Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time. by Nalo Hopkinson

Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.

Nalo Hopkinson

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Categorized in : Hands Perfection Beats

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.

race white war

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

sugar mind trying

I'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.

engagement style stories

I 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.

community mean people

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

demigods elders

I 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.

religious christian latin

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.

literature people fiction

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

groups animal children

I'd like to find great stories from as many parts of the world as... by Nalo Hopkinson

I'd like to find great stories from as many parts of the world as possible.

stories world

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.

urban-legends internet world

I'm a novelist, editor, short story writer. I also teach, and I freelance sometimes as an arts consultant. Most of my books have been published by Warner Books, now known as Grand Central Books.

short story teach sometimes

I love science fiction. There are ways in which this community kept me and my partner alive through some very, very bad years, and I will always acknowledge that.

me community love science

You look at science fiction and look how often it talks about being alien, being alienated about the other. Look at the number of blue people - 'Avatar,' I'm looking at you. And it is now easier to find people of color in science-fiction literature and media, but the issues of representation are still really, really troubling.

you blue science people

I've learned now to have a second title in reserve because, frequently, I come up with titles that seem to make editors' hair fall out.

make now hair fall

I figure this current era of history is the one with the best chance of quality of life for a black, female, disabled, middle-aged, queer person who's most comfortable not fitting in. The odds still aren't great, mind you. But I'll take my chances with the 21st century.

best you life history

I'm constantly coming up with new strategies for getting to the mental place where writing is so joyous and playful that I almost can't help putting the words down.

words down new place

It's the thing I struggle with every day: the mental diligence and stamina needed to sit in front of the computer, open the file, start writing and to keep doing so, word after word, until I've created the next story. A combination of learning disability and chronic health issues make that the hardest thing for me.

day me learning health

I am Amaxon Corazon Junia Principia Delgado the Third, and I bent over my meal and wept luxurious tears into my green banana porridge. It was a perfect decoction, and it now would not satisfy me.

i-am me green tears