It’s been an influence on all of my storytelling. So very early on, anime taught me that you can take something as simple as a fight scene and use it as a vessel for exploring incredibly mature and complex issues in a very real and multifaceted way.

Another one, “ Fullmetal Alchemist ,” is probably one of the greatest treatises on dealing with grief. The main characters were child soldiers, worried about rebel movements and civil conflict all in a story about giant robots crashing into each other. A lot of my path through speculative fiction, through science fiction and fantastical storytelling, was guided by anime and manga. I based the structure of the space colony on the colonies in “Gundam Wing”! It’s like a foundational text for me.

Can you talk about your anime influences? I couldn’t help but see a lot of the anime series “ Mobile Suit Gundam Wing” in this book. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Through their stories, Onyebuchi explores what our future – despite the vast potential of space travel and colonization – might look like if the wealth, housing and racial inequities that we face in the here and now go unaddressed. These include a construction worker tasked with tearing down houses for raw materials to be shipped to the colonies, a marshal transporting a prisoner, and a colonist who wants to return to Earth and build a life. Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and moreįrom summer to spring amid the crumbling remnants of New Haven, Connecticut, we follow the paths of various characters touched by this conflict.Attorney and author Natashia Deón delves into LA’s troubled history with ‘The Perishing’.How Neal Stephenson’s climate change epic ‘Termination Shock’ got its start at Burbank airport.How novelist Jessamine Chan created the dystopian ‘School for Good Mothers’.How ‘Murderbot Diaries’ author Martha Wells overcame a career in crisis to create the killer series.The influence of anime is hard to miss in “Goliath,” Onyebuchi’s latest dystopian epic set in a future where the wealthy have fled Earth for space colonies, leaving those who cannot afford the journey to eke out lives on a planet ravaged by climate change. This programming block, which exposed a generation of American kids to Japanese animation, helped set him on his path to becoming a storyteller of speculative fiction, he says. to watch a block of anime that included “Thundercats” and “Voltron,” and later on, “Dragon Ball Z,” “Sailor Moon” and “Mobile Suit Gundam Wing.” Author Tochi Onyebuchi is a self-described “member of the original Toonami generation” – meaning that in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, he’d tune to Cartoon Network from 4-6 p.m.

Goliath by tochi onyebuchi