Im writing about dragons as a black woman, and its fucking political.
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A solitary jogger lopes along a dirt path edging the dense woods.
After a moment, she adds an important caveat.
Well, I mean, technically my ancestors werent fucking anybody up.
They were just being fucked up.
That said … She drifts off, her eyes on the red oaks overhead.
Reality always creeps into Jemisins fantasies, whether she wants it to or not.
I just want to write about things blowing up.
Gods and planets and moons crashing into things, she tells me.
But what I write ends up being very political.
If I write about dragons, Im writing about dragons as a black woman, and its fucking political.
In Jemisins telling, this isnt necessarily a bad thing.
Dont lament when those worlds fall.
Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.
Jemisins phenomenal success has been something like an earthquake ripping through the traditional order of fantasy itself.
But more on that later.)
It just emphasizes how flawed the field has always been, she says.
The following year, she won the Hugo again.
For perspective, George R.R.
Her sense of humor is very dry.
Yay, she deadpans, pointing to a boulder in the distance.
This rock is why weve made the two-hour journey up from Brooklyn.
Jemisin, currently working on a draft, is here to take notes and block out the action.
For a fantasist, Jemisins books feel unusually grounded.
The magic inThe Broken Earthis called orogeny, which is a real geologic process that causes mountains to form.
Jemisin draws even more heavily on psychology and sociology than on the hard sciences.
She also recommends doing field research.
ForThe Broken Earthtrilogy,she went on a volcano tour of Hawaii.
Ive always written the kind of thing that would entertain me.
An ancient tulip tree once grew there, she adds, before pollution killed it.
The rock itself isnt much to look at.
Its neither particularly big nor oddly shaped.
Its not a very interesting landmark, she acknowledges.
But its important to her book, she says, because of its symbolic weight.
And with her new book, she intends to blow that myth to pieces.
She was speaking from a place of personal experience.
I have smiled and nodded while well-meaning magazine editors advised me to tone down my allegories and anger.
I didnt, she said.
I grew up at the library, she says.
When her mother was busy, instead of hiring a babysitter, shed drop Jemisin off at the library.
(Then, as now, she tended toward dark fairy tales and apocalyptic adventures.)
(Back then, Bell wanted to be a comic-book artist.)
We were both only children, and we owned our only-childness in a profound way.
We were able to keep our own company in ways that other people cant, Bell says.
There was this sense that we never fit in.
She read her first speculative book by a woman of color, Octavia ButlersDawn, in her late teens.
Apart from Butler, every single freaking thing I read was about a white dude doing white-dude things.
For the longest time, I would not write women.
I would not write black women.
I didnt know how, she says.
Jemisin was a dreamy kid, but she was practical, too.
She didnt think it was possible for a black woman to have a career as a fantasy writer.
I thought, well I have this talent, I havent monetized it, Jemisin recalls.
Herfirst short storywas published two years later, in 2004.
The next year, an agent picked the manuscript of Jemisins first novel out of the slush pile.
Ive been reading fantasy all my life, and so much sounds the same, Diver tells me.
Noras book was not like anything else Id ever read.
Friends and family encouraged her to self-publish.
She thought about quitting.
It was the blackest thing Id ever written, she says.
I thought the writing was fucking phenomenal, Pillai says.
There are very few books that you come across in your career that youneedto have.
It was really very selfish.
I couldnt imagine living without it.
(A few years later, Pillai also acquiredThe Killing Moonand its sequel.)
The year after Jemisin soldThe Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the conversation about diversity in science-fiction-and-fantasy fandom began to shift.
A predictable backlash followed, with some white writers characterizing the criticism as abusive and unnecessarily polarizing.
Jemisin viewed this reaction through the eyes of a psychologist interested in human nature.
The only way to enact change in such a system is todestabilizeit unfreeze it, she wrote.
That fury wasutterly necessary, because it shocked the whole genre enough to make it pay attention.
Jemisin believes that the conversation raised the profiles of many writers of color, including herself.
But their success triggered another outpouring of resentment.
He and Jemisin had a history.
And besides, every book has a message.
You cant escape that.
Tolkien, he said, Allegory is unspeakably ugly to me.
When I recount this to Jemisin, she laughs.
Its always,Oh shit, this is about gentrification.
Jemisins Hugo three-peat, while historic, is no anomaly.
Martin is helping adapt Nnedi OkoraforsWho Fears Deathfor HBO.
And Octavia Butler will finally get an onscreen adaptation.
All of a sudden, she says, they want to get the wordblackin there.
As Jemisin wanders the park in Inwood, she sees a bench by the edge of a creek.
Wherever the neighborhood gets rich or white enough, they put down the bar.
Lovecraft, a founding father of speculative fiction who also happened to be an unabashed racist.
Lovecrafts fiction was all about his idealized hatred and fear of people of color, Jemisin says.
In an allegorical form, Lovecraft was trying to gentrify every city he lived in.
The grass that she pictured a character lying on is thicker than she expected.
Nobodys going to be lying down in that, she observes.
I ask her if shed consider moving the bench in her story, or cutting the grass.
No, she says, astonished that I would even pose the question.
Half my friends live in Inwood.
Theyd be like, Theres no bench there!
Id have to answer to New Yorkers.
If her reasons are aesthetic, theyre also political.
Jemisin is a builder and destroyer of worlds, but really, theres only one she cares about.
She looks at it wearily and sighs.
Ill have to revise the scene.
