Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson in 2007

Nalo Hopkinson (born 1960) is a Jamaican science fiction and fantasy writer and editor who lives in Canada.

Quotes

  • Throughout the Caribbean, under different names, you'll find stories about people who aren't what they seem. Skin gives these skin folk their human shape. When the skin comes off, their true selves emerge. They may be owls. They may be vampiric balls of fire. And always, whatever the burden their skins bear, once they remove them once they get under their own skins-they can fly. It seemed an apt metaphor to use for these stories collectively.
    • in Skin Folk (2001)
  • I was nodding off on the streetcar home from work when I saw the woman getting on. She was wearing the body I used to have! The shock woke me right up: It was my original, the body I had replaced two years before, same full, tarty-looking lips; same fat thighs, rubbing together with every step; same outsize ass; same narrow torso that seemed grafted onto a lower body a good three sizes bigger, as though God had glued leftover parts together.
    • beginning of "A Habit of Waste", short story published in Fireweed Issue 53 (Spring 1996) and collected in Skin Folk (2001)
  • I've learned I can trust that humans in general will strive to make things better for themselves and their communities. Not all of us. Not always in principled, loving, or respectful ways. Often the direst opposite, in fact. But we're all on the same spinning ball of dirt, trying to live as best we can.
    • from the Forward to Falling in Love with Hominids (2015)

Brown Girl in the Ring (1998)

All page numbers from the first edition, first printing, published by Warner Books (Aspect Science Fiction)
  • “Mami,” Ti-Jeanne said, “I should go and get Baby. He ain’t take to Tony.”
    “Hmph. Child got some sense, then. More than some I could name. But leave he there. He have to learn that he can’t always have what he want.”
    • Chapter 4 (p. 62)
  • “I can’t keep giving my will into other people hands no more, ain’t? I have to decide what I want to do for myself.” No answer. It wasn’t going to tell her.
    • Chapter 12 (p. 220)
  • She had a yearning to lose herself in this noisy throng of people going about the business of staying alive.
    • Chapter 13 (p. 230)
  • Since Baby’s birth, she had learned that the first few months of motherhood were about fatigue and leakiness.
    • Chapter 13 (p. 232)

Midnight Robber (2000)

All page numbers from the first edition, first printing, published by Warner Books (Aspect Science Fiction)
The sections in the book are not numbered. They are numbered here for ease of reference
  • This was a thing she’d not seen before, how the meat that fed her was a living being one minute and then violently dead. The smell of it was personal, inescapable, like the scent that rose in the steam from her own self when she stepped into a hot bath. They had broken open the animal’s secret body just to eat it.
    • Section 2 (p. 104)
  • Come in peace to my home, Tan-Tan. And when you go, go in friendship.
    • Section 4 (p. 179)
  • She just wanted to be somewhere safe, somewhere familiar, where people looked and spoke like her and she could stand to eat the food.
    • Section 4 (p. 217)
  • She curled up on the pallet and stared into the dark, praying for a peaceful sleep.
    Prayers didn’t do no good, oui. Antonio chased her all night. (In the book Antonio, her father, beats and sexually abuses her long-term; she eventually kills him)
    • Section 4 (p. 222)
  • She was hiding in the best possible way, masquerading as herself!
    • Section 4 (p. 314)
  • Just being Tan-Tan, sometimes good, sometimes bad, mostly just getting by like everybody else.
    • Section 4 (p. 326)

The Salt Roads (2003)

All page numbers are from the hardcover first edition published by Warner Books ISBN 0-446-53302-5
Nominated for the 2004 Nebula Award
  • Lasirèn, pray you a quick death for Hopping John. Pray you no more of this life for him. Even though no gods answer black people’s prayers here in this place.
    • p. 8
  • All the people sick and dead on the ships, and the ones sick and dead on this soil. What are gods for, then, if they let things like this to happen to their people?
    • p. 66
  • Desire makes us all babies again.
    • p. 180
  • It is ugly in this world, and when the killing starts, the same stick will beat the black dog and the white.
    • p. 377

The New Moon's Arms (2007)

All page numbers from the hardcover edition published by Warner Books
  • I don’t pay much mind to politricks. Never met a politician who wouldn’t try to convince you that salt was sugar.
    • Chapter 1 (p. 40)
  • It was time to be honest with myself. To survive all the shame this world will throw at you, you have to hold yourself tall, look your accuser straight in the eye. Even if it’s your own face looking back at you.
    • Chapter 2 (p. 72)
  • Children were pack animals; let any one of them act different from the group, and the rest would bring him down.
    • Chapter 4 (p. 191)
  • “Children,” I said to her. “For the first little while, they not exactly human, you don’t find?”
    • Chapter 4 (p. 192)

Sister Mine (2013)

  • Suck all the juice this life will give! (p33)
  • Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time. (p179)

from interviews and conversations

  • (Are you consciously taking a new look at the future?) NH: No. I'm drawing pretty heavily on the science fiction and fantasy I read growing up. I also come out of a very strong Caribbean literary tradition. In that sense I'm kind of marrying the two, but not in a way of "trying to go out there and do something new." I'm like any other writer. There are a handful of us, if we're talking about solely Caribbean writers -- there's Claude Michel Prevost…Tobias Buckell. I've found that science fiction reviewers tend to react most strongly to the Caribbean-flavored stuff, and some of them identify that as being new and over-focus on it. I'm starting to feel I might be getting typecast. (with Indiebound)
  • for me to exist in this world I have to have a radical agenda because the world has got to change in order for people like me to be able to exist...I need to have a radical agenda. I need to make a world where it is perfectly okay that I'm attracted to people who live inbetween genders. I think that should not be a problem. I can't change. The world has to change.
    • in What's a Black Critic to Do?: Interviews, Profiles and Reviews of Black Writers edited by Donna Bailey Nurse (2004)
  • In the fantastical genres there is an idea that the world can change. And that to me is immensely hopeful.
    • in What's a Black Critic to Do?: Interviews, Profiles and Reviews of Black Writers
  • The metaphors we use in the west come from Greek and European mythology. Aishu in West African religious mythology is the deity I use in Midnight Robber. Aishu said: "I would like to go everywhere and see everything." a perfect metaphor for artificial intelligence. Black people have a rich spiritual heritage, as well as a rich imaginative life-stories handed down over centuries-that inform our ideas of the future. They need to be on the table like everybody else's.
    • in What's a Black Critic to Do?: Interviews, Profiles and Reviews of Black Writers
  • When people ask me to define science fiction and fantasy I say they are the literatures that explore the fact that we are toolmakers and users, and are always changing our environment.
    • in What’s a Black Critic To Do?: Interviews, Profiles and Reviews of Black Writers
  • Writers have to live in more than two worlds. The intellectual life of the Caribbean was available to me when I was growing up, through my parents, but being a science fiction and fantasy reader was strange. (There are still very few people in the Caribbean writing SF.) But I think being Caribbean, you're aware of being a multiplicity. Pretty much all of us who come from there are of mixed-race backgrounds, no matter what we look like. And they are really pluralist societies -- have been for centuries, though of course there are similar issues of systemic racism.
  • Every so often I come up with a different definition of what science fiction and fantasy do, and I'm always looking for one that describes what they both do, rather than separating them. Currently I'm saying that one of the things they do is look at the effects of large-scale social change on both populations and individuals. Fantasy tends to look to the past, and science fiction to the future, but what is common to many of the stories is change: huge societal upheaval.
  • …Even though we talk about race a lot in the literature, there’s still this idea of “Well, if we make this person blue and give them pointy ears, then we don’t have to actually talk about what’s happening in the real world.” And those of us who live in racialized bodies feel that lack, we feel that erasure, so yes, there was something quite deliberate in my doing half the speech as an alien.
  • …There’s still this notion that you are somehow morally superior if you don’t know anything about the background of the writers you read, and I maintain that writers have every right to not talk their backgrounds, that’s fine, but when people do and it’s important to their work, to not know doesn’t mean you’re morally superior, it means you are indifferent…
  • It’s the beautiful thing about being a fiction writer; you can write the world you want to see.
    • in The Queer Caribbean Speaks edited by Kofi Omoniyi Sylvanus Campbell (2014)
  • They say that writing is a solitary sport, but it isn’t, really. It doesn’t have to be. Some people are really happy about writing alone, but some people actually suffer from the isolation. (2024)
  • I enjoy exploring my connection to Caribbean vernacular – or, any vernacular. I love how people actually speak. There is an art and a poetry and a beauty and a logic to it that, to me, is undeniable. There’s no such thing as bad language, in my mind. (2024)
  • I’ve learned, don’t fight too hard when readers say, ‘You got this wrong.’ There’s a very good chance you got it wrong. I’ve started to think of it as them being helpful – that’s what’s best for my psyche. (2024)

with Caribbean Beat (2005)

  • I know how reality goes. I’m already caught up in an interesting life. I don’t need to write about it...I prefer fantasy and science fiction. They’re genres that actively say that change is possible.
  • Labels are very important to me. They’re a way of finding community and a way of community finding you. If people are looking for my work because they’re looking for the work of another woman or the work of a science fiction writer or a black writer, it helps if they know that I am that. For me, identity is kind of a mailbox.
  • Science fiction is a literature that explores the fact that human beings are part of social systems and that social systems change. It explores social change and the human change that both drives it and is affected by it. Fantasy, which I write more than I write science fiction, is a literature that explores the stories we tell to explain the inexplicable. It also explores human nature. Fantasy pays homage to folklore and folklore talks a lot about archetypes. Fantasy explores those archetypes and also explores the way we tell stories to explain things like why there’s a moon in the sky or things that we have no explanation for, but we believe. Fantasy explores what we believe.
  • We live in a racist world, and there’s no less racism [in the science fiction community] than anywhere else. But the nice thing about the science fiction community is that it’s very accepting of a challenge, of something new. We’re all a community of eggheads. We like knowing stuff. For the most part, [sci-fi readers] open the book and...get very interested in the language and the world and culture I’m talking about.
  • Reading people like James Baldwin [made me realise] that, if you’re an artist, there’s no reason not to make art out of anything. Sex is a big part of the human experience. It’s something that we’re hardwired to think about. Why would you avoid making art about something that is so all-encompassingly important to human beings?

collected in Conversations with (1999-2021)

book edited by Isiah Lavender III

  • The other challenge I see is that of the diversity of expression in speculative fiction. The readers seem to come from all over the place, but the writing that gets published (or that gets marketed as SF) still comes from a fairly narrow range of experience. The imaginative worlds that we're creating still draw heavily on Greek and Roman mythology and on Euro-Celtic folktales, and the futures we imagine still feel pretty Western middle class. And that's fair enough, because it's the primary cultural context in which many of the writers are situated. Some excellent writing has come and is coming out of those experiences. However, I also want to see more writing from the vast range of cultural contexts which makes up the world. (2000)
  • I think inserting yourself into a place where you are told you don't belong, when you know quite well you do, is important work. (2017)
  • There is so much vibrant work coming out, and more and more of it beginning to come out from, and depicting, a broader range of humanity. (2017)
  • why have things shifted a little? I think that at root it's the vocal, persistent activism of the ones most affected; the people who need positive change. (2021)
  • there are aspects of it [teaching] that are not at all enjoyable. But that "lively exchange of ideas" thing? That satisfaction you feel when a student's world expands a bit? Those are real. (2021)
  • What's needed instead is to state up front at submission time that you want to see submissions from authors of color; to include people of color in significant positions on your staff (editorial, marketing, etc.); to educate yourself to the ways in which cultural specificity results in stories being told differently, signifying differently on race, culture, fashion, language, you name it; to recognize that "not seeing race" means that they also can't perceive structural racism; to grasp that racism isn't just a stoned white male musician ranting at his concert that all people of color should be kicked out of the UK. I suspect that only if you do that groundwork will you be able to assess submissions from authors of color on an equal footing with white authors. The Anglophone market is still hugely skewed in overwhelming favor of straight, white, male authors. There are still nowhere near enough translations from other languages into English. (2021)
at International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts (2005)
  • (IL: So why do you think the SF community is more willing to discuss gay/lesbian issues versus race issues?) NH: Yeah, why do I think that is? Because queerness is still seen as a white issue, to the irritation to those of us who are both of color and queer.
  • [about writing science fiction with an African sensibility] You have to reinvent the language. You have to craft some bizarre amalgam of the sensibility you're trying to bring and a science fiction sensibility... you're grafting two things together that did not grow together, and it's difficult to do that successfully.
  • I'd like to see support right through the various forms, the various artistic disciplines for artists of color who are interested in futuristic and fantastical visions. I'd like to see us really start to make them welcome because they bring a different vision. We bring a different vision and that will change the genre, and the genre is about change.
  • to be color-blind in a racist world is to not be an ally...if the playing field isn't level, and you're not doing anything to make it level, you aren't actually being fair.
  • I think what happens is as with any form of oppression the people most concerned with or think about it the most deeply are the people most negatively affected by it.
in Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (2008)

book edited by Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, and Wendy Gay Pearson

  • Science fiction and fantasy are about looking at the world through a different lens. So whatever I write, including sex scenes, I may first think, how can I cause myself, and the reader, to see this differently? What can I do to challenge, delight, surprise, unsettle?
  • When I write, I want to present as wide a spectrum as I can of the ways in which people can choose to behave sexually and in relationships, and I like representing those where possible as visible, acceptable behaviors. Because they should be, and because science fiction is about conceiving new possibilities. So yes, I find I'm constantly resisting both monoliths and binaries because I find them limiting for myself. It took a while for me even to be able to understand myself as queer, because monoliths and binaries obscured me from seeing it. Gay/straight/bisexual are all important to represent, but they aren't the only possible axes along which to sort human sexual attraction.
  • Science fiction is and has been ripe to discuss other possibilities for sex and relationships: multiple marriages, communal structures, different genders. Writers like Theodore Sturgeon, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Lynn, Nicola Griffith, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Candas Jane Dorsey, Eleanor Arnason, Storm Constantine have been my touchstones.
  • Sexuality gets binarized too often. Not only do I resist the idea of one form of sexuality, but the assumption that there are only two forms, and you do one, the other, or both, and those are the only possible behaviors. It sometimes seems to me-and perhaps whimsically so-that the people who are courageously non-normative in their sexualities are doing in the real world some of the work that speculative fiction can do in the world of the imagination, that is, exploring a wider range of possibilities for living.
  • I hope that my vanilla and het sex scenes are graphic and explicit, too! I write. It's an art form. Why would I make the effort to describe a meal or a sunset in a way that's detailed and responds to all the senses, but not do so for a sex scene? Why are "graphic" and "explicit" good in descriptions of walking through a field of lavender in full bloom, but not for a character coming so hard that his eyes roll back in his head?
  • Every time I put my work out into the public, I risk putting something out there based in my unexamined and unrecognized assumptions. That's part of the game.
  • people will love each other, no matter what circumstances they are in.
  • Science fiction as a literature probably helped to save my life. I suspect I would have self-destructed without it, and without the people I have met because of it. So even when I'm critical of it, I'm very happy that it's here.
in Report From Planet Midnight (2012)
  • Write whatever the blast you want, and if you live in an environment where doing so doesn't endanger your life or career, count yourself blessed.
  • When I hear a (usually white and usually male) writer trying to shut down a discussion about representation by bellowing that no one should tell him what to write, it sounds very much as though he's trying to change the topic, to make it all about him. To him I'd say: Why not try to further the discussion, rather than trying to, um, censor it? What do you think needs to be done in order to make publishing more representative? Nothing, you say? The doors are already open but we just won't come in? Women, Black people (and purple polka-dotted meerkats) actually "just don't write much science fiction"? Or their books are "only relevant to their communities" (which is often code for "those people are incapable of producing anything of real literary merit")? Funny, how every one of those statements boils down to not being willing to change the status quo. You do realize that you're even drowning out the white voices amongst you that are trying to make some changes along with the rest of us? You do realize that a more representative literary field would be representative of all of us, yourself included?
  • To certain white male writers, I'd like to say, "When those around you try to wrestle with issues of entitlement and marginalization, please don't give us the tired trumpeting of 'Censorship! No one can tell me what to write!" True, people shouldn't tell you what to write, but people will try to, for bad reasons and better ones. Your mother will try to tell you what to write or not write. Your husband will. Your editor, your government, your church, your readers, your nosy neighbor. Humans are an argumentative lot. Dealing with that as a writer comes with the territory.
  • Science fiction and fantasy are already about subverting paradigms. It's something I love about them.
  • No one can make me give up the writing I love that's by straight, white, Western male (and female) writers, but at a certain point, I began to long to see other cultures, other aesthetics, other histories, realities, and bodies represented in force as well. There was some. I wanted more. I wanted lots more. I wanted to write some of it. I think I am doing so.
  • Folktales are great for learning dynamic storytelling and how to structure the resonant echoes that give a plot forward motion. It wouldn't be the last time that I modeled a plot upon the shell of a preexisting folktale. I've discovered that it doesn't matter whether your readers recognize the folktale. It may not even matter whether the folktale is real, or one you invented. What matters is that it has structure, echoes, trajectory, and style.
  • The title's sort of the distilled version of what the story wants to be. Before I quite know what the story is, the title whispers hints to me.
  • (You once said, "Fiction is NOT autobiography in a party dress." OK, then what is it?) NH: It's what happens after you grind up a bunch of your personally received input, everything from life experience to that book about spices you read ten years ago, compost it within your imagination, and then in that mulch grow something new. I think that could even apply to autobiographical fiction.
  • mainstream American media seem to believe that Caribbean people are little more than simpleminded, marijuana-steeped clowns who say "de" instead of "the."
  • Particularly when I speak at schools, people in the audience want to know whether there are going to be films of my books. Myself, I'm more jaundiced. I've seen what can happen when text-based science fiction gets zombified by Hollywood. Look at what happened to Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic"
  • There are a lot of readers who pride themselves on not paying attention to the identities of their favorite writers. Some of them think this means that they're not prejudiced. I don't know anyone who isn't, myself included. But let's just say for argument's sake that those particular readers in fact are not prejudiced. How many books by writers of color do you think you'll find on their bookshelves? I'd lay odds that if there are any at all, they will be far outnumbered by the books by white authors. Not necessarily because those readers are deliberately choosing mostly white/male authors. They don't have to. The status quo does it for them. So those readers' self-satisfied "I don't know" is really an "I don't care enough to look beyond my nose." And that's cool. So many causes, so little time. But don't pretend that indifference and an unwillingness to make positive change constitute enlightenment. If you truly want to be a colorblind, unprejudiced reader, you can't do so from a place of being racism-blind, or you'll never have the diverse selection of authors you say you'd like. Why get pissed off at people who are fighting for the very thing you say you want? Yet I don't think there's some conspiracy of evil racist editors. There doesn't have to be. The system has its own momentum. In order to be antiracist, you actually have to choose to do something different than the status quo. People who're trying to make positive change (editors and publishers included) have a hell of a battle. Fighting it requires a grasp of how the complex juggernaut of institutionalized marginalization works, and what types of intervention will, by inches, bring that siege engine down.
  • A lot of the time, all I'm trying to do is put some of my specific ethnocultural touchstones into science fiction and fantasy. When white writers do that, it's barely remarked-upon. And sometimes it should be, because it's often wonderful.
  • There are those who fear that if books get published according to some kind of identity-based quota system, literary excellence will suffer. What seems to be buried in the shallow grave of that concept is the assumption that there are no good writers in marginalized communities.

Quotes about Nalo Hopkinson

  • Indigenous scientific literacies play key roles throughout Nalo Hopkinson's works. The excerpt from Midnight Robber introduces the practice in its simplest guise: a child comes under the tutelage of an Indigenous mentor who begins teaching her the science of survival, emphasizing the practical, day-to-day transmission of generational knowledge.
    • Grace Dillon Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012)
  • When Jamaican-born Canadian Nalo Hopkinson burst on to the science fiction scene with Brown Girl in the Ring in 1998, she seemingly single-handedly reinvigorated interest in Black science fiction (SF). Afrofuturism had not caught fire at this point, but Hopkinson did. She grabbed the attention of the SF community with her Caribbean-inspired science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism. Hopkinson represents the obvious first link in Octavia Butler's legacy.
    • Isiah Lavender III, Introduction to Conversations with (2022)
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