Midnight Robber

Hopkinson, Nalo. Midnight Robber. New York: Warner Books, 2000.

The primary Narrator appears to be an AI: the Grande Anansi Nanotech Interface, which/who finally tells a soon-to-be-born fetus that "She instruct[ed] the nanomites in your mamee blood to migrate into your growing tissue, to alter you as you grow so all of you could feel nannysong […]," making his "whole body […] one living connection with the Grande Anansi Nanotech Interface" (328).

For narration by computers, cf. and contrast F. Pohl's Man Plus; for nanotechnology in one's blood, see G. Bear's Blood Music.

Note also comparison and contrast between the initial (Toussaint [P]lanet) and main setting of MR (New Half-Way Tree):

"You never wonder is where we send the thieves — them, and the murderers? Well master, the Nation Worlds does ship them all to New Half-Way Tree, the mirror planet of Toussaint. […] [W]here Toussaint civilized, New Half-Way Tree does be rough. You know how one thing and the shadow of that thing could be in almost the same place together? You know the way a shadow is a dark version of the real thing, the dub side? Well, New Half-Way Tree is a dub version of Toussaint [….], how Toussaint planet did look before the Marryshow Corporation sink them Earth Engine Number 127 down into it like God entering the woman; plunging into the womb of soil to impregnate the planet with the seed of Granny Nanny" [...]

— with "Granny Nanny" referring directly to the nano-tech AI and indirectly to Anansi, the Spider-Trickster of West Africa and the Caribbean (328). Issues of privacy are raised on Toussaint, balancing protection by the AI and service by smart houses on the one hand against intrusive surveillance and the beginning of resistance by the "runner" community on the other.

See Midnight Robber also for Toussaint as a high-tech world with a Caribbean inflection (e.g., Toussaint, from Toussaint L'Ouverture, hero of the Haitian Revolution [1794-1804]), decorous in a novel inflected through the experience of Africans and their descendants in the New World. Note hardening of "nanomites" into an "earbug" for the AI's communicating with people, bringing together nano-tech with the insectoid: ear mites (Otodectes cynotis, class: Arachnida — spiders and such).

Midnight Robber and its technology are discussed by Mailyn Abreu Toribio, “'Not One, But Two': Recognizing the Potentiality of Caribbean Multiplicity through Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber. Symposium: Proceedings of the SFRA 2019 Conference, Day 2, June 22, 2019. Caribbean SF and Nalo Hopkinson. Conveniently printed SFRA Review #330 (Fall 2019): pp. 82-89.[1]

Mentioned and contextualized usefully in "Women's Cyberfiction: An Introduction," pp. 30-31.

RDE, 10-11July05; 18Oct21