For the award-winning Hopkinson, language is more than just a way to tell a story. The words we use shape the way we think and even the technology we use.

"So many of our stories about technology and our paradigms for it refer to Greek and Roman myth and language," she says. "We name rocket ships Apollo, communication devices telephones, a human-machine interface a cyborg."

Even though Hopkinson grew up reading Greek classics like The Iliad and The Odyssey, she wanted to find out what technology might be like seen through a different language.

In Midnight Robber, she says, "I wondered what technologies a largely African diasporic culture might build, what stories its people might tell themselves about technology."

The novel is set on Toussaint, a planet settled by a Caribbean culture and named after the man who liberated Haiti's slaves from the French.

On Toussaint, communications devices are known as "four-eyes," which are literally seers, and the artificially intelligent operating systems that run homes are known as "eshus," from the West African deity that can be all places at once.

"The nations that currently control the world's resources favor standardization, homogenization and quantity. What will they do with nanotechnology and extraterrestrial travel? Make a quadrillion more things that are all the same, and that are dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, and put them in space."
     

There's also an artificial intelligence known as "Granny Nanny" watching over everyone on Toussaint.

Granny Nanny, says Hopkinson, is "named after the revolutionary and magic worker who won independent rule in Jamaica for the Maroons who had run away from slavery. Rather than being a 'Big Brother' paradigm it's an affectionate reference to her sense of love, care and duty."

With Granny Nanny caring for the colony, Hopkinson found she'd created an SF rarity: a utopia that actually works pretty well. "It isn't perfect," she says. "The person who invented the system saw the high level of benign surveillance as an acceptable trade-off for the kind of safety and high quality of life that the people would have."

On the other hand, Hopkinson says, "there are no poor people on Toussaint, and no wage slaves. And though Granny Nanny perceives all, she doesn't tell all, unless she thinks it's an issue of someone's safety. It really does feel like being mothered, and sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes a smothering thing."

Granny Nanny and Toussaint are only the story's backdrop, though. Most of the action of Midnight Robber takes place on New Half-Way Tree, a wilder, alternate-dimension version of Toussaint populated by its misfits and outcasts.

Hopkinson explores this world through the eyes of Tan-Tan, a young girl who is taken to New Half-Way Tree by her father after he accidentally kills a man in a duel.

Tan-Tan is fascinated by the "Midnight Robber" of the title, who Hopkinson calls "a particularly Trinidadian metaphor for exile."

The Midnight Robber, she says, is "a classical masquerade [character] from the Trinidad carnival. He would wear exaggerated robber costumes and pretend to waylay people at Carnival time. Then he'd spin them a very wordy tale about being the son of an African prince who'd been stolen into slavery, who'd been brought to a land full of strange-looking people, who'd escaped and become a robber in order to survive."

According to Hopkinson, it's a tale that Tan-Tan "identifies with a lot," so much so that she ultimately takes on the persona of the Midnight Robber herself.

A legend in her own time

Tan-Tan's assumption of the Midnight Robber legend is a key moment in the novel, and leads to the creation of three folktales in the novel that mix existing Caribbean metaphors and the life on New Half-Way Tree.

"I originally set out to write a novel in which a very human person becomes the stuff of legend," Hopkinson says. "I wondered, when she starts hearing the stories that people are telling about her, would she deny them or try to live up to them? Does the person create the legend or the legend the person?"

By mixing an older Caribbean culture with the creatures and customs of her colony world, Hopkinson followed the example of modern-day Caribbean culture, which is a melting pot of images and ideas from Europe and Africa.

"I enjoyed taking creatures from the folkore I'd read as a child and making them real. The Carnival imagery comes from Trinidad, where Carnival evolved out of an African response to the New Year's Eve masquerades."

In Carnival, she says, you'll find traditions that "combine West African harvest celebrations with Italian commedia dell'arte. Then when indentured laborers began to be brought to the Caribbean from India, they incorporated a lot of their imagery and iconography into Carnival. It's a very rich cook-up stew."

Even light-years away, Big Macs won't taste different

Unfortunately, Hopkinson isn't convinced that her vision of a Creole culture in space will ever appear outside books. Unless a "radical paradigm shift" occurs, she worries that the future of space travel will be dominated by white American and European culture.

"The nations that currently control the world's resources favor standardization, homogenization and quantity," she says. "What will they do with nanotechnology and extraterrestrial travel? Make a quadrillion more things that are all the same, and that are dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, and put them in space."

Despite this, she's optimistic about the future.

"I do think paradigm shifts will happen," she says. "I don't know what will bring it about, or when, but the one thing humanity does consistently (other than to die) is to change."

"I hope that we will learn to actually celebrate diversity, instead of painting homogeneity in different colors and calling that diversity."