Nalo Hopkinson’s Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions and Falling in Love in Hominids

“Hopkinson throws a bowling ball down the middle of the genre. She strikes and strikes and strikes again.”

This review is co-written with my husband, Rich Bynum. I find him a very reliable reader. He doesn’t speak Criticism; he barely knows it exists, because I try to spare him that.  I trust his take on fiction. He often says what I want to say even while I am floundering in the swampy lexicon of critical thinking.

“What kills me about 70s[-style] science fiction is that it’s insecure. Some people want to make it more academic than it needs to be. Normal people are buying and reading it. They know what it’s like. It doesn’t need a stamp of approval on it. Most readers aren’t reading those columns or looking for that stamp. [Hopkinson’s] stories can easily attract those stamps, but they don’t need them. They’re easy to read, gripping, sometimes grim, but never boring.” – Rich Bynum

I second that emotion. Hopkinson is always accessible. Her gentle voice relaxes me: I can be a reader. She’s going to put me through a moral wringer, but I’ll never feel a need for armor. Her characters are doing weird-ass things and they speak their own blend of Creole and English and Hopkinsonian sfnal stuff that nevertheless makes sense, and I like them. I want to spend time with them. I don’t have to hold my nose and clutch my advanced degrees about my waist like a lifebelt so I can force myself to appreciate elegant and mannered fiction about arseholes. This author does not substitute ideas for story or character or emotion. I can just read.

It takes an immensely secure craftswoman to stand on a record of countless awards and honors, rolling right back to Locus, Campbell, Tiptree, Dick, and other nods for her first novel, and write sfnal stories full of crazy, complicated ideas that are nevertheless easy to follow, about people who may or may not be human but they’re likeable and even good, with a story that’s unexpected and yet, by the end, you know it had to go like this.

“I like it that Hopkinson is always writing about race and class, in foreground and background, and she doesn’t skip the role of big money in the lives of her characters or in their universe.” – Rich Bynum

Hopkinson focuses on outsiders. Sfnal transformation, magic, and the alienated go together in our genres; the first to acquire the powers of magic are those whose sense of reality is fluid, whose loyalty to the consensus reality is not strong. John Waters once said, “My audience was … all the people who didn’t fit in … even in their own minorities they had trouble, and there was my audience.” Hopkinson makes all kinds of room for such in her fiction. This is the place where magic comes in by invitation, because such people are not invited in anywhere else.

“These stories are about regular people but not conventional people. Regular people are often not conventional people. They’re not necessarily poor, certainly not stupid, but they don’t talk or think like the guys from the song, reading their Emily Dickinson and their Robert Frost. The lesbian heroine in one story, for example, is still friends with the ex-girlfriend who used to hit her. This breaks a lot of stereotypes. You want to take these characters as they come.” – Rich Bynum

Hopkinson’s mad scientists and magicians “aren’t two wizards on top of giant towers with no bathroom and no food service, throwing lightning bolts at each other” as my husband says, but down here in the ditch, collateral damage to what’s happening, unnoticed by the principals for whom history will be written. The rich love history because it includes them. Hopkinson’s stories are not about them. All her stories are about the ditch. She affirms that this is okay. The view from boots-on-the-ground is not for history. It has meat and blood and bone.

“You’ve got a guy not compensating the heroine for creating robots for him, dad’s taking poisonous patent medicine, mom is doing Pullman runs for dad, boss is stealing heroine’s wages while he drives her to make better robots for him. Pullman porters really couldn’t leave their jobs.” – Rich Bynum

(Rich has wads more stuff to say about the Pullman porters. Hopkinson’s research on them is extensive, and my railroad-geek husband deeply appreciates that.)

Hopkinson foregrounds the humanity, the emotions, the struggle to survive damage done by the enemy. The enemy is off the page. She does not focus the camera on the giant flaming monster stomping little shitty houses nor on big men in uniform ordering out the mighty guns. She focuses on the houses, and the people burned out of them, and what they choose do next.

The fact that many of these stories are written in some form of Creole just makes me wriggle with pleasure.

This review is by Jennifer Stevenson, with contributions from guest reviewer Rich Bynum

Falling in Love with Hominids
(Tachyon Publications, 2015)

Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions
(Tachyon Publications, 2024)

Jennifer Stevenson

Jennifer Stevenson's Trash Sex Magic was shortlisted for the Locus First Fantasy Novel Award and longlisted for the Nebula two years running. Try her romantic fantasy series Hinky Chicago, which is up to five novels, her paranormal romances Slacker Demons, which are about retired deities who find work as incubi, or her paranormal women's fiction series Coed Demon Sluts, about women solving life's ordinary problems by becoming succubi. She has published more than 20 short stories.

Find Jennifer at the Book View Cafe blog, at the second row at fast roller derby bouts in Chicago, or on Facebook.

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