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I’m Nalo Hopkinson, I’m a science fiction and fantasy writer. There are a couple of
classics I read when I was a kid, Dante’s Inferno was definitely one of them. And I
particularly remember the description when you get down to the final circle of hell and
you finally see the devil because I’ve been waiting for that. This is Frankenstein by
Mary Shelley, 1818, thought by some to be the first science fiction novel. It has never
been out of print. And the first science fiction novel was written by a woman. This is Fahrenheit
451, the edition that has the asbestos cover since it’s about book burning. It was a
pleasure to burn, it was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened
and changed. My first science fiction I read in the covers of Playboy Magazine, Kurt Vonnegut’s
Welcome to the Monkey House. I don’t need to remind you girls, the sheriff went on,
that a nothing-head is very sensitive from the waist down. If Benny the poet somehow
slips in here and starts making trouble, one good kick in the right place will do wonders.
As an eight-year old girl, I had no idea what he was on about so it was fascinating to me.
The Clarion Anthology. Clarion is a science fiction fantasy writing workshop and I had
never heard of this and it was the first time I realized you could learn to write this stuff.
It wasn’t just somebody out there and somehow books appeared. Borderland. This was one of
the first shared world anthologies. You build on each other’s characters. The rule is
supposed to be that you don’t kill each other’s characters off and yeah, writers
are competitive. All right, Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link. I couldn’t figure out
what she’d done. I just knew that I loved it and it was so far above anything I was
capable of doing at that point. I couldn’t even be jealous. It’d be like being jealous
of a mountain. Got Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17. Oh my god, you read a Delany sentence and
then you have to go and sit down and have a meal and take a breath or two and the ideas
come so hard and fast. The man hacked my brain. Ursula K. LeGuin, her work is just so astoundingly
rigorous and fierce and joyful at the same time. I can read the simple thing, a line
like he sat down and told the child a story of the stars and I lost it. It was just, I
lost it and I’m really not sure why. I should have been more emotional at the point where
he tells the family that their family member has died but it was that something about that
last line. It gets me every time.
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