Best 2000 Adventures (7)

By: Joshua Glenn
November 25, 2020

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 2000 adventure novels.

Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000).

Hopkinson’s second novel is a brilliant, traumatic bildungsroman set on Toussaint, a world populated by the descendants of Caribbean colonists. It’s a comfortable post-scarcity planet, overseen by Granny Nanny, an AI which anticipates all needs, and serviced by nanotech robotic labor. Young Tan-Tan, daughter of Antonio, who is mayor of the Cockpit County, likes to pretend that she is the Midnight Robber — a Trinidadian traditional Carnival character; one of the narrative voices in Midnight Robber relates the stories of such romantic figures, in Anglopatwa, a future-Caribbean dialect. (If you enjoy puzzling over the patois of A Clockwork Orange, Riddley Walker, or Feersum Endjinn, this book is for you.) When Antonio takes her with him into exile in New Half-Way Tree, a primitive, alternate-dimension Toussaint, Tan-Tan must quickly learn to survive. With the help of the douen, New Half-Way Tree’s indigenous inhabitants, and friends she meets on the run, she develops into the titular bad-ass. Which makes this sound like a Heinlein juvenile… but it’s more beautifully written than that, and much darker. Tan-Tan’s real life is anything but romantic; however, as she becomes a vigilante justice-dealer, she herself becomes the subject of legends.

Fun facts: Hopkinson, who was born in Jamaica and grew up partly in Trinidad, incorporates characters and stories from Caribbean and Yoruba culture into her books, of which is the second. The planet New Half-Way Tree’s name, for example, refers to a neighborhood of Kingston, Jamaica.

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Best 2000 Adventures (7)

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