Report from Planet Midnight by Nalo Hopkinson

seem to believe that Caribbean people are little more than simple-minded, marijuana-steeped clowns who say “de” instead of “the.” In any case, my work isn’t going to make it to the big screen any time soon, given the types of characters that are in it. It’d be a lot of money for producers to invest in a project when they’re not sure there’s a big enough audience out there for it.
    And because people are always quick to jump down my throat whenever I talk about institutionalised discrimination, let me acknowledge that there have been a few SF/ fantasy films and television programs with Caribbean characters that weren’t stereotyped. Actor Sullivan Walker as Yale in the short-lived series
Earth 2,
for example. Geoffrey Holder’s voice as the narrator for the 2005
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
There are probably one or two more, but not many at all.
    Some people hear me talking like this and get pissed off at me. They don’t tolerate critique of the things they love. They miss the fact that I may love those things, too. I just don’t think love should be blind.
    Anyway, we were talking film. When directors option my stories, I’m more confident if they areindependent artists with some personal connection to some of my communities (science fiction, black, Caribbean, Canadian, queer, women, etc.). There are two other novels of mine in development:
Brown Girl in the Ring,
by Toronto’s Sharon Lewis, and
The New Moon’s Arms,
by Frances Anne Solomon of Toronto’s Leda Serene productions. Both women, like Asli Dukan, have roots in the Caribbean.
    You once identified the central question of utopia as “who’s going to do the dirty work?” (Ursula Le Guin would agree.) So how would you describe
Midnight Robber
’s planet Toussaint, where work is a sacrament (to some)?
    A sacrament? Did I do that? Not trying to dodge the question. Just that my memory is poor, and it’s been a long, busy, often stressful few years since the time it was published. I’m trying to remember back to when I finished the novel, perhaps sometime in 1999. I suspect I hadn’t yet come up with the notion that the big dilemma of science fiction is who’s going to do the dirty work. I may have just begun asking myself that very question … ah.
    I do remember this: the people of Toussaint have a maxim that backbreaking labour isn’t fit for them as sentient beings. They’ve come from a legacy of slavery, of having been forced to do hard labour, and they’re not about to forget it. But manual labour still needs to be done. So they mechanise it as much as possible. The machines that do that labour are unaware extensions of the self-aware planetary artificial intelligence that sustains their various support systems. So how you gonna keep your machine overseer down on the farm, once she’s crossed the Turingthreshold? They
programme
her not to mind doing all that work. They make her like her servitude. When you think of it, our brains are also wired to respond in certain ways to certain situations. But do we get to make that decision for other creatures? You could argue that we do so all the time, through domestication and by breeding other living things for specific traits. You could argue that that doesn’t count, since other animals aren’t self-aware. But anyone who’s ever lived in close quarters with another animal for an extended period of time can present convincing evidence that many animals are indeed self-aware. You could argue that it’s okay to mess with creatures who are less intelligent than we are. But as someone with a couple of cognitive variances and as someone black and female, I have reason to be suspicious of intelligence tests. I’m not sure that we understand enough about cognition to be able to measure cognition effectively. For one thing, we’re measuring it against human markers of intelligence. I wonder whether those are the only markers.
    So, in
Midnight Robber,
there is a powerful