Free Report from Planet Midnight by Nalo Hopkinson Page A

big, black dick.”
    So familiar, the change that wreaks on you. You’re an adult again, heavy-muscled and horny with a thick, swelling erection. You reach for her. She backs away. “But,” she says, “there’s one thing I don’t see.”
    You don’t care. She smells like vanilla and her skin is smooth and cool as ice cream and you want to push your tongue inside. You grab her thin, unresisting arms. She’s shaking, but she looks into your eyes. And hers are empty. You aren’t there. Shocked, you let her go. In a trembling voice, she says, “Who do you think you are?”
    It could be an accusation:
Who
do you
think
you are? It might be a question: Who do
you
think you are? You search her face for the answer. Nothing. You look to your mother, your sib. They both look as shocked as you feel.
    “Look,” says the golden girl, opening her hands wide. Her voice is getting less shaky. “Clearly, this is family business, and I know better than to mess with that.” She gathers her little picky plaits together, squeezes water out of them. “It’s been really … interesting, meeting you all.” She looks at you, and her eyes are empty, open, friendly. You don’t know what to make of them. “Um,” she says, “maybe you can give me a call sometime.” She starts walking away. Turns back. “It’s not a brush-off; I mean it. But only call when you can tellme who you really are. Or who you think you’re going to become.”
    And she leaves you standing there. In the silence, there’s only a faint sound of whispering water and wind in the trees. You turn to look at your mother and sister. “I,” you say.

“CORRECTING THE BALANCE”
NALO HOPKINSON INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON
    Your work is often described, even by yourself, as “subverting the genre.” Isn’t that against the rules? Or at least rude?
    Science fiction’s supposed to be polite? Dang, maybe I’ll take up poetry instead. To tell the truth, I kinda rue the day I ever let that quotation out into the world. I used it in a Canadian grant application fifteen years ago. In that context, when not a lot of science fiction and fantasy writers were getting grants from the arts councils because many of the jurors thought science fiction and fantasy were inherently immature, it worked. It allowed me to come out swinging and get the jury’s attention. But as something said to science fiction people, it just sounds presumptuous. I don’t remember how it got out of my confidential grant application and into the larger world. It was probably my own doing, and my own folly. Now the dang thing keeps coming back to haunt me. People quote it all over the place, and I can feel my face heating up with embarrassment. Science fiction and fantasy arealready about subverting paradigms. It’s something I love about them.
    And yet, if I’m being honest, there is some truth to that piece of braggadociousness. 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.
    Does the title of your debut novel,
Brown Girl in the Ring,
come from the game, the song, or a wish to connect with Tolkien?
    Tolkien? Ah, I get it! One brown girl to rule them all! Well, no. The song comes from the game. (“There is a brown girl in the ring, tra-la-la-la-la/and she look like a little sugar plum”) It’s an Anglo-Caribbean ring game, mostly played by girls. I used to play it as a little girl. All the girls hold hands to form a ring, and one girl is in the middle. When the other girls sing, “Show me your motion, tra-la-la-la-la,” the girl in the centre does some kind of dance or athletic move that she figures will be difficult to copy. The rest try to copy it. She picks the one whose version