Actor Omar Epps stopped by Good Morning America to discuss Nubia: The Reckoning, the young adult science fiction novel he co-wrote with Clarence A. Haynes.
The book, published Tuesday by Delacorte, is the second installment in the Nubia series, which kicked off in 2022 with Nubia: The Awakening. The dystopian novels tell the story of three teenagers whose parents moved to a climate change-ravaged New York after the fall of their African homeland. A critic for Kirkus called the new book “an ambitious return to a future of promise, danger, and self-discovery that fans of the first volume will enjoy.”
GMA co-host Michael Strahan noted that the books depict “Black characters in a positive light,” and said that it was “a lane that is being missed” in the literary world.
“It’s really about inclusion in an organic way, and I tried to have characters that represented the world the way that it looks, and people that haven’t been seen and heard,” Epps replied.
Strahan said that while the book takes place a century into the future, “it does address century-old problems.”
Epps responded, “It seems like we repeat certain cycles.…What I tried to do in the book was leave a little bit of a breadcrumb trail for the future generations to say, ‘Hey, we tried it this way, maybe we should try it a different way, so the future is brighter.’”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
