Children were pack animals; let any one of them act different from the group, and the rest would bring him down.
Nalo HopkinsonI wish more fantasy, especially the dominant fantasy that draws heavily on British and Christian lore, would wrestle with its own ethnospecific nature and what that means when the story is set somewhere where more than one belief system is in operation. If all you do is pay lip service to it, you can get the kind of thing where the writer has thrown one Hindu god into a Christianist fantasy (rendering said god by default a demon or otherwise inferior to the dominant religious system of the story, which is such an insult), and the hero is able to vanquish it by chanting a spell in church Latin.
Nalo HopkinsonI tried to get the word out to people who are information hubs in their communities, because they could propagate the call quickly. One challenge is that breaking science fiction means, well, breaking science fiction. Many communities of colour have a different approach to narratives of science.
Nalo HopkinsonWhen your elders are millennia-old demigods, youโd best take the injunction to respect your elders seriously.
Nalo HopkinsonWhen 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.
Nalo HopkinsonIโm going to check the worldโs best source for spawning new urban legends, the Internet. What, you thought I couldnโt even type? The Web is just another threshold between one world and another.
Nalo HopkinsonI'm looking for stories that make me sit up and take notice. For engagement with language and style in ways that the genre doesn't see enough of.
Nalo HopkinsonMy 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 hasnโt mentioned such an important plot point.
Nalo Hopkinson