Nalo Hopkinson Quotes

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.

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.

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 the fantastical genres there is an idea that the world can change. And that to me is immensely hopeful.

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.

(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)

Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time. (p179)

Suck all the juice this life will give! (p33)

Children," I said to her. "For the first little while, they not exactly human, you don't find?

Children were pack animals; let any one of them act different from the group, and the rest would bring him down.

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.

I don’t pay much mind to politricks. Never met a politician who wouldn’t try to convince you that salt was sugar.

It is ugly in this world, and when the killing starts, the same stick will beat the black dog and the white.

Desire makes us all babies again.

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?