For a super-genre known for its imagination of radically different worlds and futurescapes, speculative fiction has always been considerably conservative. Spec-fic—an umbrella term encompassing science-fiction, fantasy, horror, alternate history, and some in-between works—has often contrasted fantastic worlds of elves, hobbits, clones, robots, or aliens with a singular binding truth: the genre has mostly exited through the eyes of white men.

In a new interview with Paradoxa, Pulitzer-winning author Junot Diaz speaks at length with Taryne Jade Taylor about the allure of genre fiction, colonialism disguised as sci-fi, and immigrating to the U.S. at an early age (he refers to it as “a profound fracture of my reality, a temporal and spatial anomaly”). During the interview, Diaz also said that his attempt to write his new novel—which was excerpted in a 2012 issue of The New Yorker—has “ground to a halt,” admitting, “I’m probably going to have to abandon it.”