Midnight Robber

It's a funny genre, science fiction. I don't think any other can vary quite as wildly in terms of thematic or conceptual content, and yet remain so obviously what it is. I don't remember exactly where I first heard about Midnight Robber, or why I decided to read it now - but it's certainly a book that pushes the boundaries of the field even further.

The novel was published by Jamaican-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson in 2000 and takes a deep dive into a sub-genre I had never encountered before. While afro-futurism was brought to the mainstream by the Black Panther film a couple of years ago, building on a foundation laid mainly by '70s funk and jazz artists like Sun Ra, Midnight Robber is more accurately described as caribo-futurism. Set an indeterminate amount of time in the future - clearly a long time from now - the book details a planet named Toussaint settled by West Indian emigrants from Earth thousands of years before, who have developed a society based on their past values. Everything is controlled by a kind of cloud-based supercomputer named Granny Nanny, communicating with humans in musical form, and the settlements are a futuristic reimagining of today's Caribbean cities. This even extends as far as the language, the entirety being narrated in an adapted Jamaican patois, as it might have evolved over hundreds of generations. This made reading a challenge to begin with as, à la A Clockwork Orange, the reader is left unaided in figuring out a whole vocabulary of new terms, but Hopkinson doesn't make it impossible.

It's highly inventive stuff, but the novel is rather let down by its plot. It follows the coming of age of Tan-Tan, a girl living in this new world who is suddenly transported from Toussaint to the prison planet of New Half-Way Tree when her father Antonio - a mayor on Toussaint but undermined by an unfaithful wife - kills his wife's lover unsportingly in a duel and is banished from his world. New Half-Way Tree is a savage planet, a place of frontier justice and deadly alien beings. It seems as though the book will be an interesting character study as Tan-Tan reaches adolescence and tries to find her place there, and Antonio morphs from a father trying to do the right thing, to a depressive alcoholic, to an outright monster. But this never gets off the ground as Tan-Tan kills Antonio and flees to the jungle to live with the Douen, the planet's original, rodent-like inhabitants who are much more developed than the invasive humans give them credit for. But even this doesn't last long as Tan-Tan is eventually banished and becomes a pariah to all. There's fast-paced, and then there's disjointed. Hopkinson tries to wrap things up for her heroine as Tan-Tan seeks to save two lives for the one she took, and the ending does conclude things nicely, but the journey there just seemed far too erratic for my liking.

All in all though, the balance is just on the side of favourable, if only because this was such an immersive reading experience. I learned more than I ever thought possible about Caribbean folklore and traditions, enjoyed the unusual narrative style and had to admit that the twist ending worked quite well.

3/5

Futuristic Jamaican music? It's been done.