Nalo Hopkinson

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.

We are all here, all the powers of the Ginen lives for all the centuries that they have been in existence, and we all fight. We change when change is needed. We are a little different in each place that the Ginen have come to rest, and any one of is already many powers. No cancer can fell us all, no blight cover us completely.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.

So there__ a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn__ about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)

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

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.

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

It__ so the stories go that the Ginen tell. If you find a beautiful fairmaid swimming in the river, her fish tail flashing; if you follow her down into her water home with her, she will make the water like air so you can breathe. But then she__l ask you, playful, You eat salt, or you eat fresh? And if you say salt, she will let you go back home, but if you say fresh __t__ my business,_ he said. Pouted. Looked at the ground.If you only eat unsalted food, fresh food, we believe you make Lasirèn vexed, for salt is the creatures of the sea, and good for the Ginen to eat, but fresh__resh is the flesh of Lasirèn, and if you eat that, it__ pride. You__e trying to make yourself as one of the lwas. Makandal never eats salt. He, a living man, giving himself powers like a lwa. That__ why he couldn__ hear the voice of the lwas.