But Greg’s highly self-conscious ambivalence gives the story its uneasy tone. I am the last person to be judgmental about whether other people choose to have kids or not and Hopkinson clearly isn’t judgmental about this either.
So Greg and Cecilia are stuck with what he, at least, calls their “creepy little alien child.” All this is just background to the main action of the story, but it sets the atmosphere. We sort of dared each other to go through with it, and now here we are. Curious to see what this particular life adventure would be how our small brown child might change a world that desperately needs some change. Greg and his girlfriend Cecilia - who he describes as “lush and brown” - don’t want kids of their own but when she gets pregnant despite their precautions, It’s a fraught relationship, because Greg is ambivalent, at best, about children: he admits that they “creep me out,” and says overall that “I truly don’t hate children. The story is mostly about Greg’s encounters with Kamala, the adopted daughter of his friends Babette and Sunil. Greg also remarks on the brown skin of his lovers and friends.
Greg, the narrator, describes himself as “Indian” - though I am unsure if this means that he is South Asian (like other characters in the story) or First Peoples (he does say that he is “Rosebud Sioux on my mum’s side”). The story is set in Canada, in a near future that is not much different from our actual present. Nalo Hopkinson’s short story “Message in a Bottle” was originally published in 2004 it can currently be found in her recent collection of short stories Falling in Love With Hominids, as well as in her short volume Report From Planet Midnight.
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