Black Folks’ Magic Manifesting: ‘Riot Baby’ Review

First of all, I want to thank Tor Dot Com Publishing for sponsoring this review. When I heard the title of the book and read the back cover, I was excited. Seeing more Black folk driving in the sci-fi/fantasy lane has been a dream come true for this Black nerd. There is a squad of Black writers that are tearing down the walls others have put up, breaking down the door others have locked all the while refusing to look the white gaze in the eye. Riot Baby…keeps that same energy. The butterfly effect has always tickled my fancy. The idea that a small change can make much bigger changes happen; one small incident can have a big impact on the future. I’ve thought about it in my own life. I can track how using Google Maps in 2002, led me to a graduate program in 2010. Think about how going to one random party at the right time can lead you to a 3-year relationship. We see this phenomenon in literature. It was the basis of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that Gen X loved as kids. The comic industry has been all over this. Marvel’s What If books are phenomenal, as is DC’s Red Son, which imagines what would have happened if Kal-El’s shuttle had crashed in the Soviet Union. I love these types of narratives, where the reader is asked to push past what we think we already know and travel in a new direction. Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi does this in its own way. It asks the reader…what if, in the midst of all this: structural racism, Jim Crow, voter disenfranchisement, one of us …