- Registrado
- 15 de Nov, 2016
I honestly wasn't sure where to put this. It mentions GamerGate, Vox Day, some weird shit about modern day publishing being okay with black people being called cannibals, Ferguson, MO, did nothing wrong, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump and beans, etc.
GQ / outline.com
GQ / outline.com
N.K. Jemisin Is Trying to Keep the World From Ending
Photo by Laura Hanifin
BY
JOSHUA RIVERA
2 days ago
The most critically acclaimed author in contemporary science fiction and fantasy made history this year. Now she's trying to make the future.
Nora K. Jemisin wants to talk about cities.
First, Ferguson, Missouri. As Jemisin, along with the rest of the world, watched a city rise up in rage in response to the injustice of then-officer Darren Wilson's murder of Michael Brown, she slowly began to imagine a new way for the world to end. A society that had endured environmental disaster after disaster for generations in a cycle that was irregular but always inevitable, so much so that people were born into the world believing the Earth hated them. A world where you live one way when the seasons changed as usual, and another when the Earth churned in anger, threatening to kill everyone on it. She called these recurring cycles of disaster the Fifth Season, a name good enough for a title.
The Fifth Season is a novel that demands you see it through the moment you begin it, as a man stands over the young son he's murdered with his bare hands in one part of the world, while in another, the end of the world begins. The significance of one event to the other isn't immediately clear, nor does it seem to matter at first. With those two events, The Fifth Seasonintroduces us to Essun, its protagonist and the wife of the man who just killed their son. Now she wants to find and kill him, and she doesn’t care if that means walking straight into the apocalypse.
Thus begins Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, a three-volume epic that maintains a remarkably sharp focus thanks to building itself around on Essun’s revenge, powered by the real-life rage that comes from witnessing a nation’s violent history of injustice catch up with it. It’s also a cycle of novels that would lead to Jemisin making history, becoming the first black woman to win the Hugo Award for best novel—speculative fiction’s highest honor—with The Fifth Season, and then becoming the first writer ever to win that same award three consecutive years in a row with the next two books in her trilogy, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky.
"I ended up gazing into the abyss of a country that genuinely hates us, that genuinely wants to exploit us, wants to prey upon us," Jemisin says to me as we sit at a small cafe table. " It's harming the country, and they don't care."
We're in another city: New York. On the day I travel to meet Jemisin at the New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman building in midtown Manhattan, cell phones in my subway car ring in alarm. We don't know it yet, but fifteen mail bombs had just been sent to some of Donald Trump's most frequent targets—one of which, addressed to former CIA director John Brennan, had been intercepted in the Time Warner Center, just a dozen or so blocks north.
Armed police in kevlar vests and bearing assault rifles are stationed outside of Bryant Park just behind the library. I pass them as I walk east down 42nd Street, and tense up just a notch more before crossing the library's courtyard, passing behind its marble lions. It's cloudy, and the city is nervous.
I wanted to talk to Jemisin because she wrote a trilogy of books that largely took the world as it is now—buckling under the weight of systemic racism, income inequality, and environmental disaster—and portrayed it, through the lens of fiction, as what it truly is if left to momentum and entropy: the end of the world. It’s not a farfetched notion.There are cops outside the library, and they’re carrying assault rifles because a man whose fervent support of the nation’s president has moved him to terrorism.
“If the United States right now in this moment decided that it wanted to invest in educating every child to an equal degree, making sure everybody had actual equal opportunity, then we would become one of the most powerful countries on the planet,” Jemisin says. “We'd be able to reverse climate change. We would be able to do amazing things. Any country that genuinely harnesses its entire population and treats them all like people has nowhere to go but up.”
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She pauses, and reality threatens to creep back in. “Maybe I'm pie-in-the-sky thinking.“
In another city four years ago, N.K. Jemisin wasn’t so optimistic. In Madison, Wisconsin in May 2014 for the 38th annual WisCon, the leading feminist sci-fi convention, Jemisin was a guest of honor. But there were those in the speculative fiction community who still didn’t want her, or anyone like her—a black woman born in Iowa City and raised between Mobile, Alabama and Brooklyn, New York with a day job as a counseling psychologist— to have a seat at the same table as them.
2014 was the year we should have figured out how bad it was going to get. In August of that year, a bitter ex would post an angry screed online accusing his former girlfriend of all manner of impropriety, the misogynist seed at the heart of the online troll campaign known as Gamergate. The year prior, the speculative fiction community had seen its own reactionary movement rise up in the Sad Puppies, as a small number of white male writers who felt slighted as the number of books being nominated for and winning Hugo Awards began to skew, in their estimation, too political and too populated with works by underrepresented authors rewarded solely for their backgrounds.
It would all get worse—or at least, louder. The Puppies would grow, attracting opportunists and bigots like Theodore “Vox Day” Beale, a writer who in 2018 would become an alt-right figurehead for his white supremacist views. They would attempt, more than once, to hijack the Hugo Awards, exploiting the nomination process to get their own list of titles on ballots and crowd out the more “political” works. And the worst part was, they had fans supporting them, whether the fans realized it or not.
"A published story containing a single error of theoretical physics might elicit pages-long rage-filled letters to the editor, but if a story depicted black men as white-woman-raping cannibals incapable of sophisticated thought, the response was resounding silence," Jemisin wrote in 2013."Too many years of the Jetsons, maybe. Too many white supremacist medieval Europes. I’ve spent years swallowing these bizarro-world versions of humanity, and they have become a toxin poisoning my imagination."
Jemisin's vocal criticism, published on her blog and voiced in convention appearances, made her a target for Beale, who would would levy unvarnished racist bile towards Jemisin, calling her “half-savage” in a blog post and earning an expulsion from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America—an organization he had the temerity to run for the president of. An organization that, as Jemisin pointed out in a 2013 speech, gave him ten percent of the vote. Ten percent of her peers who were fine with the idea of a bigot representing them on the leading organization dedicated to informing, supporting, defending, and advocating for speculative fiction writers.
"[Fantasy has] always had an underlying rhetoric of white supremacy, inherent conservatism," Jemisin says. "There's still a lot of crap out there, but I'm starting to see more and more fantasies that are getting back to the old days, before the Tolkien clones and endless guys in a hood. We're starting to see big themes and stories of transformation. I'm looking forward to that. I actually really want to start reading fantasy again because I'm starting to see this."
Jemisin has always pushed for change through her own work, but she's never had any qualms about being a vocal critic of her corner of the literary world, refusing to settle for the mere lip-service of inclusion. Speculative fiction—an umbrella term that describes any fiction that employs the supernatural or scientific to imagine worlds different than ours in ways small or large—is, like science fiction, a means by which we can describe our current culture by imagining new ones. But one of the most striking things Jemisin does as a speculative fiction and fantasy writer is turn her eye towards her own field, with its fetish for the trappings of Medieval Europe and colonialism at the expense of all else, or the racist undertones frequently at the heart of stories that feature orcs (Tolkien and his imitators) or nations like Game of Thrones' Dothraki. She calls this what it is: white supremacy, molding tastes and expectations, making anything else seem foreign and suspect. In her Guest of Honor speech in Madison, she did something similar, calling attention to the racism empirically present in a community, and articulating what it really was for anyone who lacked the empathy to see: violence.
“The ways in which various right-wing movements target and practice on marginalized groups is how they're planning to implement things throughout the zeitgeist. That's the thing that they try,” Jemisin says. “ I don't want to sound like a weird conspiracy theorist or whatever, but at this point they're in the fricking White House. It's not a conspiracy.”
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She has seen all this before, and it seems like only now that people are starting to listen. That in itself is a tangible shift—Jemisin notes that her first book published,The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, wasn’t the first she’d written. That was the pair of novels that would become The Dreamblood Duology, books that wouldn’t see daylight until two years and three books after The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.
“They didn't get published first because they were full of black people, basically.” Jemisin says. “At that point, I stopped giving a fuck. The fucks were just not present. I think that that has been showing in my fiction ever since. It seems to speak to people. My sales suggest that people actually like me being out of fucks. I don't know that that's a good thing—I wonder what that says about the readership that they're out of fucks, too.”
Jemisin’s latest book, How Long ’Til Black Future Month? spans almost the entirety of her career as a published author. It’s a collection of short stories that dazzles in the ease with which it winds across genre and tone. One is a culinary fairy tale in which a talented chef, forgotten by the culinary world, is visited by a stranger who challenges her to make an impossible dish. Another imagines a Utopia that has developed an answer to all of our current ills, and when it shows us the stark measures necessary to maintain this idyllic world, dares us to come up with a better solution. In another, a woman in colonial New Orleans embarks on a bold mission to find a weapon to turn the tide in the Haitian revolution.
It’s a book that prominently features, as much of her work does, cities —but not in the meticulous, infrastructure fetishist manner of most speculative fiction writers. Jemisin is an author who conjures place by building a people. What they value, what they believe, what threatens to tear them apart from within. If people aren’t directly involved with it, odds are Jemisin will leave it to your imagination.
This is the eye with which she is beginning to re-appraise New York for her next novel, a story that’s of a kind with “The City Born Great” in How Long Til Black Future Month? It’s a story about a young homeless vagrant who carries within him the spirit of the city, and his sudden, impossible fight against the forces that conspire to keep him from giving birth to it.
It starts, like our time together, with armed guards in front of the New York Public Library.
“I'm like, what exactly are they trying to convey with this?” she says. “Are they are trying to protect tourists from the city? That was the conclusion that I came to, because it didn't make me feel any safer to see NYPD with a goddamn assault rifle. Why would it?”
As a writer of fantasy, Jemisin looks at cities as organisms, and also as structures made of myth. And those guards are what happens when the two are at odds with each other.
“The mythology of New York outlasts the reality of New York—people still believe that Charles Bronson Death Wish crap is what the city actually is. There's a tension there. An impact that those myths have,” she says. “So we need to be aware of the myths. We need to control the myths… there is a tension between the city's willingness to exploit that myth, And the ways in which the myth gets out of our control. Suddenly we think it's a good idea to put cops with assault rifles in subway stations.”
There’s a feeling, especially on a morning like this one, that the tension cannot hold. It’s a feeling Jemisin has harbored for some time now,
“I think what we will start to see is that it was inevitable that the bulk of the world started to demand stories that represented the bulk of the world,” she says. “The bulk of the world is tired of the imposition of colonialism, of that sole perspective. We've got a kind of cultural apartheid going on where you've got a small minority that's been dominating discourse, dominating everything, dominating even the way that we're able to think or imagine. But apartheid was unstable. It did not last for very long, because you can't do that for very long. I think that's where we are. I think that's why we're seeing such a backlash. It is the desperate attempt of the ruling regime to retain control for as long as it can, rather than conceding gracefully as they probably could have.”
We talk more about New York. We leave the library and make the short walk over to Grand Central Station. The market there has some of her favorite clam chowder in the city—the only thing about Massachusetts she developed a taste for after living there for ten years. She’s been reading a lot of Jane Jacobs lately, the twentieth century writer/activist who argued that the urban renewal of the 1950s was plotted by designers who had contempt for cities and wanted to make them more like the suburbs, resulting in trends that conspire to make cities less affordable, less safe, less diverse.
“It's a power trip more than anything else, and it's the same thing that we're seeing on the cultural level. People who do not get the complexity and diversity of what [cities] could be, who generally don't believe that everyone in this society has the same ability,” she says. “So to them it seems like a waste of time and energy to give everyone good education and all these other things. The scarcity model of thinking about humanity is one of these ideologies that we've gotten from having that singular focus on one group of people, written by one group of people, taught to everyone.”
There’s a bleakness that comes with seeing our cultural failings writ large in the language of urban planning, but unlike The Broken Earth Trilogy, Jemisin isn’t turning to our real-world cities as a backdrop for ending the world. Instead, she wants this book to show people coming together, helping each other, and figuring out a way to cope with the fascist hellscape we’re free-falling into.
“I've talked to my father and older relatives about what it was like living in Jim Crow—it seems we're headed back in that direction. And dad was like, ‘The way that you stick it to those people is you live your life. You raise your children. You have fun. You sing your songs. You strengthen your culture so that it's resilient against these attacks. And you don't let them destroy your happiness,’ she says. “This is the lesson I'm still learning as I'm trying to write this book. It's been difficult. But the book is, maybe, helping me learn.”
How Long ’Til Black Future Month? takes its name from an essay Jemisin wrote in 2013. It is, in part, an appreciation of the sci-fi meta-narrative that’s woven into Janelle Monae’s discography, but it’s also a reckoning with the absence of black people in science fiction. Black people like herself were absent from works that were interested in the future. Black people, it stands to reason, have been denied the future.
And being a black woman in the business of imagining a future is a tremendous opportunity. It can also mess you up.
“My life is great in a lot of ways right now. My family is doing well. I'm able to help out people who I couldn't help before. I'm able to contribute to causes. I'm able to contribute time. I have more free time than I've ever had in my life,” Jemisin says. “And it's a struggle to stay happy. It's a struggle to enjoy it, because when I see the world suffering as much as it is and I'm doing okay, it's hard not to just feel like, ‘Well shit.’”
“My job is to help the world,” she adds. “That is what an artist's job is—to the degree that we can. That is nothing more than holding up a mirror and saying, ‘You're beautiful, baby.’ Or holding up a mirror and saying, ‘Look at the shit that you're doing to yourself. Maybe you should stop.’. It is an artist's job to speak truth to power. That is a maxim that I've always believed in, but how do I do that when I wake up every day and it's a struggle just to smile?”
