Photo: David Findlay

On the BOOK RIOT podcast SFF YEAH! (Episode 17 at about  26:10), they discuss Nalo Hopkinson and her collection FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS. 

Hopkinson has an
amazing voice. She just writes these amazing stories.

At REDDIT, thequeensownfool started a Nalo Hopkinson appreciation thread.

Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican-born Canadian writer and editor, who currently resides in California. She is best known in the Canadian SFF scene for her novels Brown Girl in the Ring and The Salt Roads. Hopkinson’s work draws on Caribbean history and language, specifically its traditions of oral and written story telling. I’d classify her work as afrofuturism, defined as:

a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of history that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentrism, and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of black people, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical events of the past.

Similar to the work of Octavia Butler, Hopkinson’s work incorporates and questions the historical events of slavery and its impact on the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora, but also imagines possible futures.

The CBC shares a video with Nalo Hopkinson: “Afrofuturism, sci-fi and why ‘it is a radical act for Black people to imagine having a future‘”

You may know about Black History Month, but what about Black Future Month? CBC Arts turned to science fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson to find out more about what the future means — and why it’s so exciting.

Hopkinson brings her experience as a Black woman to her novels. She’s been reading science fiction since she was young, but she came to writing it in her adulthood after discovering that one of the writers she admired was a Black man. Now, she’s the award-winning author of six novels, including the acclaimed Brown Girl in the Ring (which is the inspiration for a new movie by Sharon Lewis, called Brown Girl Begins).

For more information on FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Chuma Hill

Design by Elizabeth Story