Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

Or Gibson’s The Difference Engine, which explores a reality in which the computer is invented and mass produced during the Victorian era.

Dick, who’s The Man in the High Castle, imagines a world in which the Allies lose World War II. Take, for instance, novels by noted science fiction authors Philip K. In this sense, speculative fiction is the building of worlds that not only predict futures (as for instance, in William Gibson’s Neuromancer,which foresaw the World Wide Web) , but also imagine realities that split off from and parallel our own given a change in circumstance, timing, or decision making. To Atwood’s definition, I would add that speculative fiction not only considers what will happen, or what is on the brink of happening, but what might happen, or what might have happened. Margaret Atwood has reiterated this position in defence of her speculative novels, The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, insisting that “Science fiction has monsters and spaceships speculative fiction could really happen.” According to Atwood,įor me, speculative fiction means plots that descend from Jules Verne’s books about submarines and balloon travel and such–things that really could happen, but just hadn’t happened when the author wrote the books. In the novel–as opposed to IRL (in real life)–the First Nation is awarded massive restitution for the state’s illegal use of sovereign territory, which results in the collapse of Toronto’s economy and the “doughnut hole” referenced in the above epigram: a space within the state that is no longer protected or governed by the Laws of that state, what Giorgio Agamben calls “the state of exception.” Employing speculative fiction as a means to critique contemporary colonial politics, Hopkinson offers an evocative space to consider and challenge deeply entrenched settler colonial ideology, extending and emphasizing the fact of that ideology as it exists in Canada today.Īccording to Robert Heinlein, who coined the term in 1947, speculative fiction broadens the study of science fiction, which emphasizes time and/or space travel and life on other planets, in the ways in which it redirects attention from what the genre is to what it does that is how it extrapolates from known facts, building imagined worlds and outcomes from contemporary or present events and truths. The founding co nceit of the story is a fictionalized extension of the on-going court battle between the Canadian state and the Teme-Augama of Northern Ontario. Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring is an award-winning, speculative fiction novel with a plot structured around the Teme-Augama First Nations land claims battle. ‘That’s what they call it when an inner city collapses and people run into the suburbs” ( Brown Girl in the Ring 11). “‘How do you mean, ‘doughnut hole’?’ Ti-Jeanne had asked.

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson