Also, Goliath is someone whose death promises to make his killer prosperous. He is the be-monstered representative of a culture, and race, regarded oppositionally by the Israelite culture, and race, which produced the text within which his story is told. So, who is Goliath? Well, the Biblical warrior-giant Goliath, a Philistine, first inspires fear and then is felled. No, David and Jonathan are not the main characters of this novel. They will return to Earth, there to secure their own attempted Paradise: which, as it happens, was already inhabited before their arrival. But neither, in the end, is Goliath about the discontented white queer middle-class lovers, David and Jonathan, who choose to leave the Colony in hope of a better, more ‘authentic’ life. It is not about the aristocrats in the manor. It’s not concerned with the people in “The Viewer.” It will not be about the ineffable, the heavenly, or those who have deployed wealth and power in such a way that they can spend their time contemplating a pleasing view of (while perhaps feeling kinship with) the heavenly and the ineffable. In a single paragraph, Onyebuchi indicates everything his novel is not concerned with. “Us? We get to look at what we all shit out.” (p. Get to stare out there and contemplate their existence.” He chuckled, and there was bitterness in it. Diana, the silver-footed queen, and all that. All they see are the nebulae and the zodiac signs. “The people in The Viewer, they don’t have to see all that stuff. I mean, it has to go somewhere, right?” He shrugged. It flowed horizontally until the walls blocked their view. “You know, they only put us here to give us an unobstructed view of the Ring.”ĭying atomizer between his index and middle finger, pointed at a floating band far in the distance. But money, and the way that it determines the architecture of their world and experience, is still a real and infuriating presence. This is to say, even smoking-as harmful as it is-has become a kind of one-dimensional gesticulation toward danger in the cybernetic world David and Jonathan inhabit. They are both white, both well-off enough to have been able to undergo “cyberization,” which replaces fallible internal organs with augmented versions that reduce the impact on the body of carcinogens and other environmental hazards. Near the beginning of Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath, the young soon-to-be-lovers David and Jonathan meet in a smokers’ lounge in the Colony: an earth-orbiting space-community inhabited by everyone with sufficient means to settle there.

Goliath onyebuchi