obody is quite who they pretend to be in Nalo Hopkinson's Skin Folk, a collection of SF and fantasy tales from the author of Brown Girl in the Ring. In these stories, women with everyday office jobs go home and learn to breathe underwater, young girls with sometimes-visible spider legs assault burned-out graphics editors, and windblown trees try to escape the soil and fly off into the night.
The collection draws on a broad range of sources. Some of the stories are revisions of old tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, told in "Riding the Red" from Granny's viewpoint. Others mine the rich traditions of Caribbean folklore, with its duppies and child-devouring soucouyants. SF meets fairy story in "Under Glass," a post-apocalyptic take on Hans Christian Andersen, while "A Habit of Waste" shows a futuristic Toronto where the well-heeled can pay to have their minds downloaded into new bodies every few years.
For readers who have not yet tried out Hopkinson's longer work, Skin Folk also offers a self-contained excerpt from Midnight Robber. "Tan Tan and Dry Bone" is a tale which appears in the midst of the novel, recasting its theme and plot in a condensed allegory. The story stands beautifully on its own, evoking the longer work without giving anything away or seeming in any way fragmentary.
Compelling tales of community
Hopkinson is rightly lauded for having one of the more original new voices in SF, and the brilliance in her fiction shines equally from her evocative voice and the deep empathy she displays for her characters. There are indisputably wicked beings in these stories, but the weight of reader focus is pulled to more ambiguous personae—a woman who discarded her black, plus-sized body in favor of one that was white and thin; a couple in love and struggling with deep relationship trouble; a young woman whose town blames her, not without reason, for her lover's suicide.
Another way in which this author's work deviates from the greater SF norm is that it does not trumpet individualism as an ultimate virtue. Community and cooperation count for more, in many of these stories, than a character's individual merits. Making a connection with others is frequently what saves Skin Folk's protagonists from peril or garden-variety despair. Thus it is the inability to communicate that endangers the lovers of "Ganger (Ball Lightning)," one of the sweetest
love stories in print today. It is isolation and a tendency to repress anger that brings trouble to the heroine of "Slow Cold Chick." The masks people wear hold them apart from others, say these stories, and coming clean is the source of true strength.
Adding to the fun is the fact that Hopkinson's prose is a distinct pleasure to read: richly sensual, with high-voltage erotic content and gorgeous details. Laden with emotion, these stories pull readers through a world that is both spine-tingling and delightful.
