of ten thanks to random gang violence and where the failure to convict the cops who beat up Rodney King are about to ignite the powder keg of rage running through the streets, a rage with roots running back through America's history of segregation and centuries of justice perverted and denied and promises of a better future forever deferred. That Kev was born on such a violent day is an omen of sorts, though whether that omen is good or bad depends on one's point of view. At first, the boy looks to be a bright star in his community, a leader who might effect peaceful change, but all too soon the unrest and injustice that sparked the Los Angeles riots in 1992 manifest in their new home. Ella, her "Thing" growing more unstable with her own growing frustration and anger, disappears to spare her family from powers she cannot yet control - leaving Kev without a big sister as he grows from an idealistic boy into a young man who becomes another victim of a society that seems designed to drive him and those like him straight into a prison cell. As he learns to survive in this new reality, he begins showing hints of his own powers, particularly after Ella reaches out to him after years away... yet, still, Kev has some faint hope that he can someday escape the brand of convict and find peace and freedom and the better future everyone tells him he'll have someday. Meanwhile, Ella undergoes her own journey to understand her Thing, which becomes entwined with understanding her mother's struggles and crushed dreams and the overall anger simmering underneath the Black communities, and perhaps a reason she was gifted with the Thing. Around the edges are hints of how technology is evolving to crush people with even more ruthlessness, with an even greater reach and ultimate control over a populace with fewer and fewer ways to resist. It builds to a moment of decision where the Jackson siblings must choose which future to pursue, and how much they are willing to sacrifice to get there.
For a novella, there are a few places that felt unfocused and meandering, but on the whole it's a strong, sometimes devastating exploration of the harm wrought by the current system and the need for tangible change beyond soundbites and slogans and vague hopes that if one just plays along and is polite enough that things will get better in a never-to-be-reached "someday" beyond the horizon.

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