Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here are your hosts. John Joseph Adams and David Barr-Kirtley.

Hi, this is Dave. And this is Dave and this is John and welcome to episode 81 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Nalo Hopkinson, author of novels such as Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, and The New Moon's Arms.

She was born in Jamaica and has lived in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada.

Her short story collection, Skin Folk, was named one of the New York Times best books of the year.

Her latest novel's Sister Mine is about a pair of twin sisters living in present day Toronto,

who belong to a family of god-like beings called the Celestial's.

Then stick around after the interview as guest geek Matt Linden joins us for part two of our discussion on the weirdest stories ever.

All right, so let's get to our interview.

All right, so we're here with Nalo-Hawkinson.

Welcome to the show.

Hi.

Okay, so your new novel is called Sister Mine, and it's about a pair of sisters Abby and McKita.

So could you just tell us a little bit about those characters and how you came up with them?

I've been trying to remember that and I'm really not sure, but part of it is because I've always been intrigued by

Goblin Market by Christina Rosetti.

It's from the 19th century and it's about two sisters one of whom saves the other from

goblins and so I wanted to write about two sisters who were very very close as

these two were and so I came up with Abby and Maccada who were born conjoined.

They got separated at birth and when they got separated, you know when you separate

conjoint twins often they've been sharing some part of their body so one gets it and the other one doesn't.

So when Abby and McKata gets separated, Abby gets the magic and McKata doesn't.

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