Fantasy Authors

"When Jamaican-born Canadian Nalo Hopkinson burst on to the science fiction scene with Brown Girl in the Ring in 1998, she seemingly single-handedly reinvigorated interest in Black science fiction (SF). Afrofuturism had not caught fire at this point, but Hopkinson did. She grabbed the attention of the SF community with her Caribbean-inspired science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism. Hopkinson represents the obvious first link in Octavia Butler's legacy."

"What I love about current Indigenous Futurisms and how they’re changing is that they aren’t constrained by this binary between Western science and Indigenous or non-Western science. One example is Nalo Hopkinson’s novel The New Moon’s Arms (2007), set in the Caribbean."

"Indigenous scientific literacies play key roles throughout Nalo Hopkinson's works. The excerpt from Midnight Robber introduces the practice in its simplest guise: a child comes under the tutelage of an Indigenous mentor who begins teaching her the science of survival, emphasizing the practical, day-to-day transmission of generational knowledge."

"I like imagining that Lovecraft is spinning in his grave as he's forced to view the world through the eyes of his statuettes placed in the homes and offices of the likes of Nnedimma Okorafor, Kinuko Y. Craft, S. P. Somtow, Haruki Murakami, Neil Gaiman, and me."

"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 marginalized communities."

"A lot of the time, all I'm trying to do is put some of my specific ethnocultural touchstones into science fiction and fantasy. When white writers do that, it's barely remarked-upon. And sometimes it should be, because it's often wonderful."

"There are a lot of readers who pride themselves on not paying attention to the identities of their favorite 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 color 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 colorblind, 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 institutionalized marginalization works, and what types of intervention will, by inches, bring that siege engine down."

"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""

"mainstream American media seem to believe that Caribbean people are little more than simpleminded, marijuana-steeped clowns who say "de" instead of "the.""

"(You once said, "Fiction is NOT autobiography in a party dress." OK, then what is it?) NH: It's what happens after you grind up a bunch of your personally received input, everything from life experience to that book about spices you read ten years ago, compost it within your imagination, and then in that mulch grow something new. I think that could even apply to autobiographical fiction."

"The title's sort of the distilled version of what the story wants to be. Before I quite know what the story is, the title whispers hints to me."

"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 modeled a plot upon the shell of a preexisting folktale. I've discovered that it doesn't matter whether your readers recognize 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."

"No one can make me give up the writing I love that's by straight, white, Western male (and female) writers, but at a certain point, I began to long to see other cultures, other aesthetics, other histories, realities, and bodies represented in force as well. There was some. I wanted more. I wanted lots more. I wanted to write some of it. I think I am doing so."

"Science fiction and fantasy are already about subverting paradigms. It's something I love about them."

"To certain white male writers, I'd like to say, "When those around you try to wrestle with issues of entitlement and marginalization, please don't give us the tired trumpeting of 'Censorship! No one can tell me what to write!" True, people shouldn't tell you what to write, but people will try to, for bad reasons and better ones. Your mother will try to tell you what to write or not write. Your husband will. Your editor, your government, your church, your readers, your nosy neighbor. Humans are an argumentative lot. Dealing with that as a writer comes with the territory."

"When I hear a (usually white and usually male) writer trying to shut down a discussion about representation by bellowing that no one should tell him what to write, it sounds very much as though he's trying to change the topic, to make it all about him. To him I'd say: Why not try to further the discussion, rather than trying to, um, censor it? What do you think needs to be done in order to make publishing more representative? Nothing, you say? The doors are already open but we just won't come in? Women, Black people (and purple polka-dotted meerkats) actually "just don't write much science fiction"? Or their books are "only relevant to their communities" (which is often code for "those people are incapable of producing anything of real literary merit")? Funny, how every one of those statements boils down to not being willing to change the status quo. You do realize that you're even drowning out the white voices amongst you that are trying to make some changes along with the rest of us? You do realize that a more representative literary field would be representative of all of us, yourself included?"

"Write whatever the blast you want, and if you live in an environment where doing so doesn't endanger your life or career, count yourself blessed."

"Science fiction as a literature probably helped to save my life. I suspect I would have self-destructed without it, and without the people I have met because of it. So even when I'm critical of it, I'm very happy that it's here."

"people will love each other, no matter what circumstances they are in."

"Every time I put my work out into the public, I risk putting something out there based in my unexamined and unrecognized assumptions. That's part of the game."

"I hope that my vanilla and het sex scenes are graphic and explicit, too! I write. It's an art form. Why would I make the effort to describe a meal or a sunset in a way that's detailed and responds to all the senses, but not do so for a sex scene? Why are "graphic" and "explicit" good in descriptions of walking through a field of lavender in full bloom, but not for a character coming so hard that his eyes roll back in his head?"

"Sexuality gets binarized too often. Not only do I resist the idea of one form of sexuality, but the assumption that there are only two forms, and you do one, the other, or both, and those are the only possible behaviors. It sometimes seems to me-and perhaps whimsically so-that the people who are courageously non-normative in their sexualities are doing in the real world some of the work that speculative fiction can do in the world of the imagination, that is, exploring a wider range of possibilities for living."

"Science fiction is and has been ripe to discuss other possibilities for sex and relationships: multiple marriages, communal structures, different genders. Writers like Theodore Sturgeon, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Lynn, Nicola Griffith, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Candas Jane Dorsey, Eleanor Arnason, Storm Constantine have been my touchstones."

"When I write, I want to present as wide a spectrum as I can of the ways in which people can choose to behave sexually and in relationships, and I like representing those where possible as visible, acceptable behaviors. Because they should be, and because science fiction is about conceiving new possibilities. So yes, I find I'm constantly resisting both monoliths and binaries because I find them limiting for myself. It took a while for me even to be able to understand myself as queer, because monoliths and binaries obscured me from seeing it. Gay/straight/bisexual are all important to represent, but they aren't the only possible axes along which to sort human sexual attraction."

"Science fiction and fantasy are about looking at the world through a different lens. So whatever I write, including sex scenes, I may first think, how can I cause myself, and the reader, to see this differently? What can I do to challenge, delight, surprise, unsettle?"

"I think what happens is as with any form of oppression the people most concerned with or think about it the most deeply are the people most negatively affected by it."

"to be color-blind in a racist world is to not be an ally...if the playing field isn't level, and you're not doing anything to make it level, you aren't actually being fair."

"I'd like to see support right through the various forms, the various artistic disciplines for artists of color who are interested in futuristic and fantastical visions. I'd like to see us really start to make them welcome because they bring a different vision. We bring a different vision and that will change the genre, and the genre is about change."

"[about writing science fiction with an African sensibility] You have to reinvent the language. You have to craft some bizarre amalgam of the sensibility you're trying to bring and a science fiction sensibility... you're grafting two things together that did not grow together, and it's difficult to do that successfully."

"(IL: So why do you think the SF community is more willing to discuss gay/lesbian issues versus race issues?) NH: Yeah, why do I think that is? Because queerness is still seen as a white issue, to the irritation to those of us who are both of color and queer."

"What's needed instead is to state up front at submission time that you want to see submissions from authors of color; to include people of color in significant positions on your staff (editorial, marketing, etc.); to educate yourself to the ways in which cultural specificity results in stories being told differently, signifying differently on race, culture, fashion, language, you name it; to recognize that "not seeing race" means that they also can't perceive structural racism; to grasp that racism isn't just a stoned white male musician ranting at his concert that all people of color should be kicked out of the UK. I suspect that only if you do that groundwork will you be able to assess submissions from authors of color on an equal footing with white authors. The Anglophone market is still hugely skewed in overwhelming favor of straight, white, male authors. There are still nowhere near enough translations from other languages into English. (2021)"

"there are aspects of it [teaching] that are not at all enjoyable. But that "lively exchange of ideas" thing? That satisfaction you feel when a student's world expands a bit? Those are real. (2021)"

"why have things shifted a little? I think that at root it's the vocal, persistent activism of the ones most affected; the people who need positive change. (2021)"

"There is so much vibrant work coming out, and more and more of it beginning to come out from, and depicting, a broader range of humanity. (2017)"

"I think inserting yourself into a place where you are told you don't belong, when you know quite well you do, is important work. (2017)"

"The other challenge I see is that of the diversity of expression in speculative fiction. The readers seem to come from all over the place, but the writing that gets published (or that gets marketed as SF) still comes from a fairly narrow range of experience. The imaginative worlds that we're creating still draw heavily on Greek and Roman mythology and on Euro-Celtic folktales, and the futures we imagine still feel pretty Western middle class. And that's fair enough, because it's the primary cultural context in which many of the writers are situated. Some excellent writing has come and is coming out of those experiences. However, I also want to see more writing from the vast range of cultural contexts which makes up the world. (2000)"

"Reading people like James Baldwin [made me realise] that, if you’re an artist, there’s no reason not to make art out of anything. Sex is a big part of the human experience. It’s something that we’re hardwired to think about. Why would you avoid making art about something that is so all-encompassingly important to human beings?"

"We live in a racist world, and there’s no less racism [in the science fiction community] than anywhere else. But the nice thing about the science fiction community is that it’s very accepting of a challenge, of something new. We’re all a community of eggheads. We like knowing stuff. For the most part, [sci-fi readers] open the book and...get very interested in the language and the world and culture I’m talking about."

"Science fiction is a literature that explores the fact that human beings are part of social systems and that social systems change. It explores social change and the human change that both drives it and is affected by it. Fantasy, which I write more than I write science fiction, is a literature that explores the stories we tell to explain the inexplicable. It also explores human nature. Fantasy pays homage to folklore and folklore talks a lot about archetypes. Fantasy explores those archetypes and also explores the way we tell stories to explain things like why there’s a moon in the sky or things that we have no explanation for, but we believe. Fantasy explores what we believe."

"Labels are very important to me. They’re a way of finding community and a way of community finding you. If people are looking for my work because they’re looking for the work of another woman or the work of a science fiction writer or a black writer, it helps if they know that I am that. For me, identity is kind of a mailbox."

"I know how reality goes. I’m already caught up in an interesting life. I don’t need to write about it...I prefer fantasy and science fiction. They’re genres that actively say that change is possible."

"I’ve learned, don’t fight too hard when readers say, ‘You got this wrong.’ There’s a very good chance you got it wrong. I’ve started to think of it as them being helpful – that’s what’s best for my psyche. (2024)"

"I enjoy exploring my connection to Caribbean vernacular – or, any vernacular. I love how people actually speak. There is an art and a poetry and a beauty and a logic to it that, to me, is undeniable. There’s no such thing as bad language, in my mind. (2024)"

"They say that writing is a solitary sport, but it isn’t, really. It doesn’t have to be. Some people are really happy about writing alone, but some people actually suffer from the isolation. (2024)"

"It’s the beautiful thing about being a fiction writer; you can write the world you want to see."

"…There’s still this notion that you are somehow morally superior if you don’t know anything about the background of the writers you read, and I maintain that writers have every right to not talk their backgrounds, that’s fine, but when people do and it’s important to their work, to not know doesn’t mean you’re morally superior, it means you are indifferent…"

"…Even though we talk about race a lot in the literature, there’s still this idea of “Well, if we make this person blue and give them pointy ears, then we don’t have to actually talk about what’s happening in the real world.” And those of us who live in racialized bodies feel that lack, we feel that erasure, so yes, there was something quite deliberate in my doing half the speech as an alien."

"Every so often I come up with a different definition of what science fiction and fantasy do, and I'm always looking for one that describes what they both do, rather than separating them. Currently I'm saying that one of the things they do is look at the effects of large-scale social change on both populations and individuals. Fantasy tends to look to the past, and science fiction to the future, but what is common to many of the stories is change: huge societal upheaval."

"Writers have to live in more than two worlds. The intellectual life of the Caribbean was available to me when I was growing up, through my parents, but being a science fiction and fantasy reader was strange. (There are still very few people in the Caribbean writing SF.) But I think being Caribbean, you're aware of being a multiplicity. Pretty much all of us who come from there are of mixed-race backgrounds, no matter what we look like. And they are really pluralist societies -- have been for centuries, though of course there are similar issues of systemic racism."

"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."