RACEBOOK

A science-fiction writer meditates on the internet’s human aspects.

In this wide-ranging essay collection, Onyebuchi traces his personal development through video games, literature, and the internet. In “Select Difficulty,” he uses the experience of playing the video game The Last of Us as an opportunity to examine his relationship with his Nigerian father, who died when the author was only 10 years old. In “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” the author contemplates the role of the Black writer in the context of cultural artifacts ranging from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to videos of “police-initiated executions” of Black citizens. In “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,” he articulates the emotional damage he suffered while working a job that required him to comb the internet to uncover “what’s going on in the world before most other people do.” Onyebuchi positions these chapters as a window into his multiple selves, all of which, he says, contribute to the way we shape our cultural world, on- and offline. He writes, “All this time, I thought the key to my multiplicity, to exhibiting that multiplicity online, lay in retrieving a previous self. In reality, this manifold self is a thing I am building, a thing we are all building one tweet, one Angelfire webpage, one sentence at a time.” Onyebuchi’s cultural vocabulary is impressive, weaving together references to, among others, Graham Greene, Nas, and Walter Mosley. Although some chapters are more cohesive than others, this is a lively and astute read.

A trenchant essay collection about race and identity online.