Laura Hanifin / Hachette / Zachary Bickel / The Atlantic
N.K. Jemisin
and the
Politics of Prose
A conversation with the recent
Hugo Award-winner about science fiction,
race, gender, power, and Trumpism
Jemisin the first black writer to win the Hugo Award for
Best Novel, perhaps the highest honor for science-fiction
and fantasy novels. Her winning work, The Fifth Season,
has also been nominated for the Nebula Award and World
Fantasy Award, and it joins Jemisin’s collection of feted
novels in the speculative fiction super-genre. Even among
the titans of black science-fiction and fantasy writers,
including the greats Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany,
Jemisin’s achievement is singular in the 60-plus years
of the Hugos.
work, and it accomplishes the one thing that is so difficult
in a field dominated by tropes: innovation, in spades. A
rich tale of earth-moving superhumans set in a dystopian
world of regular disasters, The Fifth Season manages to
incorporate the deep internal cosmologies, mythologies,
and complex magic systems that genre readers have come
to expect, in a framework that also asks thoroughly modern
questions about oppression, race, gender, class, and
sexuality. Its characters are a slate of people of different
colors and motivations who don’t often appear in a field
still dominated by white men and their protagonist avatars.
The Fifth Season’s sequel, 2016’s The Obelisk Gate,
continues its dive into magic, science, and the depths
of humanity.
the science-fiction norm as The Fifth Season winning the
Hugo Award seemed unlikely. In 2013, a small group of
science-fiction writers and commentators launched the
“Sad Puppies” and “Rabid Puppies” campaigns to exploit
the Hugo nomination system and place dozens of books
and stories of their own choosing up for awards. Those
campaigns arose as a reaction to perceived “politicization”
of the genre—often code for it becoming more diverse and
exploring more themes of social justice, race, and gender
—and became a space for some science-fiction and fantasy
communities to rail against “heavy handed message fic.”
Led by people like the “alt-right” commentator Vox Day,
the movements reached fever pitch in the 2015 Hugo
Award cycle, and Jemisin herself was often caught up in
the intense arguments about the future of the genre.
I spoke to Jemisin about her works, politics, the sad puppies
controversy, and about race and gender representation in
science-fiction and fantasy the day before The Fifth Season
won the Hugo Award. Our conversation has been edited for
length and clarity.
Vann R. Newkirk II: Tell me more about the
creative process that goes into this trilogy. This
seems like a huge undertaking.
creative process that goes into this trilogy. This
seems like a huge undertaking.
done one continuous story all the way through three books.
Trilogies are relatively easy when each story is a self-
contained piece, which I’ve done for all of my previous
books. I have a lot of new respect for authors who do like
giant unending trilogies just because this is hard. It’s a lot
harder than I thought it was. But I’m enjoying it so far. It’s
a solid challenge. I like solid challenges. I had some
moments when I was writing the first book where I was
just sort of, “I don’t know if I can do this.” Fortunately I
have friends who are like, “What’s wrong with you? Snap
out of it!” And I moved on and I got it done and I’m very
glad with the reception. I’m shocked by the reception, but
I’m glad for it.
seems like something that is tailor-made to be a
hit right now.
been happening in the genre in terms of pushback,
reactionary movements and so forth. Basically, the
science-fiction microcosmic version of what’s been
happening on the large-scale political level and what’s
been happening in other fields like with Gamergate in
gaming. It’s the same sort of reactionary pushback that
is generally by a relatively small number of very loud
people. They’re loud enough that they’re able to
convince you that the world really isn’t as progressive
as you think it is, and that the world really does just
want old-school 1950s golden-age-era stalwart white
guys in space suits traveling in very phallic-looking
spaceships to planets with green women and … they
kind of convince you that that’s really all that will sell.
Told in the most plain didactic language you can
imagine and with no literary tricks whatever because
the readership just doesn’t want that.
Newkirk: For you, are those people something that bothers you as you build a profile? Are people louder now that The Fifth Season is getting so much love?
I seem to have passed some kind of threshold, and maybe
it’s something as simple as I now have so many positive
messages coming at me that the negatives are sort of
drowned out. As a side note, the so-called boogeyman of
science-fiction, the white supremacist asshat who started
the Rabid Puppies, Vox Day, apparently posted something
about me a few days ago and I just didn’t care. There was
a whole to-do between me and him a few years back where
he ended up getting booted out of SWFA [Science Fiction
and Fantasy Writers of America] because of some stuff he
said about me, and I just didn’t care. It was a watershed
moment at that point but now it’s just sort of, “Oh, it’s him
again. He must be needing to get some new readers or
trying to raise his profile again. Or something.” I didn’t
look at it. No one bothered to read it and dissect it and
send me anything about it. No one cared.I think that’s
sort of indicative of what’s happening. To some degree,
as I move outside of the exclusive genre audience, the
exclusive genre issues don’t bother me as much. Maybe
that’s just speculation. I’m reaching a point where I’m
still hearing some of it, but it’s just not as loud, or
maybe it’s just focusing on different points. I don’t
know. It’s still there. It’ll be there. I think that the
Hugo ceremony at this upcoming WorldCon is going
to be another not-as-seminal moment as last year
when the Puppies tried a takeover that was somewhat
more successful at the nominating stage and where
they got smacked down roundly at the actual voting
stage with no award after no award. I don’t think
that’s going to happen this year, and I don’t think it
matters as much. But who knows? I’ll guess we’ll
see. If I win I’ll be happy. If I don’t win, I’ll be happy.
I’ll continue to write.
a lot when it happened [his translation of
Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem won the
2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel], and he
said all that stuff sort of loses its power over
time, because it’s reactionary. It’s something
where the facts and your audience numbers
don’t really lie.
unless they find something new to catch and burn on.
And when they keep using the same tactics over and over
again, I don’t know that that’s sustainable. Or they’ll
burn themselves out when they reach the point of, I guess,
Donald Trumpism, for lack of a better description. They
reach some point where it’s no longer a reactionary
movement, some demagogue tries to take the lead and
make it all about them. And at that point it becomes clear
that it’s just some kind of petty narcissistic thing, and I
think that’s what kills it. But we’ll see, both at the Hugos
level and in the polls in November.
Newkirk: There are some very strong allegories in
both books and they also play alongside an actual
effort to build in racial critiques in a fantasy world.
It’s weird to me how uncommon that is in a lot of
people’s perspectives about science-fiction and
fantasy. How do you pull that off?
Jemisin: I write what feels real. I write things that are informed both by my own experience and by actual history. And I’m not drawing solely upon my own racial experiences. There’s some stuff that’s going to happen in the third book that’s sort of hinting at the Holocaust. You can see hints of stuff that happened with the Khmer Rouge at varying points in the story. You see the ways in which oppression perpetuates itself, one group of people teaches every other group of people how to do truly horrible things. I was drawing in that case on King Leopold of Belgium’s horrible treatment of people in the Congo—chopping off hands for example—and how in the Rwandan Civil War they chopped off lots of hands. Well, they learned it from the Europeans.
like pretty other kid in America. Sort of half-asleep through
history, memorizing facts so that I could spit them back and
take the AP exam, and that was not fun. But then later on, as I
got older and I actually started reading this stuff from different
perspectives and started considering different research
methods, and as I started to realize just how much I’d learned
in school was just bullshit, then it became a lot more
interesting to me. So as I read about the different sets of
people who have been oppressed and the different systemic
oppressions that have existed throughout history, you start
to see the patterns in them. Obviously I’m drawing on my
own African American experience, but I’m drawing on a lot
of other stuff too.
oppression is really driven home in The Fifth Season.
to me within the boundaries of science-fiction and fantasy.
They really are supposed to be about people. It’s fiction. It’s
not a textbook, yet for decades, for reasons that I don’t fully
understand, there was this weird aversion to good sociology
and focusing on good characterization and people acting like
real people. It was all supposed to be about the science. And
so you would go into forums, and you would see dozens of
people nitpicking the hell out of the physics. “The equipment
doesn’t work this way!” Just engineering discussions out the
wazoo, but no one pointing out, “You know, your characters
are completely unrealistic. People don’t act this way. People
don’t talk this way. What is this?” I just feel like that doesn’t
make sense. Social sciences are sciences too, and that
aversion to respecting the fiction part of science-fiction; to
exploring the people as well as the gadgets and the science
never made sense to me. And that aversion is why it isn’t
common to see these kinds of explorations of what people
are really like and how people really dominate each other,
and how power works.
were writing these stories were people who didn’t have a good
understanding of their own power: their own privilege within
a system, and a kyriarchical system, and not understanding
that as mostly straight white men with a smattering of other
groups who are writing this genre for years. A lot of them
bought into the American ideal of rugged individualism of,
“Go forth intrepid person with their gun,” and they would go
forth and do brave things and that would bring them power.
No recognition of the power they already had. And I think it
does take an outsider to a degree to come in and look around
and read the stuff that’s key in the genre and be like, whoa
something is really missing here.But I don’t think that I was
the first outsider to do so by any stretch. Most of the writers
of color who have come into the genre have come and looked
around and had that moment. Of course, Octavia Butler
being the first and foremost who came in and looked at the
alien colonization story and said, “Oh, hey it’s a lot like what
happened to [black people]! Why don’t we just make all that
stuff explicit? Instead of rape, why don’t we include aliens
trying to assimilate our genes?” And it does take people who
understand systems of power, who understand the
complexities of how people interact with each other to
depict that.
>via: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/09/nk-jemisin-hugo-award-conversation/498497/