Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200

"Short stories are the lifeblood of science fiction ; it’s always interesting to see the nominees and winners in this category. Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200 is a great example of how much can be accomplished in a small space. Tantie Merle is having trouble managing her chores as she ages, with her children far away from her home in Trinidad and Tobago. 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. You can’t help rooting for the little guy, who lets itself be eaten so many times over, while learning to knit with Tantie Merle in its time off. 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. And goats, of course. Part of our best books of 2024 series December 3, 2024. Updated: June 28, 2025 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."

"There’s so many influences, because I am that complex wretch who has to put a million ideas into things, and that’s why I tend to write novellas. First of all, Tantie Merle is an homage to Tanti Merle, the almost folkloric character that was created by Paul Keens-Douglas, who is the preeminent storyteller of the West Indies. This is a gentleman who has a lot of ties to my country Trinidad and Tobago, but was originally born in Grenada, where my family originally came from as well. A lot of Trinbagonians have ties to Grenada, and of course because of that with Hurricane Beryl a lot of us are worried and upset – I do hope that everybody realizes they need a lot of help, and that they’ll contribute in what way they can. Keens-Douglas used to tell these stories, which I grew up on and which many people could probably repeat for you, and which are available on YouTube. They’re about a middle-aged black woman called Tanti Merle, who lived her life the way she wanted to, and told everybody what to do, because she was always right; and she had these adventures. I loved and grew up with women exactly like this. They knew what they were doing. They held their community together. They commanded everybody’s respect, whether they wanted to give it or not. And it was hilarious . Those stories would leave me in tears on the ground, because we saw ourselves reflected in that. I was very lucky growing up in a country where I saw myself reflected everywhere I looked, in the highest office in the land to the lowest office – it was never said to me that I couldn’t be anything, or I couldn’t do this because I was a girl, or because I was a person of colour. I grew up watching TV shows and listening to media and reading books that were focused on people like myself; or listening to the very talented storytellers like Paul Keen-Douglas, who told us who we were, and how fabulous and funny and engaging and smart and adaptable we were. 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.” It’s very rare for me to write an entire story in one sitting, unless it’s a fire in my head. This has happened to me a few times, and this was one of those times: I literally sat down and wrote the entire story within a few hours; then went to bed, woke up the next day, and worked on it. I was hoping to give it to someone who had commissioned the story, but it was too long for them, and so I ended up sending it in elsewhere – and thankfully they bought it at Uncanny Magazine . The thing I wanted to talk about, amongst many other things, was labour: the way we perceive labour, and identity, intelligence and life – and what is worthy of respect. You have a very old woman who is in a community that used to be a community, used to support each other; but through the ravages of climate change, many people have moved away – because they’re afraid of what could be coming down the pipeline next in terms of hurricanes. But she’s lived there her entire life, she doesn’t want to move. Many older people don’t want to: they see no reason, this is what makes them happy, and to ask them to adapt in the twilight of their years is very unfair, I think, when we could easily assist… So this woman’s complaining to her daughter about not being able to take care of her little garden anymore. And when we say garden, we do not mean a plot in front of your house. We can sometimes mean an acre, two acres; and people plant. She has just too much of a garden for herself to handle, as well as this goat; so the daughter, who lives in Germany, sends her a Farmhand 4200. There’s a thing that I think West Indians do: we love our moms and grandmoms, and we feel real connection – we often grow up with generations in a household – and because of that, when we send them a present, we tend to buy the top of the line. So they often don’t know how to use it. I think everybody can relate to that: you get your mother a blender, and the guy who sold it to you said it was fabulous, it’s got all these features; and your mother says, “This doesn’t look like the one I have. I don’t understand this thing.” It never occurs to her to read the little booklet that came with it. So this woman’s daughter sends her this incredibly advanced Farmhand, that’s really meant for huge farms. But it’s an eager little thing that really wants to help, and it knows its mission is to assist Tantie Merle with her troubles – which include her goat, who quite frankly does not wish to be handled. I was also talking about aging in modern societies, the loneliness that comes from it. And what it takes to go forward into a progressive future: respect and understanding. Not everybody will be like you, look like you, or react the way you do, but we’re all here together, and if we’re going to make it through this, we have to make it through it together, and we have to start with that love and community and respect. Of course, the story is hilarious, because the goat is not happy about having this weird thing handle it. When you’ve grown up with goats, you know just how hilarious life is – they are not controllable. I thought it was the perfect foil for a story about accepting people with their differences, even when they’re no fun – even when they seem destructive or pointless. Sometimes you’re just not communicating their way. But you can’t communicate with a goat: a goat does its own thing. It is about that lack of respect that we have now for the persons who carry out such important labour: we don’t see them as individuals, we see them as machines who are there for productivity. So I knew what I was going to do, and I swear to God, I was laughing the entire time. My sister is my beta reader and often my first editor. It’s one of the few stories that she just returned it to me with tears in her eyes and said, “How dare you?” Yes! “You know what you did!” she said!"