Space fiction began as the dreams of young white men, and while its authors and fans have diversified, its imagery, language and point of view are firmly rooted in Western European culture. A few writers have broken away from those roots to write a story or a book, but what makes Nalo Hopkinson such a refreshing new voice is that she's built a career around non-European science fiction.
Born in Jamaica, Hopkinson made Afro-Caribbean dialect and culture a crucial part of her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, which won her the prestigious Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her second book-length work, Midnight Robber, which ships to bookstores in February, demonstrates her first novel was no fluke.
Midnight Robber is the story of Tan-Tan, a young girl growing up on the colony world of Toussaint. Her father, Antonio, has discovered that his wife Ione is having an affair with his best friend Quashee. After walking out on Ione, he agrees to meet Quashee in a duel of honor at the upcoming Carnival. The duel goes badly, and Antonio now faces life in prison after accidentally killing Quashee.
Tan-Tan helps her father escape through a dimensional shifter to "New Half-Way Tree", an alternate-universe version of Toussaint that is home to the colony's misfits and political exiles.
Tan-Tan grows up in New Half-Way Tree, enduring the sexual attentions of her increasingly unstable father before she flees into the wilderness to take on the bandit persona of the legendary "Midnight Robber" and learn the secrets of the planet's native lifeforms.
This plot is, of course, a standard coming-of-age story, and even the sexual elements are nothing unusual in contemporary young-adult books. What makes Midnight Robber unique is the way it is told and the cultural vocabulary it draws from.
At home we used a foreign tongue
Hopkinson's language is the first thing you notice. Brown Girl in the Ring featured some dialect passages, and that book's success has allowed Hopkinson to broaden the experiment in Midnight Robber. She's written bridging sections entirely in Creole, framing the main story with legends and background information, slipping Caribbean vocabulary and rhythms into her narration.
What's impressive is how she controls her use of dialect. While the characters speak a consistent patois, the dialect ebbs and flows in Hopkinson's expository writing. By carefully varying whether each sentence is in standard English, Creole or a combination of the two languages, she shifts elegantly from simple events to emotional viewpoints, highlighting action or slowing other scenes down.
Hopkinson's use of Caribbean myth extends beyond mere language. The space-age legends she has created provide clues about the history of the Toussaint colony and explain the sometimes unusual attitudes and actions of the characters. This subtle approach is fairly common in science fiction, but readers are still forced to work out the meanings of each legend for themselves before they can connect the stories back to the colony's present-day life. It's extra detective work, but it's fun.
Then she became the myth
These legends also bend the story in unexpected directions.
The Midnight Robber, for instance, begins the book as a figure who waylays travelers to Toussaint's Carnival with words instead of weapons, but Hopkinson's plot uses Tan-Tan's fascination with him in several different ways.
In the end, of course, Tan-Tan assumes the role of the Midnight Robber, and even then the consequences of that act are very different from what readers raised on Robin Hood might expect.
In fact, many of Hopkinson's references will be foreign to the largely North American and European science fiction community, leaving readers to understand many things she describes or names from their context. Still, Tan-Tan's adventures are always clear and entertaining and the myths and legends never smother the SF elements.
Midnight Robber makes me want to read more Caribbean literature, but more importantly, it makes me want to read more Nalo Hopkinson.
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