N.K.Jemisin is trying to stop the world from ending
By Joshua Rivera
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 Season introduces 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.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE
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 Season introduces 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.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE
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