Six fantasy novels. Three Hugo Award nominations. A gig as a book reviewer for The New York Times. N.K. Jemisin was by all accounts a successful writer, but she still had to work a 40-hour-a-week day job to make rent. That finally changed in May when she turned to Patreon, a crowdfunding service that lets fans pledge monthly stipends to artists they love. Jemisin's campaign was so successful that she was able to tender her resignation within days. That's wonderful for her, and it's wonderful for us too---because we can't wait for Jemisin to finish her dark, lyrical Broken Earth trilogy. We read the first book, The Fifth Season, for WIRED Book Club last month, and the combination of seismologic geekery and social commentary rocked our world. (We expect the same from the sequel, The Obelisk Gate, which comes out in August.) As Jemisin prepares to begin life as a full-time fantasist, WIRED Book Club sat down with her for a chat about where she gets her inspiration, the state of genre fiction today, and how she builds such gorgeous, intricate, meaningful worlds.
First of all, many congrats on the successful Patreon.
It's weird. It's something I wasn't quite prepared for. But all things considered, I'm really excited and really happy to finally be able to turn myself entirely into a writer.
Are you worried that, by leaving behind your day job as a counseling psychologist, you'll lose that regular access to the human psyche?
It's very much a concern. I never really wanted to give up my day job. I've always believed that as an artist, as a writer, you need a lot of contact with other people to make your art good. I had a job that I loved, a career that I loved, so it is a little sad. But on the other hand, I don't have time to do both anymore. Other things in my life had already given. I don't watch TV anymore. I don't go out with friends very much. It was time for me to make some choices, get off the fence, start being a pure writer---whatever that means. We'll find out what that means.
In the Broken Earth books, people called orogenes have the power to stop earthquakes. Yet they're reviled by society. How did you come up with that?
Pretty much the same way I've gotten most of my other major world-building ideas: partially as a dream, partially me trying to make sense of the dream. I had a dream of a woman walking toward me in the badass power walk that you've seen in any blockbuster movie---these grim-faced people walking toward the camera with stuff exploding behind them. But instead of stuff exploding, it was a mountain moving along behind her. She looked at me like she was really pissed, like she was going to throw the mountain at me. Who is this woman who can control mountains? How can she do that?
Where did you go for answers?
I spent three months learning everything I could about seismology. I took a seismologist out for lunch. I went to Hawaii and visited four volcanoes. Then I started thinking about the woman herself and what would make her so angry. That was the summer when, just about every other minute, there was the unjustified killing of a black person at the hands of police. Ferguson was happening, and I was angry myself. I wanted to throw a mountain myself. So a lot of that went into the world-building and the story.
It's a very human story; the science is more in the background.
Fantasy is fantasy. It's fiction. It's not meant to be a textbook. I don't believe in letting research overwhelm the fiction. That's a danger of science fiction in particular, as opposed to fantasy. A lot of writers forget that what they're doing is supposed to be art. Your science might be right, but if your characters are like lead and your soft science, your sociology, is messed up, you've got a terrible book. That's why I leave myself a finite period of time to do the research. I'm not going to write this to the satisfaction of an expert seismologist. The goal was to blend science with the art, the creativity, the magic—magic that has enough of a flavor of plausibility about it that people who need a clear explanation for things would have that.
Did you set specific rules for the magic, or what's known as orogeny in the books?
One of the rules is that orogeny is not measurable, is not finite, is not containable. To try and keep the sense of magic about it, I needed it to not be predictable. What I understand about it---and this is something that will become clearer over the course of the next two books---is that orogeny has evolved. The ability to use orogeny is a biological thing. There are physical rules to it in the sense that you have to have a certain kind of developed set of organs in the base of your brain in order to be able to do this. And you need some training with it---training not to increase the strength but narrow the perception. So those are rules if you want to think of them that way. But at the core of it, this is an adaptation to the world that has evolved over time and changed over time, as survival skills tend to do. People want to define other survival traits of humanity in clear and concrete ways, and that doesn't always make sense. Intelligence, for example. Intelligence clearly helped us survive as a species thus far, but how do you define it? How do you quantify it? We have some ideas, but in a lot of ways we're still in the dark. Orogeny isn't as complex as intelligence, but that's basically what it’s like. I wanted a magic form that emulated evolution.
We asked readers to submit questions. Here's one: "I love how this storyline seemed to play with the idea that a person is fluid rather than static, especially when discussing the concept of mothering. Women tend to be judged very harshly on whether or not they want a family, and on the decisions they make when they do have a family. To see one person travel along all different points of the mother spectrum was very interesting. Am I reading too much into this?"
No! I'm glad that reader saw that. I tend to like writing characters that are not typical heroes. I have seen mothers as heroes in fiction lots of time, but they tend to be one-note. You don't often see that they weren't always that interested in having kids. They weren't always great moms. You don't often see that they are people beyond being mothers, that motherhood is just one aspect of their life and not the totality of their being. I had some concern about the fact that I am not a mother. It's entirely possible that I made some mistakes in the way that I chose to render that complexity. But it's something I wanted to explore.
We also wondered if there was anything allegorical about the relationship between Syenite, Alabaster, and Innon?
I wouldn't say there was any allegorical reach. The buffer of Innon is the thing that allows Syenite and Alabaster to navigate through the frictions caused by their forced interaction. Innon is supposed to be a balm for both of them, so they can see past the pain and frustration they've had to deal with. I was trying to explore the ways in which oppression has damaged men and women, how people have to find ways to support one another despite the damage they have inflicted on each other, or the damage they may still be inflicting on each other without thinking about it.
The sexual identities of your characters—straight, gay, trans, whatever—go almost entirely unremarked upon. Was that a deliberate choice?
It was a choice. If I'm trying to depict a society that is drastically different from our own, that has drastically different cultural biases and hang-ups, it doesn't make any sense to simply import our own stuff and assume it's universal. In the Stillness, you are not supposed to have a relationship with an orogene. That's why they're all forced to wear black uniforms. It doesn't matter how attractive you find them---you're supposed to find them repulsive. In that sense I wanted to show a world in which the taboos are different. And since they have completely different taboos, it doesn't make any sense to not depict the natural range of humanity. We know there are multiple sexes, multiple expressions of gender, multiple expressions of sexuality. We've seen this in every human society. We've seen this in nonhuman societies. In a society that's not supposed to be Earth, obviously we should show that.
Another reader question: "I've always appreciated foreshadowing in literature---it makes a story feel planned as a whole. I was a huge fan of the Wheel of Time novels for that reason. I wonder if Jemesin has already written the last scene of the series, as Robert Jordan had?"
No, I don't work that way. I am a linear thinker in a lot of ways. It's in my head, but it's gonna change. I know it's gonna change. If I write it down now, it might actually spoil it.
What can you tell us about the decision to write Essun's chapters in the second person?
One key piece of the intent will not become clear until the end of the third book, so I can't tell you about that. The other piece of it, though, was that I didn't choose that voice. I wrote test chapters from different points of view, and what ultimately felt right was the second person. She needed that. In the first book she's kind of in a dissociative state. She's seen her child murdered. It's her breaking point. This is a woman who's been hit again and again and again, forced through pain and suffering again and again and again, and by a system that isn't going to stop.
Can you tell us anything more about the Guardians? As horrifying as their role is, it must be so lonely to be a Guardian, more than any of the other groups in the book.
I cannot tell you a lot about the Guardians without spoiling the latter two books. I will drop a big hint, though, and just say that no Guardian is ever alone. Moving on!
Fair! Perhaps you can talk about the scene at the end [WARNING: MAJOR SPOILER ALERT] where Syenite kills her son. How do you get to the point where you can have a reader sympathize with a mother killing her own child for its own good?
In African-American history, there is a famous story of Margaret Garner. Anyone who's read Toni Morrison's novel Beloved is familiar with this story. Margaret Garner and her children ran away from slavery and something went wrong. Slave catchers were bearing down on them, they were going to catch them, and Margaret began to kill her children, rather than let them fall back into slavery. The story got popularized by abolitionists because, of course, the horror of slavery is implicit. It resonates with anybody who reads it---especially someone like me, who's descended from slaves. I'm trying to depict a story about people who have reasons to destroy the world, people who view the state of existence they've been forced to live in as literally worse than death. And a lot of what I was feeling about being an African American living in this country---that has over the centuries done so wrong by us, and continues to do so---came through.
Around that time, a contingent of readers---the so-called Sad and Rabid Puppies---were freaking out about progressive themes in fantasy and science fiction. Did that play a part in any of this?
During the big Rabid Puppy fracas and takeover of the Hugos, I decided for this that I was just committed to writing what I feel like writing. I've always written what I want to read, and I don't really care that it doesn't fit into the narrow confines of what a bunch of reactionary---can I say assholes?---reactionary assholes want of the genre. I assumed at that point that I was never going to get a Hugo nomination again. So the fact that The Fifth Season has managed to get nominated this year is a little bit of a surprise, a pleasant surprise, heartening in the sense that it reminds me that the reactionary, loud people are still a very small group. They're still a minority of what's out there, and the bulk of the genre fans still like my stuff. The genre is fighting back. Being in any way able to remind SFF-dom that it is willing to embrace new ideas, new languages, new principles---that's cool, I love that.
So you didn't deliberately set out to write a critique of our society?
I didn’t set out to write big heavy themes. I did not set out to write an allegory for slavery and caste oppression. I set out to write a story about a woman grieving her child. I set out to show what made her extraordinary. I set out to write a world in which people who are powerful, who are valuable, are channeled into systems of self-supported and externally imposed oppression, and how you keep people who can throw mountains from throwing mountains---and running the world.
