 Good morning, Highline. First, a big shout out to the Unity Week team who's holding it down at the back end of this presentation for us all. It is my honor to introduce our Unity Week speaker, Tochi Onibuchi. When discussing the theme, Reclaiming Education and Honoring Resilience, our committee examined where our community stood at this current moment in time. Tochi Onibuchi embodied our theme through his social justice efforts through the written word. Tochi Onibuchi is the author of the young adult novel Beasts, Made of the Night, which won the No More Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African. It's sequel, Crown of Thunder and War Girls. He holds a BA from Yale and an MFA in screenwriting from the Tisch School of the Arts. He master's degree in economics from sciences, people, and a JD from the Columbia Law School. He is currently a guest faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. And Raya Baby is his adult fiction debut. Without further ado, Tochi Onibuchi. Hi everyone. Thank you Highline College for having me and a huge shout out to Doris Martinez, to Betty Vera and everyone who has been working so hard to put this incredible Unity Week together. It's an honor to be here and to speak on some matters that as a writer, as somebody who traffics in imaginings and imagined futures is very important to me. So I want to talk about dystopia. An anthropologist travels 20 light years from Earth to arrive at a place called St. Anne. It's a colony planet, part of a dyad. Its sister planet is San Qua. Now, St. Anne was originally settled by French colonists who were then later supplanted by other humans, supposedly. Our anthropologist arrives on St. Anne looking to excavate the past. Popular history has it that the French upon arrival wiped out the aboriginal population of St. Anne as is the want of such people. This anthropologist believes at least some trace of the original race exists. And soon after his arrival, he hires a young boy, allegedly half aboriginal to assist him on his quest. As the anthropologist refuses to believe that any peoples could be so systematically exterminated as to leave no trace of their having existed. Pyramids, sunken cities, linguistic fragments, there has to be at least some evidence. The anthropologist and the boy embark on their journey encountering all manner of science fictional flora and fauna. At some point we learn that the anthropologist has come to disprove a hypothesis. And the story it's called Veil's hypothesis and the hypothesis is this. The original inhabitants of St. Anne weren't wiped out. In fact, they were a race of shapeshifters who assumed the form of their would be conquerors and then proceeded to slaughter them. Suddenly, in a world of interstellar travel and oversized bear cats and clones are shapeshifters the thing that beggars belief. Suddenly it's a valid proposition. What if what if the original inhabitants of this planet were shapeshifters are shapeshifters. Who saw invaders killed them and stole their identities. We follow as our anthropologist makes a path through this world and are forced to question everything until at some point in the story even the anthropologist's identity is thrown into doubt. And we are left asking the question, who is human and who is Abo. Not realizing the trap we have fallen into until it's too late. Who is human and who is Aboriginal. That is the question that animates the colonial enterprise, isn't it. Who is British and who is Aboriginal, who is European and who is Aboriginal, who is white and who is Aboriginal, who is human and who is Aboriginal. The book, The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolf tells the story of this anthropologist and weaves his story through and around to other novellas, all set on the twin planets of St. Anne and St. Kwa. And all of them examining in haunting fashion, the post colonial project. At the center of these stories of clones and genetically enhanced sex workers and robots. Is this question. Who gets to be human crack open any book in the science fiction or fantasy section of a library or bookstore and somewhere nestled near the book spine or hovering just below the header on your reader will be this question. Who gets to be human. The story concerns elves and orcs, super soldiers drafted to fight in a forever war, a boy who lives beneath the stairs or a reanimated monster this question or some version of it announces itself. Sure, all of our stories are about us. There are creation myths explaining the origin of the stars or dark ponderous Oscar bait at the theater. All our stories are about us, but speculative fiction provides a particularly powerful lens speculative fiction literalizes metaphor. It allows a story to operate as allegory and reality simultaneously. So a rival is a movie about contact with aliens about learning their language and about figuring out whether or not they mean us harm, but it's also a story about a woman learning how to live with a loss she hasn't yet endured. If we know what's going to be taken away should we love it with all our heart anyway. So the X men are a group of superpowered beings capable of pyro kinesis and telepathy and weather manipulation. But their stories also the story of a people hunted hated and feared for what they cannot change a metaphor, however imperfect for the weaponization of race. We're in the West and we home in on say American publishing American storytelling. Common thought would say the science fiction novel as it's known today can be traced back to HG Wells with the time machine in 1895 and the island of Dr. Moreau a year later. Go back a little further and we get Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818. In those stories, the ones that followed well into the early 1900s we get all the staples. The colonization of foreign planets time travel bioengineering in one 1886 French novel. Thomas Edison builds a friend of his a female Android, because this friend has grown tired of his own wife. It's not immediately apparent to the characters, or perhaps to the author either who is the true monster of that story. Still the story most often told is of those stories seeping into the pop culture of the time. Dr. Moreau saw its first film adaptation in 1913. And then we get the magazines weird tales which published the early work of influential horror writer and noted anti-Semite HP Lovecraft and amazing stories published by Hugo Burns back in 1926. To give an indication as to how influential Mr. Burns back was fields highest honor is named after him. He is the Hugo in the Hugo award. Burns back writes in the first issue. Not only do these amazing tales take from make tremendously interesting reading. They are also instructive. They supply knowledge that we might not otherwise obtain and they supply it in a very palatable form. For the best of these modern writers of scientific fiction have the neck of imparting knowledge and even inspiration without once making us aware that we are being taught. What follows is an explosion of space opera and the beginnings of what folks have come to call the golden age of science fiction. Before these sorts of stories would appear in pulse, the children of the dime novels and penny dreadfuls that came before. Now they have their own magazines. They no longer had to share real estate. And these stories are what you may expect of the time. Lurid colorful covers. There's a felt somewhat Scandinavian hero on the cover. Maybe he shares that cover with an alien. If not that then a woman. These were adventure stories with sciencey bells and whistles. But if you're a young white American male, corn fed, heterosexual cisgendered with a healthy interest in airplanes and a world war in your near future, then these stories are about you. All the things these characters do all the places they go to all the saving that they get to do. That's you. Those stories are about you. In 2017 at the ceremony for the world fantasy awards, Martha Wells gave a speech titled on bury the future. In it, she says, the convention defines secret history as tales which uncover an alternative history of our world with the aid of fantasy literary devices. Like alternate histories or secret tales of the occult. Secrets are about suppression and history is often suppressed by violence, obscured by cultural appropriation or deliberately destroyed or altered by colonization and a lingering kind of cultural gaslighting. Wikipedia defined secret history as a revisionist interpretation of either fictional or real history which is claimed to have been deliberately suppressed, forgotten or ignored by established scholars. That's what I think of when I hear the word secret histories. Histories kept intentionally secret and histories that were quietly allowed to fade away. She goes on to speak about the erasure of women and non binary writers and writers of color from the literary history of this country, whether in the pulps of the 1920s and 30s or from the beat generation. The secret history is the speculative fictions literary devices at work again. A metaphor describing reality. Because as these young American boys are being primed for war a continent away by books whose covers feature bugs to be squashed and women to be rescued there's another type of science fiction being written. In 1903 Pauline Hopkins publishes the novel of one blood or the hidden self about a mixed race medical student named Royal Briggs who sets off on an adventure to Ethiopia in search of very treasure because student loans. Taken identities amnesiac damsels magic ancient prophecy a royal family, daring archaeological expedition this novel had it all. There's also one of the first novels to articulate a form of black internationalism, because it not only features African American characters but it is also set largely in Africa. The foundation of a romantic adventure story rest themes of race and the obsession with physiognomy incest and racial passing. Royal passes for white and over the course of his journey discovers the sameness of the human race. And he gets there by embracing his story to African heritage. Also published that same year was wb Du Bois the souls of black folk. In the early 1930s the magazines amazing stories and amazing stories quarterly flounder a little bit money trouble money troubles abound. Imaginations grow stale but chip away at the literary amber and uncover another secret history. Eileen Hopkins may have been the first African American to give us a romantic fantasy. And in 1931, we may have gotten our first African American science fiction novel. It isn't about aliens it isn't about other planets. The novel figures our own is strange enough. Its author is one George S. Schuyler. Its title is black no more, being an account of the strange and wonderful workings of science in the land of the free AD 1933 to 1940. And at its center is a scientific procedure. After having been spurned by a white woman in a Harlem speakeasy on the simple fact of his blackness, reads of a scientific procedure that could result in the complete bleaching of his skin. Black no more claims to be able to turn a black man white. The scientific procedure grows in popularity, throwing the social and economic order of the country predicated on a strictly delineated racial hierarchy into bedlam. NAACP leaders with their talented 10th aura, they hate it. Southern segregationist desperate for a critical mass of other to hate they despise it. Meanwhile, Max Disher, now Matthew Fisher, wins the white girl. The novels hijinks involve a potential mixed race baby a jet plane and mutilation at the hands of animalistic at a vistic Mississippi whites. speculative fiction in general and science fiction in particular, speak to our anxieties. They speak to our pathologies, our worries. Nuclear warfare, civil rights, racial discrimination, we organize our stories around these concerns. Perhaps if we can articulate our fears we can render them obsolete. Simply to say them out loud is to leech away at least a portion of their power, which is to say that our science fiction and our fantasy. Our speculative imaginings are about our fears, and our fears are about us. There's something quantum mechanical about it all makes me think of that poor cat. Now what animal has been more prone to the vagaries of human curiosity than Schrodinger's poor cat. Trapped in a steel box that it must share with radioactive chemicals. While physicists in the comfort of their laboratories and arm chairs talk about super positions and wavelengths and quantum systems and while they wait for the radioactive element in the box to either decay or not. The cat has to know that something's up. As the experiment goes, either the radioactive element in the box decays, triggering the release of an acid that will kill the cat. Or the element remains stable and Felix sees another day. Because we are human and selfish we have to make this about ourselves so it stands that Felix, his father neglected to name him so I decided to go ahead, is both alive and dead. He's not a zombie. We're not going to have to rick grimes the poor thing, but there's a reality where Felix is alive and a reality where he's dead. They're both happening on top of each other. And the matter doesn't get settled until we step in. The problem needs an outside observer. As soon as we open the box the wavelengths collapse and the cat is dead. Or not. But there might be a way out. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics here, there is no wavelength collapse. The observer triggers nothing. The world happens whether or not we pay attention to it. Felix dead and Felix alive aren't simply two options or possibilities. They are two things happening at the same time in different realities. Two truths, more than that. Felix is buried beneath the mausoleum. Felix is right now perched on the back of your favorite couch and ignoring you. Felix is meowing his final meows. Felix is at the apex of his career as a world class tap dancer. Felix battling a gambling addiction. Felix discovering lasagna for the first time. Felix is dead, long live Felix. It may not seem obvious just how much quantum mechanics, how much science fiction has to do with blackness in America. But I know for a fact that more than a few of us engage in precisely these thought experiments throughout our day. Mothers of black sons do it every day that they must send their child out the front door. Because very often Laquan McDonald, Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin and Botham Jean aren't just names or family members or loved ones or former classmates or work buddies or teammates. They are alternate realities. You hear the racist remark in the office and wonder if chewing out the offender is worth the potential job loss. Before you, on spools of future where you lose the job you fought so hard to get to begin with. Then the delinquent rent. Then the pile of unpaid bills becomes a mountain. Student loan default, eviction, estrangement, but before that, before all that can be spun into being, you hold your tongue. You save yourself. A million deferments, a million instances where you step aside for someone else, a million defeats, compiled over the course of the day born out of self preservation. Because as angry as it makes you, what makes you angrier is that recorded video of Philando Castile's last moments after an officer had fired his gun into the car carrying his partner and child. Worst case scenarios are the business of survival. You learn what berries to eat, not because certain ones taste better than others, but rather because certain berries will kill you or at least give you bubbling cuts. Certain berries will see you minding your business, living your life, and you'll stoop down thinking this is just a regular encounter with another bushel of berries and maybe these will even taste better than the last bunch. Then suddenly you're on the forest floor, paralyzed by pain, betrayed by a berry that was supposed to nourish you. A berry that was supposed to serve and protect. Basically berries are cops. There's this thing I'm doing right now, and you might look at it and say, oh, he's just laughing through the pain. And I would chuckle and maybe demure, suggesting that perhaps that's too melodramatic a take. The berries thing, what was that you asked the person next to you. Well, aside from a kind of wobbly metaphor, this thing I'm doing right now is imagining. It's imagining away the apocalypse. It's articulating a fear, engaging in science fiction as act. I'm trying to survive the dystopia dystopia comes from the Greek, and as night is the opposite of day. It came on the heels of the term utopia. It's opposite, translating quite literally to the bad place. Dystopia brings to mind autocracy and tyrants, mind control, environmental disasters, subjugation. In dystopias books are burned and heroines must volunteer as tribute. In dystopias words are stricken from the spoken language in the hopes that the ideas they hold will vanish as well. Dystopias and droids are birthed into lives of automatic servitude, always a slave. I'm thinking in particular of Blade Runner 2049. In the movie, our chief antagonist played by Jared Leto seeks to build a workforce that self replicates. Machines that give birth to other machines. Algorithms made flesh. It is unclear whether Jared Leto's character understands the full implications of capturing the power of birth and therefore engineering our own obsolescence, all in a quest for an ever expanding workforce. Even devoid of racial animus, Leto operates in the shadow of the slave master, commanding his chattel to copulate and create born slaves whose entire purpose is to generate profit. Twitter rides a wave of hate in order to appear as though their user base is ever increasing. Never mind that a significant portion of those new accounts are automated bots. Facebook finds itself similarly situated, governed by an aid so avaricious, it turns even altruism into a mere act of performance. Are we making money in order to advance the human race or are we advancing the human race in order to make money? If our present reality has told us anything, it is that our future will carry all of our present societal pathologies. In fact, it may even aggravate them. Our future will be racist. It will be sexist. It will be virulently misogynistic. As long as the white cisgendered males currently writing our algorithms remain in power, Jared Leto's transhuman mock Messiah is far from the least believable part of Blade Runner 2049. The imagination need not stretch far to touch the hem of this Jack Dorsey Peter teal Jeff Bezos hybrid garment. He is our terminus. Algorithms used in police departments and health services. To where the majestic neutrality of faceless machine precision have been shown not only to reinforce racist and patriarchal dynamics, but in some cases to expand their ambit. Ask an algorithm to calculate bail for two detainees of different races. Ask an algorithm to gauge a patient's risk of suicide. There's the black box. So impervious and whose contents are so unimaginable that to watch an algorithm at work is to be in dialogue with another species of being a dog staring at a human knowing that it is capable of thinking of figuring things out. And yet who remains forever tragically unintelligible. The future is in the hands of white male chaos agents disguised as visionaries who more often than not are not forced to submit their source code for public examination for scrutiny for comment. And thus build our to be unchallenged and unpunished. Facebook morphs into a platform for the spread of misinformation easing the consciences of those enacting genocide on Rohingya Muslims. Twitter, the chloroform soaked rags silencing the already near silenced marginalizing the marginalized. These makers believe they're at work constructing a utopia. If a foreign power cyber attacks its way into a presidential election, if a woman of color is harassed off a social media platform, if swap teams are maliciously sent to the homes of innocence by way of hoaxes and prank calls. It's chalked up to the cost of doing business. For them. It's the dirty soiled present they intend on leaving behind, but for the rest of us. It's the future we are being dragged into the nightmare of dystopia doesn't lie in the Carmine shade of lightning that cuts through small gray clouds overhead or the hungry way ocean laps up against the gigantic wall surrounding our cities. The nightmare of dystopia isn't even the elephant in garbage carrier, discouraging waste onto the hidden homes of orphans. The nightmare of dystopia is its inevitability. Every fantastical story is about our now. When Hugo Gernsback wrote in the pages of amazing stories about the type of story he sought to publish a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. He was elaborating a vision of the genre that sought to will the imagination into being. He was pictured for us in the science fiction of today are not at all impossible. He writes of realization tomorrow. Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written. Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well. There's the temptation to read into the genre a sort of prophetic mandate. Especially when our own time seems so dire and surreal. Commentators wasted no time drawing comparisons between the Gilead of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and the inauguration of the current president of the United States. A figure who many say saw its prefiguration in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. The marketing team behind this president wasn't the first to coin the phrase make America great again. Look to Fahrenheit 451 and see a metaphor for the current valorization of anti-intellectualism and the denigration of expertise. Maybe the signal quality one looks for in a leader isn't a facility with foreign languages or the ability to hold macroeconomic concepts in their head. Maybe it isn't the capacity for expansive geopolitical and moral imagination. Maybe it's simply that he seems like a nice guy to have a beer with. Before the thought police made their appearance in Orwell's 1984. There was the Tokubetsu Koto Kaisatsu established in 1911 by the Empire of Japan. Waterworld, Westworld, climate change, artificial intelligence in each version of the post apocalypse, the fear that drives the narrative is that of our own obsolescence. In the future, our being human will not be what saves us. In fact, our being human is what doomed us to begin with. We are chained to the action to the consequences of our actions. But these visions often assume a monolithic human folly. There's this idea that we, all of us in our respective rooms or in what would have been the room we shared, deserve what happens to us equally. That we all deserve this prison of the future. Like all living things we resist enclosure. Dear Rome forests, vines colonize abandoned coliseums, a human being held in solitary confinement will self harm, scream, plead, kick doors, smear feces on their cell walls and refuse food. If there exists even the promise of seeing the sun for 15 minutes of their day. There are many words in English for what that human being quest for. Liberty, emancipation, freedom, independence. So much of the American project has been dousing its cultural fabric in these colors. Justice is nowhere to be found piece somewhere far off in the distance over the horizon. In fact, those messy words presume and after, and they presume that this after is other than post apocalypse. An episode in the second season of black mirror titled white bear dramatizes precisely this conundrum. The protagonist, a woman played by Lenora Chrislow awakens with amnesia haunted by a symbol that flickers on the television screen in her room and hunted by unreasoning pursuers. People on the street catch sight of her and immediately raise their camera phones to record. Even as her pursuers shoot at her and those who have decided to aid her the spectators remain just that. Spectators. They're being held captive by a signal from a transmitter at a facility called white bear. Get to white bear destroy the transmitter and free the world from their stupor. When she and her Confederate reach the transmitter to hunters attack. What is supposed to be the episode's climax. She rushes she rustles a shotgun away from one of her assailants aims and pulls the trigger. Out comes confetti. The whole thing was a hoax. Her name is revealed as well as the fact that she and her fiance had murdered a child. Her sentence for which is daily psychological torture. We live the same day over and over and over again. With no memory that it has ever happened before. Emancipation with no hint of peace. Some would watch the aftermath of that reveal the woman being driven back to her compound while those spectators from earlier curse her and damn her and spit at her. And say that's justice. They might say that in punishing her whatever justice system that exists in the world of this episode is simply operating out of procedural fidelity. Maybe the algorithm decided this and an algorithm sees neither color nor sex nor gender nor faith. It renders us equally as numbers. But of the many things I came away from that episode holding in my chest nowhere among them was any sense of justice. It replaces the episode somewhere in our future and after as it were. The paradox of progress here is that it takes our imaginations to create an after where there are no afters revealing the mistake inherent in founding your identity on the sole item of liberation. The light at the end of the tunnel brought to you by lamps that have been hung up in the next portion of the tunnel. But organizing principle is freedom. Maybe all you've done for yourself is fashion and other cage. And a cage does not need metal bars and concrete walls to be obvious. Once again, science fiction allegorizes our prison. I should have said allegorizes are present. But for too many Americans, there is no difference. In Flint, Michigan, the water is still poisoned. The atomic has wreaked particular havoc in the cities, the neighborhoods, black Americans and Latinos call home. The data has become increasingly assertive of the notion that we are not all on the same boat. Some of us take shelter in the safety of our yacht, while others are forced to share a single piece of driftwood. The United States capitalism has already partnered with law enforcement throughout the nation so that resistance movements can be quelled while they gestate in the womb. In meeting rooms throughout DC and state capitals across the country sit men legislating away the control a woman might have over her own body. Put this all in a book and you'd be forgiven for thinking that this unreality was simply the product of an overactive imagination. But the reader, when confronted with the truth of these conditions must ask for whom is this dystopia and for whom is this reality. Gernsback's idea of scientific fiction as a story intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision becomes especially chilling in this light. What Gernsback could not have imagined was that the children and grandchildren of empire might also be engaged in these imaginings. They might also be at work constructing alternate mouths to critique this one and imagining new afters. We see the fruit of their labor in Afrofuturism. UX designer and theorist Florence Okoye writes Afrofuturism dares to suggest that not only will black people exist in the future, but that we will be makers and shapers of it too. She ties the Afrofuturist project to a reaching back far from operating from the blank slate baseline that results from the wholesale obliteration of one's history by the triangle slave trade. We can reach back to our past to inspire our futures. We've snatched the pen, the tablet, the laptop from the hunter and type out with our claws the true story of the savannah oppression seeks to pulverize the possible to atomize hope to granulate not only dreams but the very act of dreaming. What control does one have over the slave the sharecropper the convict in a capitalistic enterprise if they can imagine another now if they can build in the cathedral of their mind and after. Now, better to erase their name indicate only their present physical features on the bill of laden amputate their familial bonds by scattering their children into plantations all over the country. A century later, however, rappers walk the streets of New York City with Africa pendants hanging from their necks at work knowingly or unknowingly repairing American injury. Telling story the way Skyler told story the way Butler told story the way NK Jemisin will tell story. Afrofuturism this imagining of afters pushes the labor toward the tunnels mouth that warmth. The feel of the sun on your face. Prison still persists environmental racism aggravates illness material and professional advancement will still be thwarted but there is nothing like the moment. When a prisoner the first night of the 1971 Attica uprising stares up at the sky from a D yard crowded with other prisoners crafting a civil rights moment and says tears leaking down his face that he hasn't seen the stars in 22 years. We resist enclosure speculative fiction speaks in the language not only of what is but what can be. In fact speculative speculative fiction breaks down the walls between those two. In the work of neon yanks black tides of heaven. Your gender is the result of your choice. In the recent TV mini series adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchman God takes the form of a black man and is hunted. In the fifth head of Cerberus by Gene Wolf and indigenous peoples allegedly murders there would be colonizers and turns into them. All of these things can be read as fantasy. And all of them can be read as true. The genre's primary concern was never technological advancement. It was human examination. From Pygmalion to planet of the apes all of these stories posit the question who gets to be human. Reading dystopia as a black American can often feel like being confronted with a constantly lived truth. That everywhere contains peril. And that there is always immediate cause for mourning. This is that apocalyptic imagining. speculative fiction often speaks in the language of any times. You spend your whole life gathering evidence informing the worst case scenarios that you cannot help but constantly imagine. And if the fundamental denial at the root of race hatred in the United States persists, then maybe apocalypse is all there is. I do not believe we can stop them Samori. Tallahassee Coates writes to his son in between the world and me. Because they must ultimately stop themselves. The white supremacy will never go away its victims will never fully escape its reach in every galaxy we travel to it'll be there waiting to be warred against. Life is reduced to an ice blink existence inside a steel box, while a poisonous acid is being released. In every variation of this equation the result is the same. We are Felix Schrodinger's cat. But that's not all there is to the story. Afrofuturism, the work of Pauline Hopkins, the satire of George Schuyler, this appropriation of the medium by the children and grandchildren of the empire, the secret history, running like a third rail through our past and our present. That is the other part. It is this thing that gives my pessimism texture. It pulls it out, wrinkles it enables me to believe that the universe, this one, at least is ordered out of consideration for me is molded with me as its subject. In essence, I get to be the hero believing this doesn't necessarily mean believing in a universe where you will never suffer harm or loss. The universe where everything is fair where the cosmic ledger is balanced. It's sacrificing oneself to a higher calling or duty, prioritizing others, family, community, etc. over oneself and finding fulfillment in that. Believing that the universe is ordered around you as subject can look like watching an autumn sunset, or standing outside in the winter, and listening to the feathery snow set up every single sound so that there's nothing but that beautiful charged silence wrapped around you. It can look like an appreciation of nature for everything from the ladybug to the goshawk. Sometimes it looks like submitting to the limits of your understanding and admitting you have no idea what the hell is going on. Always though, we're trying to find some way out of the box, some way that keeps our head on straight and air in our lungs. Sometimes that looks like writing fiction. Sometimes it looks like us replacing the anthropologist and proceeding to tell our own story. Thank you for your time. Thank you. I'm sure if you could see everyone, everyone would be applauding and they'd be very happy and thank you for sharing your knowledge with us. So today we will now take a 10 minute break for you to get up, move around, get to class if you need to, get a drink of water. And then after those 10 minutes, we will commence with our Q&A session. If you do have a question for Toche Onyabuchi, we ask that you please use the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen to submit your question. Thank you. Hi-Line family. We will now resume with questions for Toche. We have some great questions, but please feel free to submit more in the questions in the Q&A feature at the bottom of the screen as we move along. All right, let's look at them. All right, so the first one that we have is not a question, but it is coming from Shaiwan Hain. She says no question, but wow, this is dope. And our first question is from one of our students named Maya and they're asking which book has been the most influential on your world view, Toche? Oh my goodness. Oh man, there are so many candidates for that title in part because there are certain books that have really burst my world view open with regards to race or with regards to international issues or with regards to gender or what have you. But I will say in terms of just sheer possibility, I would have to point to The Count of Bonacristo, oddly enough, by Alexander Dumas. And the reason I picked that book is because I remember reading it in high school and Dumas was my favorite writer at the time and still to this day and still to this day is. But it wasn't until junior year of high school when I was doing study abroad that I actually found out he was black. Like I had no idea. Like the dude who wrote Three Musketeers, like arguably the most famous French writer in history. No shade to Victor Hugo was the same color as me. And I think that really, that really drove home an interesting point for me because, you know, it's important what's in a book but I think also to with regards to representation. Perhaps what has been even more powerful for me has been seeing who has been writing these stories, right? Like, I knew for a very long time that I wanted to be a writer that I wanted to tell stories. And then I wanted to tell all types of stories and to see to see a guy like Alexander Dumas write a story about like, you know, you know, hidden identities and buried treasure and revenge plots and all this like really, really, really cool stuff. Like sword fights, all of that stuff. That really blew my, my mind open with regards to what was possible in the world because it made it seem like I was possible as a writer. So yeah, I would. That's a somewhat long-winded answer to to yes, the counter monocrystal. The second question that comes from Paul Sam says, thank you so much for your knowledge. I learned so much from this talk. I'd like to think of myself as an aspiring writer. I am an international student from South Sudan. And I want to write fantasy but African fantasy. How can I tell a story? How can I tell stories that are unapologetically African. I have this fear that a majority of people are not as ready to receive real African and Black stories unless they are diluted in whiteness. Oh man, that's so real. That's such a real, that's such a real concern. I think it's, we're, we're very, this is a very interesting and I think really promising moment for speculative fiction and even just fiction in general that concerns itself with the African continent. My very first book Beast Made of Night was the setting is very much inspired by Legos and particularly the Legos where my mom grew up in Nigeria. And, you know, you look for instance at the recent novel by Marlon James Black Leopard Red Wolf, which is set in this sort of second world, you know, sub Saharan fantasy Africa. And that was like shortlisted for the National Book Award. And then you had you look, you know, across, you know, whether it's young adult or adult fiction, you know, Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, which is the first in her trilogy. You know, you look at Ray Bearer by Jordan Ifueko. They're like, there's so much incredible work that's being put out by African and diaspora writers. And, you know, granted, there's it's, it's not enough, like there's, there always needs to be more, but I will say now more than ever that, you know, it's possible to go into a library to look on a shelf and to see a story that, you know, science fiction or fantasy that engages seriously with the continent that gauges seriously with issues that are endemic to to African countries to African peoples that, you know, takes African countries to miss seriously. And that wasn't always the case, you know, I think, you know, one of the people that I think of immediately with regards to the intersection of Africa and speculative fiction is Nettie O'Curl for and her binti trilogy that like, you know, look no further. And basically just everything that that Nettie does, you know, she's very much career goals for me with regards to the trail that she's been able to blaze for Nigerian American writers. But yeah, you know, while it's a legitimate worry that that stories that are that are sort of unapologetically African will be diluted by, you know, publishing machine that is majority white. And let's not forget, I do think that, you know, there is cause for hope that if you if you stay as true to your vision as as as you as you are able to, there is an audience for that. Awesome. Thanks. So our next question comes from a student Angelisa. And they have asked how are some ways that you recharge yourself after having to constantly know and encounter and encounter oppressive structures that are steeped into humanity. Video games. No, I mean, it's, it's, it's a, you know, it's such a that's such a real and important question, in part because, you know, as, as somebody who's writing is infused with, you know, these sorts of issues and concerns and what have you I'm constantly having to stare this stuff in the face right and it can be exhausted. It can be exhausting just living through it and then it can also be exhausting on top of that trying to engage in the sort of alchemy that turns that that pain and that trauma into a work of art that somebody can relate to. It's, it's always a blessing to have your peoples, you know, just have people that you can that you can laugh and be joyful with and that you can crack jokes with that you can watch, you know, Netflix shows with that like, you know, people that you can go to and it doesn't even necessarily have to be you know, people that you can have heavy conversations with, you can just be people that bring joy into your life. That, you know, that is definitely something that I tried to make sure has been an ample supply in my life, but also to, you know, just having things that that allow me to extricate myself from the work so you know I was laughing about video games but I am dead serious like video games really like that. I'm playing, I'm playing a game right now Sekiro Shadows Die Twice is very much like a Dark Souls Bloodborne type game, notoriously difficult. And if you saw me playing you'd be like wow that doesn't look relaxing at all that in fact looks like the most stressful thing that I have seen you do all week. But it's something that's not, you know, engaging with, you know, deconstruction of oppressive colonial structures. So in a way it is, it is a sort of relaxation is a way to sort of get my head out of that space and it is something that I can sort of lose myself in which is I think, you know, at the core what I'm looking for when I'm looking to sort of detach from the work that I'm doing. And it, you know, it keeps me sharp, you know, it's like, it's like Sudoku, in a sense. Remy Friedrich asks, you mentioned that you were pessimistic about what will happen in the future. If you were being optimistic, what do you think will happen? What will it take to get us there? Oh man, shouts out to optimism. I love optimism. I think if I were to engage in my most optimistic vision of the future, it would be that that there that that you know that it would it would entail a sort of breakdown of racialized capitalism right so you know, one sort of concrete manifestation of that would be, okay, we no longer, you know, no longer tie your health insurance or whether or not you have health insurance to whether or not you're employed right and then you look at that. And you look at all the ways in which that has sort of all these, these racial vectors when you look at the job market, for instance, and you look at who has what jobs and, you know, whether they're full time part time what have you and how health insurance is tied into and immediately you're confronted with this sort of this entanglement of of capitalism and all the sort of ways in which racism has structurally manifested itself in the workforce and in society and whatnot. And if there was a way to just sort of like tear that all apart and make sure that you know, no matter what color you were no matter what your background was you would be able to be medically taken care of in this country like that would be that would be really really really really really dope. Um, yeah, I like, I don't know, I feel like, I feel like the things that I that I would be asking for would be like just super basic things like, like, like universal childcare like you know, not having to, you know, that that every single person in this country would be free from worry, right, like, you know, food insecurity, or home insecurity, like that they wouldn't have to worry about that sort of thing, like that's, like that's, that's it for me like I you know, I could. I wouldn't need spaceships or I wouldn't need you know, you know, androids or any of that stuff, but just like if we could get rid of food insecurity in this country like that would be really really really cool. I do think we're seeing steps in that direction with, you know, aspects of the of the left amongst our legislators both on the national and on the state level. And you see in terms of like state politics a lot of really good organizing going on, but also to sort of outside of the political realm a lot of organizations that are doing work with regards to indigenous rights with regards to gun violence with incarceration with regards to bail reform, so much work is being done so much good work is being done. And it's the type of good work that doesn't it's not showy, it's not flashy it's not the type of stuff that you would that you would hear about or that you would see people like tweeting about even, but it's getting done so you know, it's not you know those those visions it's not that far out there. It is possible. And I think we're, I think we're on our way there. All right, so the next question, which books or concepts would you personally recommend to someone who wants to learn more about speculative fiction. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness, where to begin. This is such a delicious question, but at the same time this is just so many. I would say, if you're if you're interested in the ways in which speculative fiction can look at and deconstruct sort of oppressive structures. But you also want a story that is just incredibly well told, and that just has all these incredible mind busting like world building details. I would say read the broken earth trilogy by NK Jemisin. So the first book in that is the fifth season. Let's let's just put it this way. Every single book in that trilogy won the Hugo Award for best novel and NK Jemisin is the only author to have ever pulled off that feat to win the Hugo three years in a row for that for for best novel, and also to have every single book in a series when best novel and it is all deserved. It is all deserved that is how good those books are. I would say I would say check check that out. Also Ted Chang is the like master of the speculative fiction short story and novel let I mentioned a rival earlier in my remarks. That is an adaptation of the Ted Chang story story of your life. And he most recently had another collection come out exhalation, and he is. And it's interesting too because you look at NK Jemisin and you look at Ted Chang and, you know, stylistically they may seem like, you know, like opposite poles on the same spectrum but really they're there at work doing similar sorts of things with regards to using speculative fiction as a method as a vehicle for human examination, you know, getting back at this question, like what makes us human and who gets to be human. That I think is at the core of what both of those writers are doing and they, they are absolutely peerless when it comes to speculative fiction. Aisha asks, I'm thinking about your final point of white men writing our algorithms and I'm wondering from the perspective of science fiction, which addresses or reveals our anxieties and peers. What would you name as a current anxieties, fears of white men and how can we disrupt and ultimately heal these anxieties for a better future for all of us. Oh man. Well, I think, I think we're seeing, we're seeing a lot of that stuff, how it plays out online like one thing, one thing in particular that I think about a lot is with regards to Twitter and harassment and also to tying that into the Gamergate movement. The Gamergate was this this campaign that I think reached ahead in 2015 and it had been sort of building. But basically it was this campaign of harassment of online harassment against these these two women in particular who were women who were reviewing video games. And it started out or ostensibly it was about, and this became a bit of a punchline, but ethics in gaming journalism. That's what that's what a lot of the proponents said it was about but really it was this backlash to what a lot of people saw as the increasing classification of people in the gaming industry, and also much more largely in science fiction and fantasy fandom. So basically it was this backlash against there being more people of color prominently featured in fandom. You know backlash against, you know, you know, women and non binary people reviewing games and making and creating games and and all of that. And the way in which all of that was very much facilitated by the way a platform like Twitter is built. The way in which, you know, harassment is reported or dealt with or what have you is very unwieldy when dealing with the type of targeted campaigns that those sorts of of groups and those sorts of movements engage in. And you see that dynamic replicated in so many different ways throughout our platforms you know they're they're parts of Facebook that are like that. And I think, I think the, it's becoming increasingly difficult for a lot of these, these founders and what have you to plead ignorance of these blind spots right or to say that they're working on it and not really like do anything about it. More and more people are really calling them to task for it, but I do think it's a very persistent thing and that gets at this issue of like, you know, diversity and tech like who's writing the algorithms who's in the room making these decisions and and who's coding these things. Who's preparing for these eventualities. You know, Jack Dorsey, when he often is asked about the issue of harassment because people like often ask him about harassment on Twitter. He'll talk about how like nobody on his team saw this coming when they first like started Twitter like when they first, you know, started out with nobody saw the sort of thing coming but if you're a person of color online you you would have known from the Facebook that this would have been something to expect. So that I think is is that I, I'm very curious to see how, how that is dealt with moving into the future this conversation surrounding the blind spots of a lot of these people that are sort of put in charge of this sort of thing. Not quite sure if that answers your question, but I hope it does. All right, so the next one we have for you is what are other books to to look to when this person is beginning their understanding of race and class so if someone is beginning their understanding of racing class and the intersections of those concepts. What are some books that they should start with. Oh my goodness. Oh man. Whoo. Definitely the new Jim Crow. That is that like that's that's a fantastic book about the way in which race intersects with incarceration, and particularly like that vector of of race relations in in the country like it's a very sort of salient dimension along which the issue of races is examined in America. I'd also recommend the warms of other sons by Isabel Wilkerson. That is a book about the great migration, basically the, the mass migration of black Americans from the Jim Crow south up through and to other parts of the country and the way that the book is structured it, it takes the bird's eye view from like 30,000 feet in the air but it also tells these individual stories. And through these individual stories you get a, a, you get these like, you know, glimpses of the larger pattern, and it tells this incredible and gorgeous story about America. And you know, it gets into why these people were moving from the south or moving from where they were moving and it goes into like what was waiting for them when they got there. And so I think those two books the new Jim Crow and the warms of other sons are, are to they shine their light on two different aspects of the, the way in which race happens in this country. But it's sort of all along the same continuum and also to that's just to sort of show that, that there is such a multiplicity of experience right so, you know, with regards to black Americans it's not just about like jail and prison and at the same time it's just about like, you know, Jim Crow, it's about all this other stuff all this other stuff that we're having to deal with in our life or all this other stuff that brings us joy or all these other ways in which we relate to each other like that's that I think is really, really, really important. I'm blanking on a few other titles but I would also recommend the poetry of e viewing actually electric arches but also most recently her collection 1919, which I believe is titled after the year in which there was a, a race riot in Chicago. The Eve's poetry is incredible. And the, it just, she's able to get into all these different aspects of the black experience, particularly black childhood and, and black girlhood. And, like, I think between those three books, like that, I think you're going to be off to a tremendous, tremendous start and also to like those, those writers are not shy about the writers who have influenced and informed them and so those will be really good windows into the work of other writers as well. The next one reads thank you so much for sharing today what inspired you to pursue your MFA and screenwriting and writing. Do you have advice for others who may be interested in pursuing a degree in writing or other creative fields. So I, so I knew, ever since I was a kid that I wanted to be a writer, but I grew up in a Nigerian household. So it's, it's, you know, the, the, the four career paths that were available to me were doctor lawyer, engineer, and then disgrace to the family. I figured let me split the difference. I, I, you know, went to law school but actually got into law school and MFA program at the same time and then law school let me defer for two years to do the MFA program. And so there was always that caveat like mom was like okay it's cool for you to get this little MFA because I know you're going to law school after. But the reason I got the MFA that I did and I got it in dramatic writing so screenwriting, playwriting and TV writing. And I got it, I got it in that field, because I'd been writing prose for so long already at that point. And so I, you know, I knew how to write a novel I knew how to write a short story I could work my way around your prose fiction. But I had just towards the end of college gotten into screenwriting, like I, it was very late in life that I realized that people that there's actual writing that goes into like movies and TV. I had no idea that this was the thing until like way too late in life, but also to I found out that it pays way better than being a novelist. So I was like, you know, let me let me let me try this, let me try to get good at this. So, I will say, probably the biggest benefit was that for two years, my, my main focus, pretty much my only focus was writing, and that had never been the case for me before. I was always negotiating writing around all these other obligations. There was high school, college, like, you know, work, law school, whatever. And so for two full years, I got to do nothing but write, and I wrote a ton, and that was very, very, very instructive. In terms of advice, I would say, you know, more than anything, just love writing, because then the time will the time to write will find itself. Because people are always asking me, Toshi, when do you when did you find time to write, like, how are you writing and doing all this other stuff while you were in school and etc, etc. And I don't, I don't know that I have an answer for that because it's not necessarily that, oh, I woke up, you know, super early every morning and that was my writing time or, oh, I stayed up super late and that was always my writing time. No, like my writing time was whatever I had. Part of the reason it was that way was because I loved doing it. And so whenever I could do it, I was doing it. And also too, the thing about the thing about that being the piece of advice that carries you through is that there's just so much rejection involved, like so much rejection and so much nonsense. Like one, one book, one book that I was shopping around at one point picked up rejections from 40 different agents. Like it didn't even make it past like the agent, it didn't even get me an agent, no editor ever saw it, like it barely got past the query stage and it's like 40 rejections for like one book. And that book is one of I think like 13 that I wrote at various points in my life and tried to try to shop around. So there's just like so and, and that was the thing was like it took me from when I like decided I wanted to become a published writer to when my first book actually came out was about probably like 15 years, maybe a little more than 15 years. And it was just like 15 years of straight rejection. There was any other line of work. If you're being told no for 15 years and like, oh, tochi the same it chief like usually that's an indication that you should find a different line of work. Like that's, you know, you're maybe this isn't the thing for you, right? Like, if you're trying to, you know, if you're trying to become a pipe fitter and 15 years of trying to become a pipe fitter and you're not fit in pipes the right way. Maybe you just ain't got like, maybe that's just not it for you, right? But I just loved writing so much that it never even occurred to me to contemplate not doing it. Because whether or not I was published I was always going to write. And I think that for me was the, the most important thing was figuring out like how to maintain that. And so when people ask what advice like that's, that's the only thing I feel comfortable like giving in terms of advice because everything else is sort of your mileage may vary. Alright, so next this question is, what is your advice to people that would start would like to start exploring fiction and fantasy writing specifically. What would be a toolkit for beginners. Oh man. Um, I would say just just read what you love and try to figure out why you love it. Right. So, I think there's, you know, I think one thing that will come in handy is really critically examining your own reading habits. Why do you feel drawn to the things that you feel drawn to. And that isn't just reading but also movies and TV. Like why do you like the movies that you like why you drawn to the TV shows that you're drawn to and try to sort of unpack the answers to that. And then, once you get down to that that'll start you thinking more mechanically about storytelling and about why certain things work for you and why certain things don't work for you. And that in a sense is sort of a self generated toolkit right like I am very wary of books that are like okay here's how to write a novel in 30 days right because you know there's a lot of snake oil salesman that that you know are trying to that you know have made an industry off of folks desperation but really it's so much of it is about learning yourself right learning who you are and who you want to be as a writer. And it's like with with, you know the old painters you know you got good at painting by by copying the people you admired. And so I think, you know, figuring figuring that out figuring out why you like what you like, is probably going to be the best way to get started in terms of building that that toolkit. And this will be the last question. Amazing lecture but one question I have for Tochi is what work do you do and why is this topic important to you. Oh man, I so I am actually like finally full time writer. And then it's been about a year and a month. But before that I did. I did some work at a tech company and then before that I did work in civil rights law, particularly with regards to incarceration. So, after law school I worked for the New York State Attorney General's office with their Civil Rights Bureau. And basically our job was to enforce federal state and local civil rights laws for the entire state of New York. And a lot of that, you know, there were, there were, you know, employment discrimination claims that we would investigate. You know, we did a lot of work with regards to reentry so people that were on parole or on probation and just trying to sort of reintegrate into into society sort of easing their path. We did a lot of work with regards to solitary confinement, particularly of juveniles in the New York jail system and like that's that's a distinction that New York shares with North Carolina is there they are the only two states that will allow 14 and 15 year olds to be tried as in prison as adults, or to be tried as adults when incarcerated and I got to see those literally kids in cages right and so I did a lot of work with regards to examining that issue in New York County jails. And then after that I moved to the Legal Aid Society and their parole revocation defense unit which was essentially criminal justice but for parolees. That entailed basically living on Rikers Island. I spent so much time there it was it was ridiculous and it was very, it was very taxing it was immensely rewarding work but it was so taxing that I do very early on that I just did not have the stamina to do this like long term. At the same time I saw a lot of stuff there that I wanted to talk about, particularly the, the humanity that happens in places like that right like there's this idea that a place like place like prison a place like jail. It's all just like you know people indulging in their worst like basis instincts but no like they're human beings there and there's so much incredible like the whole spectrum of the human experience can be witnessed in over the course of like 24 hours in any sort of facility, carceral facility across America. Like there are people like in love there are people like, you know, negotiating friendships there are people like dealing with all types of stuff like from back home people trying to build new lives for themselves, etc. Like all this stuff is happening in this very charged environment. Look at even just the relations between, you know, the incarcerated and prison officials and you'll all you'll automatically notice this sort of multiplicity. You know, why do some people get along with this one CEO versus this other CEO. Why does, why does this person feel like they have to assert themselves a particular way but this person may automatically have other people's respect. What does it mean that for for these guards to come from this particular like city versus like this particular community. What does that mean for the like all these different things are going on with regards to human relations and I wasn't seeing any of that reflected in the books that I was reading or in the TV or movies that I was watching. This was all really fascinating and important stuff to me. And so that is one of the ways in which the work that I did before has made its way into what I do now and I hope I can I hope I've been able to do justice by some of those folks. Thank you. Well, this concludes our presentation for today. Again, thank you to touch on your butcher for your wisdom and your powerful message. In the chat feature you will find a link for a unity week survey. Your feedback is critical and enhancing our programs and we would greatly appreciate your feedback.