N.K. Jemisin on Truth, Education, and Speculation

Episode Transcript

N.K. Jemisin I did not grow up wanting to be a writer. I often thought that it was a good idea and I would ask people, you know, ‘I read these books. I think they're great. I'd like to write books myself. I'm already writing books. They're, you know, in crayon, but I'm writing books, so can I be a writer?’ And people would quickly say, ‘No, no, of course not. You know, this is science fiction. Black women don't write science fiction.’
 

[Music]
 

Adwoa Adusei This is N.K. Jemisin, a New York Times-bestselling  science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s a Brooklynite, the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and the first author to win three Best Novel Hugos in a row. 

Virginia Marshall When we sat down with her a few months ago, we talked about the responses she would get from people when she told them she wanted to write science fiction as a kid.

N.K. Jemisin People would say, ‘You know, it would be great for you to try and do it, but you'd have a lot of trouble getting published, you know, and here's Toni Morrison, read her.’ And you know they were like, ‘Well, if you write like that, then maybe you can get published. But you know for the most part, it's so hard to get published, you should aim for something a little more practical.’

Adwoa Adusei It wasn’t until she read Octavia Butler’s books as a teenager that she began to see that being a Black woman science fiction writer was not impossible. Seeing Octavia do it first, Jemisin said, opened up a world of possibilities. 

N.K. Jemisin And around the same time I discovered several other Black writers had been published and I began to realize that they were a small number, but they existed. There's Nalo Hopkinson, Steven Barnes, you know, Tananarive Due, all of these great people had been getting published and I just hadn't realized it. Because in a lot of cases either it wasn't possible to tell from the books, or it just wasn't being discussed. 
 

Virginia Marshall We played parts of our interview with N.K. Jemisin in last week’s episode about Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. But there was so much we couldn’t fit into the episode, about Jemisin’s path to writing, and the present-day issues that inform her fiction.

Adwoa Adusei So we wanted to bring you this bonus episode: our conversation with the acclaimed speculative fiction writer N.K. Jemisin. We hope you enjoy. I’m Adwoa Adusei.
 

Virginia Marshall And I’m Virginia Marshall. You’re listening to Borrowed and Returned: a podcast from Brooklyn Public Library about the books that have changed us, and changed America, too.
 

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Adwoa Adusei We started our conversation by asking Jemisin about Parable of the Sower, which is the topic of our first episode in this series. If you haven’t heard that episode yet, you can go back and listen any time. We wanted to know if Jemisin was re-reading the book, as so many people are right now, particularly folks in the Los Angeles area grappling with the fallout from devastating fires earlier this year.
 

Virginia Marshall Remember – Parable of the Sower was written in 1993, but set in 2024 and 2025, when fires are ravaging Los Angeles. Readers today are being drawn back to the book for its eerie predictions not just about the fire, but also about the rise of religious conservatism in politics, and the election of a president whose slogan is to “Make America Great Again.” Despite being a big Octavia Butler fan, and writing the introduction to the 2018 edition of Parable of the Sower, Jemisin said she’s not one of the people re-reading right now. She recalled reading the Parable books in the ‘90s.

N.K. Jemisin It's a little much right now. [Laughs] I need a break. So I'm reading about intelligent spiders instead. But yeah, no, I need to break from the horror. And the truth of the matter is she got it so right that I would just feel sort of grimly resigned on reading it right now, understanding exactly where she was getting those predictions from. She wasn't pulling it out of thin air. And there was plenty of evidence that we were going to head this route. I just didn't see it at that time. The first time I read it, I didn't understand why she was going in that direction. As I continued to read it, I began to understand what she was saying, and I saw it too. Which took a lot of the fun out of reading it, but on the other hand, truth isn't always fun. 

Virginia Marshall Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's really eerie, so I was re-reading it and, you know, in November 2024, she predicted the election of a very conservative candidate, and of course the fires in LA. 
 

N.K. Jemisin With a “Make America Great Again” slogan, no less.
 

Virginia Marshall Yeah. So I wonder, like, just in terms of the power of speculative fiction, like the power that Octavia Butler had, I guess, to predict what we're in now… What does it do for a reader to be before the time when things happen and look to the future? What’s the power of that? 
 

N.K. Jemisin I can only speak for myself. In my case, it was one of the things that helped me understand the kind of vision I needed to have as a writer. My father is an artist. I came from a family of artists. I was raised with the idea that my job was to see the world clearly and hold up a mirror to it for others to understand. I took to heart the idea that a writer is supposed to speak truth to power. And, I understood on an intellectual level the dangers of power and religion melding into a single unit. I intellectually understood that a lot of what I was seeing with like the anti-abortion movement at that time was a reflection of a kind of weird cultural misogyny, a refusal to grant women equal status, a refusal, of course, to grant people of color equal status yada yada. The power structures in society I had seen, I understood how they reinforced themselves. I did not understand how they were strengthening in certain ways. And Butler saw that. So, you know, as an artist, it is my job to understand how societies work. I did not understand a lot of that.
 

Some of that I picked up when I went to grad school for counseling psych, and as part of my counselor education, we did a lot of multi-cultural or cross-cultural counseling-related education, which was really helpful. You know, I am a person of color myself. I know how to talk to other people of color, but what I did not understand and what we did in those classes was explore the history and the sociology of things in a way that I had not fully, kind of, reckoned with. So, I needed to understand all of that. I needed to get a better feel for why people are the way they are. And Butler's deep dive into where we were going helped me understand that I did not know where we were as well as I thought I did. 
 

Adwoa Adusei You've talked a little bit about how you are not necessarily going back to Parable of the Sower, but can you speak to why you think people in general turn to speculative fiction? Why are people wanting to read this as a genre? 

N.K. Jemisin Well, different people come at it for different reasons, same as with any genre. A lot of science fiction is pure escapism. You know, I am reading escapist fiction right now myself. You know, it's much easier to read about intelligent spiders than it is to read about yet another religious, misogynistic, bigoted demagogue taking power in America because I can read that in the paper. But, that said, there are people who come to speculative fiction looking for its predictive capacity or its futurism. I do tend to think that's a mistake. 

When you look at, like, golden age or classic science fiction, you see a lot of it does a great job of predicting the technology, the cell phones, the particular ways that we're going to get into space, you know, network engineering, all of that. You see that it's great at predicting the technology. It is not great at predicting the people who are using that technology, or how people will use that technology. Remember Star Trek had things like this, the tricorders, and people were using these and communicators and so forth, and they had six different devices doing what this can do right now. This is more powerful than half of what they had on Star Trek, and yet we're not using it in the same ways. It's not as ubiquitous for one thing. It's much more commercialized, and it's spying on us. You know, Star Trek didn't talk about what happens when your tricorder is listening and I'm trying to figure out all of your personal data. [Laughs] 

You know, so what we did not do a good job of with science fiction was centering on how to predict people, the sociological part of science fiction. You see a lot of novels that have got very accurate modern technology and the women are still barefoot and pregnant in the home, basically. There's still no people of color visible anywhere. Everybody is a middle-aged, middle-American white dude. You know, there's no accent differences, there are no language differences. You just see a really constricted and finite world. And it's because that is the world that the artist knew, or that is the world that the artist was interested in. And so they're not exploring the reality as it is. And science fiction's terrible at that. So if you are trying to understand the future—the future is more than tech. The future is people. The future how people use that tech, or engage with that tech or are used by that tech. 

Virginia Marshall I guess my follow-up question to that is like, have you ever had an experience where there's something that you've written, you saw it then reflected in reality? Maybe it's not a tech thing, maybe it's like a … oh, that human thing that's happening now, like I sort of wrote that.

N.K. Jemisin It's the other way around for me. I can't say what other people are getting out of my books, but for me, I engage with something and then I go write about it. I am not trying to predict, I am trying to process. I'm not even interested in the future. I just want to see what am I dealing with right now in the moment. And this is how I'm making sense of it, this is how I am finding strength in it, this is how I’m understanding it. 

Science fiction, like any fiction, is not really about the future. It is a reflection of what the author in the present is concerned about in a metaphorical form in a lot of cases and sometimes blatantly so, as in Butler. That said, it is a great examination of what we're stressed about right now. [Laughs] And it's a great examination, in the case of the Parable books, of what Butler was afraid of. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, as she was working on these books, the things that were beginning to develop were frightening, were deeply concerning. And she decided to confront that fear by just like, let's go. Let's deep dive into it and let's wallow in it for a while. There is a cathartic power in that, and I think that’s also why people read books like that, which are meant to be predictive and are also kind of depressing. There is a cathartic power in confronting your fear, in taking it as deep as it can go and seeing, in the case of the Parable books, that she was exploring, how do you survive that? How do you get past it? How do you gain strength despite these terrible things happening? How do you form those social networks that you're gonna need to rebuild? How do you get the philosophy and your—how do you get your mind right to get through all of this? 
 

Adwoa Adusei I wanted to ask you about the role of education and access to education in speculative fiction for your characters in particular, but even within Parable of the Sower. So education is so important, whether it's higher education, having characters with PhDs, especially if they're people, characters of color, or like alternative education in that, like, each one, teach one mutual aid sense. 

N.K. Jemisin Or even self-teaching, yeah. 
 

Adwoa Adusei Or even self-teaching. So why the emphasis on learning and education? Why is it important?
 

N.K. Jemisin Because you need that as a weapon. I mean, the same reason that we are seeing the current regime do its best to rewrite history is the same reason that you need to know that history. Because, you know, they're trying to rewrite because they literally want to erase the gains of the last 150 years or so. An attempt to rewrite women's progress, people of color's progress—all of that is to aggrandize the people that want to gain power right now. There is power in that learning. There is power in the knowledge and the understanding of what has come before, how to avoid it, but also how to get through it, if you've got to. 
 

What I personally am taking from the Parable books is the ‘how to get my mind right’ part. In the case of Lauren Olamina, she basically developed her own philosophy, her own religion, in order to kind of help her focus and maintain her resolve to grow and change and keep going and keep trying. These are things that all of us are going to need to do if we’re going to get through this. We need to not allow the firehose of terrible news to make us despair. We need not to check out and get disengaged. We need to stay focused on whatever our goal happens to be. And that, for me, is the biggest takeaway. 

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Virginia Marshall You spoke earlier about how speculative fiction is a reflection of what the writer is thinking about now and worried about now. And so I'm just curious, in your work, like, what are the things you're turning over in your mind that might turn into fiction one day for you? 
 

N.K. Jemisin At any given moment, it's something different. So like with the Broken Earth books, for example, I was very much engaging with Ferguson, which was happening while I was writing it. I was engaging with what does it mean to live in a country that absolutely hates you, that is constantly trying to erase your existence and your contributions, constantly treating you like a dire threat when you're just telling the country, ‘We want you to be what you keep saying that you are.’ For the duration of their time in America, African Americans have, as a kind of general culture said, ‘You keep saying you're the land of the free. You keep saying, you're the land of equal opportunity, and yet you're not living up to that.’ It was not a shock, but again, intellectually I understood that this country absolutely hates Black Americans, that anti-Blackness is written into every part of its identity and its legal systems and everything else. Intellectually, I understood that. Feeling it was something different, and I needed to process those feelings. So that got poured into—What does it mean to live in a society that needs you but hates you? At what point does that society become unsustainable, unfixable? Is there any point where you can't fix it, where you just need to give up and just burn everything to the ground? And I was just kind of thinking through that, and it turned into a very allegorical exploration of that. 
 

But, right now I've been thinking a lot about—what does it mean to live in the chaotic information-scape that we are in right now, which is deluged with misinformation, just absolute lies, where everybody has a different sense of truth and reality? You know, how do you make a reality out of that? And I've just been exploring, what is it like to live in that kind of chaos, that kind of collective madness?
 

Virginia Marshall I actually had a question on The City We Became. I really enjoyed that book. And it reminded me, in a way, of Parable of the Sower, just as like a novel about New York, and the way that Parable feels so set in LA. Would you say that it's set in the future, The City We Became, or…?

N.K. Jemisin No, no. I intended for it to be very firmly here. And it was actually grappling with the mayoral campaign. [Laughs] The second book in particular. But the first book was mostly just me processing my life in New York. And the fact that I do sometimes walk down the street and see, you know, interesting reflections from the windows. And it looks like the windows are looking at you. Or, you know, at the time, I was doing a lot of traveling to other cities. And I kept noticing that when I would get into a city, there would be a fairly quick sense of—okay, I like this city and this city likes me, we can be friends. Or, this city does not like me, I need to get my business done and get the heck out before bad things happen. There was just a fairly quick sense of—okay, Tokyo, it feels a lot like New York, very culturally different. But there's a sound in the air at night that I understand and I feel some kinship with. And as long as I hear that sound in a place, I think I'm probably going to be okay there. And then I go to—I won’t mention cities that I haven’t gotten along with, Chicago [laughter] anyway—then I go to other cities and there's this instant, you know, the wind is blowing really hard and pushing at you and sort of reminding you, you don't belong here. Maybe you should get the heck out. Anyway, I have a lot of Chicago stories that I jokingly tell my friends, my Chicago friends in particular. They keep trying to get me to visit them and I'm like, no, your city is going to kill me. Your city is trying to kill me. I can tell. 

Virginia Marshall [Laughs] Got it, yeah. But there is this impulse I think for writers to really write about a place they’re living in that it becomes—as you so vividly write—that it becomes a character.
 

N.K. Jemisin If you have the artist's eye, everything is a character. Not inanimate objects necessarily, but there's a certain amount of ‘what if’ that you apply to pretty much everything that you are encountering in life, or at least that's how it works for me, I can’t speak to other writers.
 

Virginia Marshall I wonder if we could ask some bigger questions. If Butler were here today, what would you say to her? 
 

N.K. Jemisin Oh, God, uh ... How did you survive the despair of seeing what was coming? And I don't think I would ask her that question because the Parable books are her answer. This is how she survived. She wrote through it. That is the same thing that I am trying to do right now with my work. That's what I think all of us, all artists right now are trying to do, because our work is the way that we process the world. 
 

I will say I did have the chance to meet Butler in the early 2000s before she passed, when she came to a convention that was relatively near me—and I had a panic attack. She was right there in the hallway at a table, I could have walked over and said something to her and I did not do so because I was in the corner hyperventilating. It is the only panic attack I have ever had in my life. [Laughs] And then I found out a few years later that she had passed, so I missed my chance and I feel really bad about that. But, if I had the chance to do it over, I would say, ‘I'm sorry that I had a panic attack instead of talking to you.’ But I think that would be it. Mostly, I think I'd just try and get to know her, see if we could be friends. I feel like we could.

Virginia Marshall I think you could.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei That’s it for this bonus episode. You can find N.K. Jemisin’s books at Brooklyn Public Library. We’ll include links to her work in our show notes.

Virginia Marshall We’ll be back next week with our next full episode about The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

[Music]

Virginia Marshall Borrowed and Returned is a production of Brooklyn Public Library. It’s written and produced by me, Virginia Marshall, and co-hosted with Adwoa Adusei. You can read a transcript of this episode and our show notes with all of our great links at BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.   

Adwoa Adusei Brooklyn Public Library relies on the support of individuals for many of its most critical programs and services. To make a gift, please go to BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] donate. Our Borrowed advisory team is made up of Fritzi Bodenheimer, Nick Higgins, Robin Lester Kenton, and Damaris Olivo. Our marketing and design team for this series includes Laurie Elvove, Ashley Gill, Jennifer Proffitt, Lauren Rochford and Leila Taylor.

Virginia Marshall That’s it for this episode. Until next time… keep re-reading.