Quotes from Nalo Hopkinson

Bad-minded man, always making mischief, spreading doubt and fear.

Blue stars crackled, spat. "Why they don't speak to me!

I had put on beauty as a hermit crab puts on a discarded shell.

I remembered to keep my body inclined low, to shrink myself smaller than he. He was sensitive about my greater height.

Delicious Monster When

which I draw is European. Even the form in which I write is European. Arguably, one of the most familiar memes of science fiction is that of going to foreign countries and colonizing the natives, and as I've said elsewhere, for many of us, that's not a thrilling adventure story; it's non-fiction, and we are on the wrong side of the strange-looking ship that appears out of nowhere.

The Smile on the Face Innocent

So I don't see the theme of the story as nature versus science. I see it as a conflict between demanding and understanding, between the kinds of labor that our society values or doesn't value, "innovators" versus "maintainers." It's

Blushing, she took it from him. She dared not put her nose to it; like everything that Tony had ever given her, this gift had thorns.

The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn't eased, but there was room there for humour, too.

Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.

My friend Ian Hagemann, a regular at Wiscon, once said on a panel that when he reads science fiction futures that are full of white people and no one else, he wonders when the race war happened that wiped out the majority of the human race, and why the writer hasn't mentioned such an important plot point.

How do I know anything? How is it that my arms stretched out in front of me are so pale? How to I even know that they should be brown like riverbank mud, as they were when I was many goddesses with many worshippers, ruling in lands on the other side of a great, salty ocean? I used to be many, but now we are one, all squeezed together, many necks in one coffle.

So there's a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn't about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)

You folk are so finicky about time, living it in straight lines like that.

Suck all the juice this life will give!

Mid-range, androgynous voice. I first thought that Solaris was a guy. Then a girl. Maybe. Then I gave up trying to figure out which. It would become obvious at some point, or not.

I'm going to check the world's best source for spawning new urban legends, the Internet. What, you thought I couldn't even type? The Web is just another threshold between one world and another.

Do not ask your future, or you will forget to live in your present.

They are me, these women. They are the ones who taught me to see; I taught me to see. They, we, are the ones healing the Ginen story, fighting to destroy that cancerous trade in shiploads of African bodies that ever demands to be fed more sugar, more rum, more Nubian gold.

I made myself listen to the birds singing squabbles and love songs. Occasionally I heard a war. Sharp mechanical sounds clashed with the nature music. Bells and whistles mashed together in nagging bursts. My new life was calling. I had to get on with it. Body historians, griots of the galaxy, we didn't diddle ourselves in jungle paradises, we inhabited flesh to gather a genealogy of life. We sought the story behind all the stories.

Even she hair itself rough and wiry; long black knotty locks springing from she scalp and corkscrewing all the way down she back... The only thing soft about Tan-Tan is she big molasses-brown eyes that could look on you, and your heart would beat time...

Why? Because I played god with you? Baby girl, that's what I do. And not lightly, either." He thought about that for a second. "Well, yes, sometimes lightly. You know what they say about all work and no play.

When your elders are millennia-old demigods, you'd best take the injunction to respect your elders seriously.