Recommendations from our site
“Tantie Merle is having trouble managing her chores…To help out, her daughter sends her the highly sophisticated Farmhand 4200, which enthusiastically turns its learning powers to accomplishing any task Tantie Merle requires. This includes tying up the goat. Unimpressed, the goat eats it. So the little Farmhand reconstitutes itself and sets its steely will to devising a method of successful goat-wrangling…The story is light and full of laughter, and you feel almost tricked when you realise you have just read a story about labour rights, personhood and dignity.” Read more...
“Tantie Merle started with a conversation… I got a question once from someone about what Caribbean sci fi was like. I was really shocked by the question, because I said to myself, I wonder if anybody has ever approached an American sci fi writer and said, “What is American sci fi?” You would never! Science fiction does not have a nationality; it’s something that we are all engaged in. There are viewpoints you can come with because of your nationality, your society, your cultural outlook, but as an endeavour, science fiction has no nationality. In the course of a conversation about that question, we were laughing about how Trinidad is very much a place in which you see both sides – I will see the coconut vendor that has been selling coconut water since the dawn of time, and he’s on his cellphone taking orders, while he’s chopping coconuts up with the same cutlass he’s always chopped up his coconuts with. And instead of a cart, now it’s motorized. So I’m living in a world where technology is just something we accept and assimilate, but it doesn’t remove the old things all the time. And then somebody said, “Just imagine trying to raise goats in the future. Maybe that’s Caribbean sci fi.” And the story fell into my head, I swear to God, almost entirely. I said to them, “I have to stop this conversation. I’m going to go write this down.” “ Read more...
R.S.A. Garcia, Short Story Writer
