Midnight Robber
Jan. 21st, 2013 15:22![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyHopkinson, Nalo. Midnight Robber. New York: Warner Books, 2000.
Dedicated to the memory of Pete Hudson.
Nalo Hopkinson was the Guest of Honor at two cons I attended last year; I read this book after Sirens. I liked it better than the other book of hers that I've read, The Chaos, though this novel, Hopkinson's second, is way heavier and much darker.
Midnight Robber tells the story of Tan Tan, whose father Antonio abducts her to an alternate prison-world (dimension?) after he commits a crime that Granny Nanny, the AI web into which almost everyone is linked and which helps govern society, cannot abide. Tan Tan grows up quickly on the criminal world, and at the age of sixteen she commits a crime her settlement can't forgive and runs off into the bush, where she lives in trees with the planet's native dominant species and begins to remake herself to match the legend of the Robber Queen.
The book was--well, not always easy reading, and because I had been semi-spoiled for what happens at Sirens, I sort of had to force myself through the sexual abuse stretch of the book, as well as what came before it, since you know that it's going to happen. Antonio begins raping Tan Tan on her ninth birthday, and when she runs into the bush after killing him in self-defense, she's pregnant with his child. But Tan Tan's journey from self-loathing to self-confidence is unforgettable, as is the setting, and Hopkinson's language, which is wondrous. Both planets are Afro-Caribbean, and the telling of the SF story in another English--Caribbean Creole--using that to describe and map futuristic concepts, is really cool, as are the interpolated folk tales about Tan Tan as the Robber Queen. In a way, the book is a rebuke and a reminder to mainstream SFF that (and here I'm quoting a Margaret Weis/Tracy Hickman novel) there are other worlds out there, and other suns.
Dedicated to the memory of Pete Hudson.
Nalo Hopkinson was the Guest of Honor at two cons I attended last year; I read this book after Sirens. I liked it better than the other book of hers that I've read, The Chaos, though this novel, Hopkinson's second, is way heavier and much darker.
Midnight Robber tells the story of Tan Tan, whose father Antonio abducts her to an alternate prison-world (dimension?) after he commits a crime that Granny Nanny, the AI web into which almost everyone is linked and which helps govern society, cannot abide. Tan Tan grows up quickly on the criminal world, and at the age of sixteen she commits a crime her settlement can't forgive and runs off into the bush, where she lives in trees with the planet's native dominant species and begins to remake herself to match the legend of the Robber Queen.
The book was--well, not always easy reading, and because I had been semi-spoiled for what happens at Sirens, I sort of had to force myself through the sexual abuse stretch of the book, as well as what came before it, since you know that it's going to happen. Antonio begins raping Tan Tan on her ninth birthday, and when she runs into the bush after killing him in self-defense, she's pregnant with his child. But Tan Tan's journey from self-loathing to self-confidence is unforgettable, as is the setting, and Hopkinson's language, which is wondrous. Both planets are Afro-Caribbean, and the telling of the SF story in another English--Caribbean Creole--using that to describe and map futuristic concepts, is really cool, as are the interpolated folk tales about Tan Tan as the Robber Queen. In a way, the book is a rebuke and a reminder to mainstream SFF that (and here I'm quoting a Margaret Weis/Tracy Hickman novel) there are other worlds out there, and other suns.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-22 00:14 (UTC)(Nit: Robber is her second; Brown Girl in the Ring precedes it.)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-22 00:18 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-22 05:28 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-22 05:55 (UTC)