Historically this has not been my thing! But I am trying to be more open to different kinds of books and different ways of telling stories, and certainly it’s impossible to read Goliath and wish for it to be anything other than what it is. Goliath is the second of two 2022 SF novels that I read in January that were no plot, only vibes. But the divide between Yale and Not-Yale was so stark, and so mutually suspicious, and white people in New Haven would just say anything to you about non-white New Haven, like, right to my face after knowing me for thirty seconds, and everyone was deeply unfriendly, and tldr it was fucking weird as shit and I was not there long enough to get good at navigating it.)ĪNYWAY. It’s one of those things where like, the segregation and prejudice of the place you’re not from feels the weirdest? Like, I know that segregation happens all over the US, very much including my home state. (Sidebar, I lived in New Haven for three months and it was the weirdest place I have ever been. Now, white folks are coming back to New Haven (and Earth more broadly!), which means that governments are starting to care more about clean air and policing the lives of those who never left. In this future, the wealthy and the white have mostly left earth for space colonies, while those without the means to leave were left to cope with pollution, automated policing, and steadily deteriorating government support. Inasmuch as it has a plot, it’s about the re-gentrification of New Haven. Tochi Onyebuchi is far too interesting and thoughtful a writer to have achieved his final form with his fifth novel, but I do get the sense that the success of his most recent novella, Riot Baby, and his continuing development as a writer bought him the leeway he needed to write his wonderful, genre-crossing new novel, Goliath.

Even if the thing they become doesn’t quite align with my tastes and I have to hop off the train, it’s still a very cool process to witness a writer achieving their final form. Ideally, with supportive agents and editors, and the sales to support it (sob, capitalism is a hellscape), writers go through their careers becoming more and more like themselves, writing books that are more and more the exact thing they want to write. This is fun because when they hit it big, I get to be a hipster about it (in a few years I’m going to be a nightmare about Micaiah Johnson and y’all will all be tired of me), but it’s also fun because I get to see their development as writers. When I feel a bit sad about my reading/blogging focus having shifted to focus so heavily on recent releases, I comfort myself with a reminder that reading recent releases gets me in on the ground floor of new authors.

Goliath onyebuchi novel