...a collection of 15 stories so sly, fresh and Bizarro World witty, they reaffirm the resiliency of the artistic imagination ... The overarching aim of all this outlandishness is to entertain, as well as to tuck some social criticism into the formulaic folds of these tales of spooks, spies, private eyes, clones, bots and alien invaders ... In recent years, writers of color have taken up sci-fi and fantasy in particular as richly poetic vehicles to explore racism and imagine alternative worlds. The pulp stories in The Obama Inheritance — sci-fi, fantasy and noir — are fun to read, and be forewarned: Many of them also pack a punch.
Amid this bull market for Obama-related conspiracy theories, it is entirely understandable that a group of writers felt inspired to
produce, The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir...Truth may be stranger than fiction, but why should the conspiracists have all the fun of creating fake narratives? ... Yet, running beneath the book’s mockery of conspiracy fanatics, the unspoken question that I raised earlier persists: Why are there so many outlandish conspiracy theories about the Obamas? The answer, I believe, can best be detected as this book’s authors do, through the lens of identity — and I’m not talking only about race.
While these tales may be wanting as literature, they do succeed as a kind of 'laugh, clown, laugh' approach to trauma therapy ... A few of the stories, including some of the best, simply treat the reader to a hearty laugh at the credulity of ignoramuses who fell for the 'fake news' peddled by organs of the alt-right and Russian bots ... It’s not as good as it could be, but it’s still a fun read.
This collection of 15 short stories, inspired by right-wing conspiracy theories about the 44th president, take aim at the freak-show realities of the 45th … This science fiction literary act of resistance aims to be a ‘thrill ride of weirdo, noirish, pulpy goodness.’ You’ve got talking dogs, Obama as a space alien and a floating biomedical freak named Balthazar … The subtext of horror today is not the Red Menace or the atomic age, but racism, Islamophobia and ham-fisted greed. Some stories in The Obama Inheritance feel like they are one degree from reality; others are a good pole-vault from it … These tales finish as an entertaining, if uneven, look at the world we live in.
The 15 entries in this intriguing theme anthology riff with mixed success on the weird, mostly racist conspiracy theories that followed Barack Obama through his White House years, including those of the phony birth certificate, death panels, and secret lizard people. The stories are adrift with white supremacists, secret locations, strange conflicts, and subtle aliens. Several of them are truly excellent, notably Travis Richardson’s 'I Know They’re in There!,' in which death panel believers take hostages at a hospital, and Walter Mosley’s 'A Different Frame of Reference,' in which the only dirt that detectives can dig up on Obama for a white men’s group is that he smokes ... Other contributors try hard, but the shallow insanity of the material can’t be taken seriously and defies parody.
These stories are engaging, but they sometimes sink into didacticism, using genre fiction as a way to make points about white America’s fear of black political power. The lessons are welcome, but they are often too on-the-nose to be effective. The stories are at their best when they forego lecturing and rely on narrative and satire to imagine the consequences of white supremacist politics on American society. A surprising, though sometimes frustrating, collection that uses genre fiction to confront the impact of Obama’s presidency on the white American psyche.
