Goliath Roundtable at Strange Horizons

I've written already about Tochi Onyebuchi's Goliath on this blog, but even after publishing, I wasn't sure that I'd given the novel the full consideration it deserves. The further I get away from it, the more obvious it seemed that Goliath is one of the major science fiction novels of 2022, and that the community as a whole has failed to fully appreciate it. I was thrilled, therefore, to be able to participate in a roundtable about the novel at Strange Horizons, alongside A.S. Lewis, Archita Mittra, and Jonah Sutton-Morse, and with the impeccable guidance of Dan Hartland. This is a long, detailed discussion that gets into how we define science fiction, how "difficult" novels engage us, and how Goliath is in conversation with own genre.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Thanks for gathering us—I'm really looking forward to this.

I have, I think, an answer to what the book is "about," and moreso to "where did your focus wind up landing," but I’m not sure they're particularly satisfying, so I'm looking forward to reading other answers to this.

My focus in Goliath wound up landing on the moments and edges outside the stories that the book tells. There’s a way that Goliath is straightforwardly a story about ecological collapse, capitalism scavenging on leftover fragments, and the destructive impulses of gentrification and racism that we can see in national US news stories every day. But it struck me that, while the book was aware of that story, and expected the reader to be able to follow it (and this is a book that I found hard to follow), my focus kept falling on the pieces outside that story. The impulse to scavenge the remnants of a city is less interesting than the people who do the basic manual work of hammering the bricks. The people who leave ecological collapse are less interesting than those who remain—and even among those who left, the most interesting are those at the margins who eventually return. The mechanics of living in climate collapse, and enduring the policing that comes with the intrusion of wealth, are acknowledged but less interesting than an adventure collecting wild horses, or a group of people playing Spades and talking trash.

I don't really like saying that this novel is "about" the lives and details around the edge of the destructive forces that regularly lead my national headlines (and I realize that the "Winter" section that Dan puts at the heart of the book at least partly complicates my reading), but it is those lives and details that my focus landed on.

Abigail Nussbaum: I'd say that "what is the book about" and "what is its story" are two different questions. This is often the case, of course, but all the more so for Goliath because the characters in whom it's truly interested are also in such stasis, mostly acted upon, and, by the novel’s end, only able to affect their world in extremely destructive ways. So the story is about two gentrifiers coming back to Earth and settling in New Haven, and causing terrible destruction even though they've promised each other that they're among the good ones. But that is not what the book is about—note, for example, how David and Jonathan’s point of view is deliberately elided in the novel's final segment. The last time we see inside either of their heads is right before they make the fateful decision (and we never get to see the rationalization that justifies it, only the trigger for it). We don't learn their reaction to the aftermath, or what happens to them afterwards.

As for what the book is about, I would say that it’s a twist on Gibson's "the future is here but not evenly distributed." It’s a story about how there are always people who are left behind by the future, often in ways that can't help but seem deliberate. And how, when those people try to stake their claim in the world—try to take that quintessentially SFnal step of building their world—the response is to come in and take what they’ve made without even acknowledging their right to it. The entire system is designed to disempower them.

This roundtable is being published as a funding milestone in Strange Horizons's annual fundraiser. Though the base funding goal has been reached, there are still several stretch goals that I'd very much like to see reached, such as raising contributor pay, and additional special issues. Strange Horizons remains one of the most vibrant venues for SFF fiction and criticism—I can't imagine another magazine that would not only commission this conversation about Goliath, but give it this kind of space and freedom to range in so many directions. If you're able to, please consider contributing to help the magazine's work continue.