If fame of former rapes belief may find, You both by love, and love alone, were join'd

But they’re still analytical as fuck, with a measure of art in there.

Back then, I saw a gap between what I defined as tech and what I defined as art. Tech and creative writing existed on a binary — a binary I had grown up learning in school, and which I used to explain that I was a “words” person, a person who kept her head in a journal but couldn’t do any computer programming. I pushed away the insecurity I felt at probably being “unable” to do anything technical by reminding myself that it was okay: I was meant to be doing something else.

use of Caribbean-inflected language been received

I guess that fusion of the genres is characteristic of my writing if onlybecause I’m not very good at remembering to tell the genres apart. Buttoo, when my work is coming from a Caribbean context, fusion fits verywell; that’s how we survived. We can’t worship Shango on pain of death?Well, whaddya know; he just became conflated with a Catholic saint. Gotat least four languages operating on this one tiny island? Well, we’ll justcombine the four and call it Papiamento. Can’t grow apples in the tropicsfor that apple pie? There’s this vegetable called chocho, and it’s approxi-mately the right color and texture and pretty tasteless; add enough cinna-mon, brown sugar, and nutmeg, and no one will know the difference. It’sa sensibility that I’m quite familiar with and enamored of (and it’s greatfor writing postapocalyptic cities

I finally decided that it was the three “folk” tales thatform the triple spine of the book. I wouldn’t have said the beings in thetree;

Forme, spec-fic is a contemporary literature that is performing that act of theimagination — as opposed to the old traditional folk, fairy, and epic alle-gorical tales, which I think of as historical literature of the imagination.

f I’ve said that, it would depend on who asked me thequestion and why. To those who insist that my writing isn’t science fiction,I say, yes, it is. To those who insist that it isn’t literature, I say, yes, it is.When I’m simply asked what I write, I use whatever definition I think theaudience will either understand or be curious about. As to my definitionof spec-fic, I describe it as a set of literatures that examine the effects onhumans and human societies of the fact that we are toolmakers. We arealways trying to control or improve our environments. Those tools may betangible (such as machines) or intangible (such as laws, mores, belief sys-tems). Spec-fic tells us stories about our lives with our creations

As a young reader,mimetic fiction (fiction that mimics reality) left me feeling unsatisfied.The general message that I got from it was “life sucks, sometimes it’s nottoo bad, but mostly people are mean to each other, then they die.” But,rightly or wrongly, I felt as though I’d already figured that out.I felt that Ididn’t need to read fiction in order to experience it.

The only people we see ordering the stormtroopers (who are all named with dehumanising numbers) throughout the Force Awakens are white officers. If all the stormtroopers were as black as Boyega, this would would mean the First Order has an apartheid structure that is quite familiar and not unlike that of slave plantations, the former South African government or American sports leagues.

though we are conditioned to believe that whiteness is the norm even in outer space – that his race wasn’t an aberration but the standard. The clues were certainly there: that on a galactic scale the First Order had conscripted black folks to do its heavy lifting (just as so many other oppressive regimes have done right here on earth on a planetary scale).

After all, the only stormtrooper we actually see unmasked is played by John Boyega, and so it’s possible – though we are conditioned to believe that whiteness is the norm even in outer space – that his race wasn’t an aberration but the standard. The clues were certainly there: that on a galactic scale the First Order had conscripted black folks to do its heavy lifting (just as so many other oppressive regimes have done right here on earth on a planetary scale).

After I saw Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens the first time, I was left wondering: what if under every white stormtrooper’s armour was a black human?