Nigerians read … authors should step it up and see what happens …

book cover

A number of people hold the view that, Nigerians don’t read which may be responsible for its low level of development. But Tope Apoola, author of the science fiction novel, Times of the supermen thinks otherwise.

‘I do not share in the view of people who think Nigerians do not read. They do read but their appetite isn’t insatiable like those of our western friends. I guess the problem is stemmed from our culture and history. I think people need to be fed with stuffs that do not patronize their intellect, like Alice Walker, author of Color Purple once said she could not possibly bring herself to read shit. Nigerian authors should step it up and see what happens with local consumption of our so called 'Native' books’.

Tope, who was born in 1984 to civil servant parents in Akure, Ondo state, Nigeria and studied Microbiology in Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife, Osun state spoke about his novel and the new book he is writing in this chat with xpressionz.

Excerpts:

Becoming an author

I did not become an author, did not even have to discover anything. I guess writing has been more like a 'behavior' to me. By putting down some words that kept coming to my head, I eventually came up with a book - length stuff and subsequently discovered I needed to put a whole lot into graduating from amusing myself to writing seriously for a wide audience.'

Times of The Supermen

Tope Apoola

The novel is about a group of wise men who finds a tiny clue to an emerging hypothesis that there existed a deliberate design, somewhere on the face of the planet Mars. If their claims get substantiated, then they would have a reason to suspect that a legion of superior creatures once lived on the red planet.
Series of identical formations were also found on the surface of a rock in one undisclosed location in England. These symbols appear to have been carefully crafted by some super intelligent population many million years ago. Should there be a semantic relationship between them, scholars would purport that these ancient beings once visited the earth. Nations work to uncover the mystery symbol that is known to have formed in a pre-biological time. In the novel, they might be diving beyond the waters of science.

Inspiration

I was inspired by the spirit of the Nigerian youth. While a few still believe otherwise, I can boldly predict that they are set to do great things. They are the supermen that I tried to speak about. Again, I was also inspired by a conclusion I arrived at, privately. Creation might have been brought about by the recreation of a Homo erectus that lived in Eastern Africa about 30,000 years ago. I am inspired to marry some scientific theories with some scriptural propositions

Title

The book title is an adaptation from a 2006 article of mine titled "Emergence of the supermen," a piece that played around the subject of my novel.

Fascination with 'supermen'

I used to read about Friedrich Nietzsche's"Thus spoke Zarathustra". The crazy guy said a lot of things which defied societal norms and even insulted the world systems all together. While I do not buy his opinions entirely, I am convinced that he had achieved a thing of considerable literary significance with his declaration that "a time will come when the mere man shall be unto the new men as apes is to the human."

On-going projects

I am presently working on a non-fiction and I had to put the sequel to "Times of the supermen" on hold to achieve that. I was specially requested to write the non-fiction. The working title is "Logos-What Nigeria may learn from the doctrine of Trinity". I tried to marry the Trinity of religion with what I called Trinitarian science.

Upcoming writers

While I consider myself as one of them, I'd say they cannot be writers and too many other things all at once. A writer should read more than he or she writes.