Fantasy Authors

"The metaphors we use in the west come from Greek and European mythology. Aishu in West African religious mythology is the deity I use in Midnight Robber. Aishu said: "I would like to go everywhere and see everything." a perfect metaphor for artificial intelligence. Black people have a rich spiritual heritage, as well as a rich imaginative life-stories handed down over centuries-that inform our ideas of the future. They need to be on the table like everybody else's."

"In the fantastical genres there is an idea that the world can change. And that to me is immensely hopeful."

"for me to exist in this world I have to have a radical agenda because the world has got to change in order for people like me to be able to exist...I need to have a radical agenda. I need to make a world where it is perfectly okay that I'm attracted to people who live inbetween genders. I think that should not be a problem. I can't change. The world has to change."

"(Are you consciously taking a new look at the future?) NH: No. I'm drawing pretty heavily on the science fiction and fantasy I read growing up. I also come out of a very strong Caribbean literary tradition. In that sense I'm kind of marrying the two, but not in a way of "trying to go out there and do something new." I'm like any other writer. There are a handful of us, if we're talking about solely Caribbean writers -- there's Claude Michel Prevost…Tobias Buckell. I've found that science fiction reviewers tend to react most strongly to the Caribbean-flavored stuff, and some of them identify that as being new and over-focus on it. I'm starting to feel I might be getting typecast. (with Indiebound)"

"Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time. (p179)"

"Suck all the juice this life will give! (p33)"

"“Children,” I said to her. “For the first little while, they not exactly human, you don’t find?”"

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

"It was time to be honest with myself. To survive all the shame this world will throw at you, you have to hold yourself tall, look your accuser straight in the eye. Even if it’s your own face looking back at you."

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

"It is ugly in this world, and when the killing starts, the same stick will beat the black dog and the white."

"Desire makes us all babies again."

"All the people sick and dead on the ships, and the ones sick and dead on this soil. What are gods for, then, if they let things like this to happen to their people?"

"Lasirèn, pray you a quick death for Hopping John. Pray you no more of this life for him. Even though no gods answer black people’s prayers here in this place."

"Just being Tan-Tan, sometimes good, sometimes bad, mostly just getting by like everybody else."

"She was hiding in the best possible way, masquerading as herself!"

"She curled up on the pallet and stared into the dark, praying for a peaceful sleep. Prayers didn’t do no good, oui. Antonio chased her all night. (In the book Antonio, her father, beats and sexually abuses her long-term; she eventually kills him)"

"She just wanted to be somewhere safe, somewhere familiar, where people looked and spoke like her and she could stand to eat the food."

"Come in peace to my home, Tan-Tan. And when you go, go in friendship."

"This was a thing she’d not seen before, how the meat that fed her was a living being one minute and then violently dead. The smell of it was personal, inescapable, like the scent that rose in the steam from her own self when she stepped into a hot bath. They had broken open the animal’s secret body just to eat it."

"Since Baby’s birth, she had learned that the first few months of motherhood were about fatigue and leakiness."

"She had a yearning to lose herself in this noisy throng of people going about the business of staying alive."

"“Under what circumstances do you think you might want to…return to the real world?” The real world and I never did get along, she thought. “I can’t imagine,” she said."

"Banach recalled that one defector had stated, I didn’t abandon the USSR, the USSR abandoned me. And he recalled the oath he had taken, with perfect sincerity, at the age of eighteen: I will always be ready to come to the defense of my homeland, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics… The what? he thought now. What was that you said? The Roman Empire, was it? The Persian Empire, the Hittites?"

"Finehouse relaxed in his own seat. They had all certainly failed. But maybe sometimes, he thought, it’s a good thing, on the whole, to have closed a knife that someone else had opened."

"We should all be getting insanity danger pay."

"“Where’s the sane world?” Castine asked as she followed him around to the front of the Saturn. “I used to live there. I think I still have pictures.”"

"“So what do you, you know, do,” she asked, “in Barstow?” Her voice was resolutely light. “Beside talk to ghosts?”"

"Now she was giving him a worried look. “Say something sane.” He smiled bleakly, his eyes on the cars ahead. “You and I are not normal people.” “Huh.” She shook her head. “That’s not sane, that’s just true.”"

"Guesses based on guesses are of no value."

"“I think we’re dead.” “Maybe.” Vickery shook his head. “Would that make a difference?”"

"“Maybe later,” he told her. “Time yet for a hundred indecisions.”"

"Terracotta says people can’t help what they do, any more than a rock rolling down a hill can. The rock might think it has a choice about rolling left or right, just like people think they choose what they do, but really it’s all just physics."

"He fought to think rationally. Guilt, he reminded himself, is an electro-chemical event in the physical brain. It’s one of the useless side-effects of consciousness, which is itself irrelevant. The ideal is the lines in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall:” “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.” The important thing was that all of it moved in determinate grooves."

"The terrain is the body, the map is the anatomy chart."

"“‘Allies,’” he explained, “means we agree not to kill each other.” “I knew that,” she said. “It just slipped my mind for a second.”"

"I owe a fortune in student loans, and after I got my degree in education and tried to apply it, I caught on that the emperor had no clothes—"

"“Did he say who he was?” asked Scott. “I asked him,” said Ariel. “He sort of laughed and said he was between names.”"

"“I’d offer you a drink,” he said, “but all I have is the good stuff.”"

"When my mother told me the meek would inherit the earth, I told her all I wanted of it was the shovelful that would cover my cold face."

"“She did love us. Does.” “She loves you the way a drowning person loves somebody they can push down and climb on top of.”"

"“I got to missing her, the way things used to be here, the past. The past,” she repeated. “It’s always out there, isn’t it? I hate now. I hate that whenever you look at a clock, it shows a different time. What’s the use of knowing what time it is, if it’s always changing? And it’s always later!”"

"“Doesn’t she read chicken entrails?” “Oh! No, astrology.” “Same sort of thing.”"

"After a few seconds, he said, “You’re devout, aren’t you? Some species of Christian, I imagine?” She smiled faintly. “Yes.” “I would say that was a mark against your intelligence, but since you’re both nice girls, I won’t say it. But you assume a sequel to this life, one in which noble sacrifices are rewarded, or at least noted. I’m convinced that no note is taken at all, and that, as far as any one of us is concerned, the universe comes to an end at the moment of his death.”"

"“She chose to reject me!” That wasn’t a choice, lad—that was an empty gun saying click.”"

"I’m not a joiner. Any time you work with people, they turn out to be inept clowns."

"“William will marry eventually,” he said in a quieter tone. He’ll try to have children—he doesn’t believe any of this.” “Not even in God,” said Maria sadly, shaking her head, “who is our only hope.” “And an unhelpfully remote and theoretical hope, at that,” Gabriel snapped."

"Gabriel scowled through his glasses. Why were ghosts such imbeciles? Who could be blamed for striving, at any cost, to avoid forever the decay-of-self that death was?"

"By the dim yellow glow of the overhead bulb, Lepidopt stared at the bomb and the time machine, and he tried to imagine what might go wrong."

"“When you get to where I am—” “I’ll never get to where you are. I’ll make better choices.” “Choices! You don’t get choices, you get...situations that you react to—the actual cumulative you reacts, with whatever half-ass wiring you’ve got at the time, not some hovering ‘soul.’ You’re a mercury switch—if the spring tilts you to the right degree, you complete a circuit, and if it’s got metal fatigue, it tilts you less, and you don’t. You don’t have free will, sonny.” “Of course I do, of course you do, what kind of excuse—” “Bullshit. If—” The older Marrity was panting. “If a scientist could know every last detail of your physiology and life experiences, he could predict with absolute accuracy every ‘choice’ you’d make in any moral quandary.” Quandary! To Marrity the sentence sounded as if it had been prepared ahead of time. Not for talking to me, he thought, this old wretch couldn’t have anticipated talking to me—he must have cooked it up for his own solace. “Laplace’s determinist manifesto,” came another man’s languid voice from the background. “it overlooks Heisenberg’s uncertainty.” “Okay,” said the older Marrity furiously, “then it’s probability and statistics that dictate what we’ll do! But it’s not—” “It’s a sin,” said Marrity, breathing deeply himself. To Daphne he projected a vague cluster of images—hugging her, holding her hand—and he was able to have more confidence in his reassurance now. “Said the fourth domino to the twenty-first!” exclaimed the older Marrity, laughing angrily. “‘Ah, wilt Thou with predestination round / Enmesh me and impute my fall to sin?’”"