Report from Planet Midnight by Nalo Hopkinson Page A

human-manufactured sentience that we have programmed to love us and to want to take care of us. Was it wrong of us to do that to her? Ethically, it’s a conundrum. That was deliberate on my part. The planet of Toussaint isn’t exactly Utopia. I didn’t solve the problem of who does the menial work. I just put it into the hands of a being that’s been designed to accept those tasks. I may have had some of the human citizens voluntarily take on forms of manual labour as part of a practice of ethical mindfulness.
    These are the people I meant, who see labour as a sacrament.
    It’s their way of acknowledging that work that looks after oneself and others isn’t really beneath them. You know, something like the old proverb attributed to Buddhism: “Before Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
    I still haven’t answered the question of who does the work in a Utopia. I have an alternative history fantasy novel in progress in which I’m exploring the idea that everyone in a municipality is assigned menial tasks in a rotating schedule. But in practice, my characters have all kinds of ways of slipping out of their turn taking out the town’s nightsoil or working on the building site of that new community centre. In the novel, it’s a cooperative system, but not politically Socialist; I’m trying to build something a bit different than our current political paradigms. I’m not quite happy with it yet as a world-building element.
    My partner tells me I need to wrestle with systems of exchange in return for labour, money being the primary one that we use in this world. I need to look at effective alternatives to money. I’m daunted by that, but he’s right.
    You have a lot of uncollected short stories. Any plans for them?
    Uncollected,
yes, but all but one of them have been published. I’ve actually collected them up into a manuscript, which I plan to submit to a publisher soon. Honestly, it’s the formatting that’s slowing me down, and the thought of writing intros to each story. Maybe I don’t have to do that last bit.
    You often speak of putting the “threads” of a story into a “weave.“ Not uncommon, yet from you it seems something more than metaphor. How did you get into fabric design?
    On a lark, thanks to a company called Spoonflower which came along to take advantage of new technologies of printing with ink on fabric. Spoonflower’s website democratises the process and makes it easy for someone with basic image editing skills to dabble in fabric design. They’ve built an online community of people interested in cool fabric. We range from hobbyists to professionals. We talk to one another, vote on one another’s designs, and buy fabric to sew. It’s like print-on-demand for fabric.
    I sew as a hobby; have done since I was a teenager. When I hit the fashion-conscious teen years and my desire for new clothes outstripped my parents’ income, they bought me a sewing machine. My mother taught me how to use it. It was an extraordinarily frustrating learning curve for someone with undiagnosed ADHD. Once, I glued the seams of a blouse because I was too impatient to stitch them. My mother was horrified. But I did learn how to sew, and how to get to a place of patience around it (plus some time-saving tricks that kept me from going supernova). Since then, I’ve always had a sewing machine. I have an ever-growing collection of clothing patterns, some dating back to the 1930s. I’m a big girl, almost always have been. There was a time when attractive clothing at reasonable prices just wasn’t available for larger women. Being able to sew meant that I could make my own. It’s easier now to find nonhideous off-the-rack clothing in my size, but when you make it yourself, the fit can be better, the clothing more unique.
    Now that I can design my own fabric and have the designs printed, I can create and use iconography I don’t find on store-bought fabric. Ever since