Report from Planet Midnight

by Nalo Hopkinson

  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 modelled a plot upon the shell of a preexisting folktale. I’ve discovered that it doesn’t matter whether your readers recognise 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.

  Skin Folk won a World Fantasy Award, and there was talk of a movie. What’s up with that?

  The movie project isn’t mine. The director who optioned it is the visionary Asli Dukan, of Mizan Productions. I believe the project is currently in the development stage, which means raising the money to make the film. That is the stage at which most film projects die stillborn, so if anyone who wants to see the final product is of a mind to support Asli with some hard cash, I know she’ll appreciate it. 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.”

  I know. I wrote the novelization of that unfortunate script.

  My condolences! I’ve also seen what can happen when mainstream American film and television try to depict black Caribbean people. You get the likes of Kendra the vampire slayer, Sebastian the crab from “The Little Mermaid,” and the eternal disgrace that is Jar-Jar Binks. Seriously, would it be so hard to hire actors who can do accurate Caribbean accents? Though that wouldn’t solve the depiction problem; mainstream American media seem to believe that Caribbean people are little more than simple-minded, marijuana-steeped clowns who say “de” instead of “the.” In any case, my work isn’t going to make it to the big screen any time soon, given the types of characters that are in it. It’d be a lot of money for producers to invest in a project when they’re not sure there’s a big enough audience out there for it.

  And because people are always quick to jump down my throat whenever I talk about institutionalised discrimination, let me acknowledge that there have been a few SF/ fantasy films and television programs with Caribbean characters that weren’t stereotyped. Actor Sullivan Walker as Yale in the short-lived series Earth 2, for example. Geoffrey Holder’s voice as the narrator for the 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There are probably one or two more, but not many at all.

  Some people hear me talking like this and get pissed off at me. They don’t tolerate critique of the things they love. They miss the fact that I may love those things, too. I just don’t think love should be blind.

  Anyway, we were talking film. When directors option my stories, I’m more confident if they are independent artists with some personal connection to some of my communities (science fiction, black, Caribbean, Canadian, queer, women, etc.). There are two other novels of mine in development: Brown Girl in the Ring, by Toronto’s Sharon Lewis, and The New Moon’s Arms, by Frances Anne Solomon of Toronto’s Leda Serene productions. Both women, like Asli Dukan, have roots in the Caribbean.

  You once identified the central question of utopia as “who’s going to do the dirty work?” (Ursula Le Guin would agree.) So how would you describe Midnight Robber’s planet Toussaint, where work is a sacrament (to some)?

  A sacrament? Did I do that? Not trying to dodge the question. Just that my memory is poor, and it’s been a long, busy, often stressful few years since the time it was published. I’m trying to remember back to when I finished the novel, perhaps sometime in 1999. I suspect I hadn’t yet come up with the notion that the big dilemma of science fiction is who’s going to do the dirty work. I may have just begun asking myself that very question … ah.

  I do remember this: the people of Toussaint have a maxim that backbreaking labour isn’t fit for them as sentient beings. They’ve come from a legacy of slavery, of having been forced to do hard labour, and they’re not about to forget it. But manual labour still needs to be done. So they mechanise it as much as possible. The machines that do that labour are unaware extensions of the self-aware planetary artificial intelligence that sustains their various support systems. So how you gonna keep your machine overseer down on the farm, once she’s crossed the Turing threshold? They programme her not to mind doing all that work. They make her like her servitude. When you think of it, our brains are also wired to respond in certain ways to certain situations. But do we get to make that decision for other creatures? You could argue that we do so all the time, through domestication and by breeding other living things for specific traits. You could argue that that doesn’t count, since other animals aren’t self-aware. But anyone who’s ever lived in close quarters with another animal for an extended period of time can present convincing evidence that many animals are indeed self-aware. You could argue that it’s okay to mess with creatures who are less intelligent than we are. But as someone with a couple of cognitive variances and as someone black and female, I have reason to be suspicious of intelligence tests. I’m not sure that we understand enough about cognition to be able to measure cognition effectively. For one thing, we’re measuring it against human markers of intelligence. I wonder whether those are the only markers.

  So, in Midnight Robber, there is a powerful human-manufactured sentience that we have programmed to love us and to want to take care of us. Was it wrong of us to do that to her? Ethically, it’s a conundrum. That was deliberate on my part. The planet of Toussaint isn’t exactly Utopia. I didn’t solve the problem of who does the menial work. I just put it into the hands of a being that’s been designed to accept those tasks. I may have had some of the human citizens voluntarily take on forms of manual labour as part of a practice of ethical mindfulness.

  These are the people I meant, who see labour as a sacrament.

  It’s their way of acknowledging that work that looks after oneself and others isn’t really beneath them. You know, something like the old proverb attributed to Buddhism: “Before Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

  I still haven’t answered the question of who does the work in a Utopia. I have an alternative history fantasy novel in progress in which I’m exploring the idea that everyone in a municipality is assigned menial tasks in a rotating schedule. But in practice, my characters have all kinds of ways of slipping out of their turn taking out the town’s nightsoil or working on the building site of that new community centre. In the novel, it’s a cooperative system, but not politically Socialist; I’m trying to build something a bit different than our current political paradigms. I’m not quite happy with it yet as a world-building element.

  My partner tells me I need to wrestle with systems of exchange in return for labour, money being the primary one that we use in this world. I need to look at effective alternatives to money. I’m daunted by that, but he’s right.

  You have a lot of uncollected short stories. Any plans for them?

  Uncollected, yes, but all but one of them have been published. I’ve actually collected them up into a manuscript, which I plan to submit to a publisher soon. Honestly, it’s the formatting that’s slowing me down, and the thought of writing intros to each story. Maybe I don’t have to do that last bit.

  You often speak of putting the “threads” of a story into a “weave.“ Not uncommon, yet from you it seems something more than metaphor. How did you get into fabric design?

  On a lark, thanks to a company called Spoonflower which came along to take advantage of new technologies of printing with ink on fabric. Spoonflower’s website democratises the process and makes it easy for someone with basic image editing skills to dabble in fabric design. They’ve built an online community of people interested in cool fabric. We range from hobbyists to professionals. We talk to one another, vote on one another’s designs, and buy fabric to sew. It’s like print-on-demand for fabric.

  I sew as a hobby; have done since I was a teenager. When I hit th
e fashion-conscious teen years and my desire for new clothes outstripped my parents’ income, they bought me a sewing machine. My mother taught me how to use it. It was an extraordinarily frustrating learning curve for someone with undiagnosed ADHD. Once, I glued the seams of a blouse because I was too impatient to stitch them. My mother was horrified. But I did learn how to sew, and how to get to a place of patience around it (plus some time-saving tricks that kept me from going supernova). Since then, I’ve always had a sewing machine. I have an ever-growing collection of clothing patterns, some dating back to the 1930s. I’m a big girl, almost always have been. There was a time when attractive clothing at reasonable prices just wasn’t available for larger women. Being able to sew meant that I could make my own. It’s easier now to find nonhideous off-the-rack clothing in my size, but when you make it yourself, the fit can be better, the clothing more unique.

  Now that I can design my own fabric and have the designs printed, I can create and use iconography I don’t find on store-bought fabric. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been hesitant to wear images of non-black people on my body. Not because I hate white people, or some rubbish like that, but because I wanted to be able to love black people and my own blackness. Nowadays, you can find fabric with images of black people on it that doesn’t make you want to go postal, but good lord, does it ever tend toward the twee! I prefer images with a bit more bite, a bit more perversity, and a bit less saccharin.

  I can make science fiction and fantasy imagery, too, that isn’t all unicorns with flowing manes on a background of rainbow-coloured stars. I adapt a lot of historical imagery, and my own photographs as well, and sometimes I draw. I know nothing about design, and I haven’t conjured up the patience to learn. I make fabric designs by trial and error. Some of them are hideous. Some of them are just okay, and some of them are successful. I’m always a bit surprised when someone who doesn’t know me buys fabric from my online Spoonflower store: (http://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/nalo_hopkinson)

  I make stuff. I was a craftsperson and did a lot of my own cooking long before I took up writing. I have my mother to thank for showing me that it was possible to make things for pleasure, for sustenance, and to save money. Come the zombie apocalypse, I know I’ll have some survival skills to offer.

  You have edited several anthologies (Mojo: Conjure Stories, So Long Been Dreaming, etc.). Is this part of a plot to wedge more black and female writers into the genre until they outnumber, overwhelm, and eventually drive out the white men? Or not?

  Good lord, you’ve sussed out my cunning plan for world domination! Excuse me for a second while I go work some obeah to keep you quiet. Please ignore the toad and the padlock lurking behind the curtain. Okay, I’m back. That toad’s never gonna croak again. So. How does trying to foster a more representative literary field translate to wanting to exclude white male writers? How would that be representative? I mean, I’m bad at math, but I’m not that damned bad at it.

  Just now, once I was done burning a candle of a particular colour and padlocking a toad’s lips shut, I glanced at the pile of books beside my desk. Among them are titles by Gene Wolfe, Steven Gould, Rudyard Kipling, China Miéville, Stieg Larsson, Hal Duncan, Charlie Stross, George R.R. Martin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and a certain Terry Bisson.

  Whew. Frankly, you gave me quite a turn with the intimation that white male authors were in danger of extinction. If that were true, we’d have to immediately start the Society for the Protection of White Male Writers. We’d get a Board of Directors together, and we’d do a fund-raising drive on Kickstarter, and make depositions to all the major publishing houses, and hand out T-shirts with our logo on them, and infiltrate government, media, the churches, and the multinationals. We’d become so ubiquitous that pretty soon, people would cease referring to us by our full name—TSFTPOWMW is so unwieldy, don’t you think?—Instead, they’d just refer us as Society. Oh, wait …

  I get it. You would have the status quo.

  You said it, not me. Anyway, beside my bed are also books by Liz Hand, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Madeleine E. Robins, Nisi Shawl, Ivan E. Coyote, Ayize Jama-Everett, Barbara Lalla, Olive Senior, and Rabindranath Maharaj. That list comprises some women, some black folks, white folks, multiracial folks, South Asian, queer, Canadian, Jamaican, and Trinidadian writers. They are for the most part books I had to go a bit out of my way to find, which meant that I had to figure out where to look.

  There are a lot of readers who pride themselves on not paying attention to the identities of their favourite 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 colour 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 colourblind, 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 institutionalised marginalisation works, and what types of intervention will, by inches, bring that siege engine down.

  We’re in a genre that is heavily invested in the romance of the individual villain and the lone hero who defeats that villain. We want to know who the bad guy is. Dammit, we want someone to blame! And there are people who say and do racist things, consciously in ignorance. You can try to change them, or to limit the harm they do. These are useful and necessary actions. But pulling the weed doesn’t destroy the root system, and what do you do when you realise that we are all in some way part of that system? I don’t know all the answers. I’m sure that some of what I say here is going to come back to haunt me with its ignorance or naiveté. Remember when Robert Silverberg published that essay about why the stories of James R. Tiptree, Jr. (pen name of Alice Sheldon) could only have been written by a man? I’m impressed by how graciously he later acknowledged that he’d been wrong. That’s a grace to which I aspire. I have a feeling I’ll need it.

  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 marginalised communities. That huge prejudice aside, there is some validity to the fear. If you want to vary your diet, you put a larger selection of foods into your mouth. You don’t toss vitamins into the toilet. The latter would be attacking the problem from the wrong end.

  So to speak. So what would be attacking the problem from the right end?

  A few years ago, when I was about to put out the call for submissions to the anthology Mojo: Conjure Stories, I had two equal priorities that the received wisdom in this field says are antithetical: I wanted to choose stories based on the quality of the writing; and I wanted to end up with an anthology (about an African diasporic form of magic) that would actually contain a lot of stories by black writers.

  It took me some hard thinking to figure out the flaw in the logic that leads people to think that antiracist diversity and literary quality
are mutually exclusive. This is what I came up with: there are many steps to editing an anthology, and they have different priorities. Efforts to broaden the representation have to happen at the beginning of the process, not at the stage where you’re selecting for literary quality. If I wanted black writers to send me their stories, I’d have to specifically invite them. And in an effort to right the systemic imbalance in numbers, I’d have to invite more of them than of anyone else. If I wanted the participation of non-black writers (and I did), I’d need to invite the ones that I felt were creatively up to the task.

  I knew that statistically speaking, if you invite people to something, one-fifth of them will attend. I knew that I had room for roughly twenty stories in the anthology. I multiplied that number by five, and so decided I would solicit stories from more than a hundred writers. “More than” because I knew I would reject some of the stories as unsuitable.

  Then I made two lists of writers to invite who I thought could handle the material well: one of writers I knew to be black, and one of writers I knew to be non-black, or whose race I didn’t know for sure; after all, some writers don’t place a focus on their racial identities, and that is their right. I listed twice as many black writers as those in the second group. In a way, you could say that I deliberately did the opposite of what would have happened in our current context of institutionalised racism if I hadn’t thought about who I was inviting. Some might call that reverse racism. I think it was more in the way of reversing racism (grammar’s so important, don’t you think?), if only for a small space of time in a temporarily and very conditionally autonomous zone.

  I sent out the invitations, crossed my fingers, and waited nervously until the submission deadline. There was a chance it wouldn’t work. The law of averages means that efforts to even out that kind of imbalance work in the aggregate, not necessarily in every single instance. I had to take that chance, and to also take the chance that if it didn’t work out, I’d face disapproval from some of the black readers in the field. Part of the job. At least I could say that I’d tried.