Report from Planet Midnight by Nalo Hopkinson Page B

I was a child, I’ve been hesitant to wear images of non-black people on my body. Not because I hate white people, or some rubbish like that, but because I wanted to be able to love black people and my own blackness. Nowadays, you can find fabric with images of black people on it that doesn’t make you want to go postal, but good lord, does it ever tend toward the twee! I prefer images with a bit more bite, a bit more perversity, and a bit less saccharin.
    I can make science fiction and fantasy imagery, too, that isn’t all unicorns with flowing manes on a background of rainbow-coloured stars. I adapt a lot of historical imagery, and my own photographs as well, and sometimes I draw. I know nothing about design, and I haven’t conjured up the patience to learn. I make fabric designs by trial and error. Some of them are hideous. Some of them are just okay, and some of them are successful. I’m always a bit surprised when someone who doesn’t know me buys fabric from my online Spoonflower store: ( http://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/nalo_hopkinson )
    I make stuff. I was a craftsperson and did a lot of my own cooking long before I took up writing. I have my mother to thank for showing me that it was possible to make things for pleasure, for sustenance, and to save money. Come the zombie apocalypse, I know I’ll have some survival skills to offer.
    You have edited several anthologies
(Mojo: Conjure Stories, So Long Been Dreaming,
etc.). Is this part of a plot to wedge more black and female writers into the genre until they
outnumber, overwhelm, and eventually drive out the white men? Or not?
    Good lord, you’ve sussed out my cunning plan for world domination! Excuse me for a second while I go work some obeah to keep you quiet. Please ignore the toad and the padlock lurking behind the curtain. Okay, I’m back. That toad’s never gonna croak again. So. How does trying to foster a more representative literary field translate to wanting to exclude white male writers? How would that be representative? I mean, I’m bad at math, but I’m not that damned bad at it.
    Just now, once I was done burning a candle of a particular colour and padlocking a toad’s lips shut, I glanced at the pile of books beside my desk. Among them are titles by Gene Wolfe, Steven Gould, Rudyard Kipling, China Miéville, Stieg Larsson, Hal Duncan, Charlie Stross, George R.R. Martin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and a certain Terry Bisson.
    Whew. Frankly, you gave me quite a turn with the intimation that white male authors were in danger of extinction. If that were true, we’d have to immediately start the Society for the Protection of White Male Writers. We’d get a Board of Directors together, and we’d do a fund-raising drive on Kickstarter, and make depositions to all the major publishing houses, and hand out T-shirts with our logo on them, and infiltrate government, media, the churches, and the multinationals. We’d become so ubiquitous that pretty soon, people would cease referring to us by our full name—TSFTPOWMW is so unwieldy, don’t you think?—Instead, they’d just refer us as Society. Oh, wait …
    I get it. You would have the status quo.
    You said it, not me. Anyway, beside my bed are also books by Liz Hand, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Madeleine E. Robins, Nisi Shawl, Ivan E. Coyote, Ayize Jama-Everett, Barbara Lalla, Olive Senior, and Rabindranath Maharaj. That list comprises some women, some black folks, white folks, multiracial folks, South Asian, queer, Canadian, Jamaican, and Trinidadian writers. They are for the most part books I had to go a bit out of my way to find, which meant that I had to figure out where to look.
    There are a lot of readers who pride themselves on not paying attention to the identities of their favourite writers. Some of them think this means that they’re not prejudiced. I don’t know anyone who isn’t, myself included. But let’s just say for argument’s sake that those particular readers in