In My Own Words

July 6th 2007 at 5:13 pm

Geoffrey Philp’s story Uncle Obediah and the Alien was one of my favorite stories in ‘Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root,’ the anthology of Caribbean Fabulist Fiction that I shared the table of contents with him in (as well as many other childhood literary heroes I would never have expected my name next to, like Jamaica Kincaid, OMG).

So it was cool that he recently asked me to write up some thoughts about writing straight genre science fiction with Caribbean inspiration for his blog series ‘In My Own Words’:

When I started writing my own science fiction in high school I often used common settings in SF, it seemed like that was what was expected. Even though I doodled spaceships with Caribbean town names, and thought up multi-racial characters with muddled identities like my own, it never occurred to me that anything science fictional with strong Caribbean flavor would be accepted. And since not many people around me shared my love of SF, I had no idea where I fit in any or all of this. I did see a few books (like Islands in The Net, by Bruce Sterling) that gave me flashes of hope. But I thought to myself that a whole science fiction book that remained in the Caribbean or was inspired by it is something that I really wanted to read in my lifetime.

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