science fiction writer n k

N.K. Jemisin Books In Order

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N.K. Jemisin is an American Speculative writer and blogger that was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2010.

Jemisin was born September 1972 in Iowa City Iowa. She spent most of her childhood in Mobile, Alabama. She also spent a few years living in Massachusetts.

The writer attended Tulane University between the years of 1990 and 1994, eventually receiving her Degree in Psychology. N.K. Jemisin eventually earned her Master of Education from the University of Maryland College Park.

The author’s career began to take shape when she graduated from Viable Paradise Writing Workshop in 2002. Over the years, she published a number of short stories before working on and completing several novels.

N.K. Jemisin also participated in the Boston-area writing group BRAWlers. She was also a member of Altered Fluid. Her career has availed her several opportunities over the years, this including the chance to be co-Guest of Honor at the WisCon Science Fiction Convention in Madison, Wisconsin in 2014.

She also delivered the Guest of Honor Speech at the 2013 Continuum in Australia. She has, on occasion, butted heads with Theodore Beale, a writer she called racist, misogynistic and hateful.

Jemisin’s work explores a variety of themes, from cultural conflict to oppression, with most of her stories told within a fantasy and science-fictional context. Jemisin was nominated for the Hugo Award in 2011. She has also been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, this along with being short-listed for the James Tiptree Jr. Award.

N.K. Jemisin is best known for her work on the Inheritance Trilogy which spans three books that were released within a two-year period. The author has continued to supplement her Inheritance story with novellas and short stories set within the same universe.

+The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

When her mother dies, Yeine Darr, outcast from the barbarian north, is summoned to the majestic city of sky. Once there, she learns that she has been named an heir to the king. However, winning the throne is no easy task. Yeine is forced into a vicious struggle for power.

When Jemisin was questioned about her approach to this, the first story in her highly popular trilogy of novels, she explained that she had little interest in maintaining the status quo.

So many fantasy novels on the shelves today are purposed towards pitting heroes against villains that they must defeat in order to bring back the good old days or thrusting rightful heirs into the thrones they were born into.

Jemisin claims that she approached her Inheritance trilogy with the aim of writing a story where power was challenged and the good old days were discarded.

And the African-American author more or less succeeds here, throwing everything that the fantasy landscape has come to know away and instead forcing readers to rethink the paradigms they have come to expect.

On the whole, there are a lot more merits than demerits, at least according to most readers. A wonderful read, the first novel in the trilogy brings Yeine Darr to the fro, the heroine of the story, an outcast from the ruling family and the product of a biracial marriage.

Summoned to the palace and suddenly declared as one of three heirs to the throne, this after the mysterious death of her mother, Yeine soon finds herself locked in a deadly war against her cousins both of whom possess far more power and understanding of the political arena that Yeine.

Through her trials, Yeine works to gain the loyalty of the Enefadah, gods that the ruling families have enslaved.

If you love stories about gods meddling in the affairs of the mortal plane and bringing chaos upon mankind, you will appreciate this book. N.K. Jemisin’s mythology is rich and intriguing.

Admittedly, some readers have complained about Jemisin’s writing style, calling it choppy. A few voices, in particular, have raised complaints about the author’s transitions in time, most of which are not bad but largely unnecessary, instead playing out like a gimmick used by Jemisin to inject flavor into an otherwise bland story.

The plot hasn’t escaped opposition, with some people complaining that the story of an orphan girl being thrust into the political machinations of her family is hardly new.

While the book has proven divisive in some circles, N.K. Jemisin’s work continues to garner attention from Science Fiction fans, receiving praise for its engaging plot and interesting characters.

+The Broken Kingdoms

When Oree makes the fateful decision to provide assistance to a mysterious individual who, through her unique sight, seems to shine, she is dragged into a deadly conspiracy.

Godlings have began to die all over, and in noticeable numbers. Someone is murdering them and carelessly discarding them on the streets, desecrated. The objective of these killers remains a mystery, whether it is the homeless man they truly seek or Oree herself. With powerful forces beginning to churn and divine entities such as she has never seen finally coming into play, Oree will need all her wits to survive the coming chaos.

For a lot of people, this book exceeds expectations, superseding Jemisin’s previous work in every single way. Even proponents of the previous novel have come around to appreciate Jemisin’s work in the sequel, which proves that the author probably has more room to grow.

N.K. Jemisin creates a far more vivid world than before, bringing greater detail to her characterizations.

There is one complaint that must be raised against The Broken Kingdom, and it is a problem that watered down the quality of the first book in the trilogy. Jemisin continues to make her heroines unnecessarily helpless, making them seem like they are designed to fall apart the moment their world fails them.

Oree is a victim of circumstances throughout the run of this novel. Her actions are rarely empowering and she rarely shows initiative unless other people’s actions provoke her. Along with the cold and rather ridiculous romances that Jemisin attempts to insert into her story, anyone looking for a strong and powerful heroine will be sorely disappointed, this failure to craft an intriguing female lead ruining what might have been a wholly entertaining read. That doesn’t make the book bad. However, it could have been much better.

One Response to “N.K. Jemisin”

just to say you are a terrific writer. i started way long ago, heinlein’s methusalah’s children was my first at about 9-10 years old, and found over the years a few other special writers – gaiman, gay, abercrombie, tolkien, lewis, some bujold, ks robinson, some others- and i have to say i place you in their company. i hope you take this as a compliment, that’s how i mean it. thanks.

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N. K. Jemisin’s Dream Worlds

By Raffi Khatchadourian

N. K. Jemisin

Several years ago, N. K. Jemisin, the fantasy and science-fiction author, had a dream that shook her. In her sleep, she found herself standing in a surreal tableau with a massif floating in the distance. “It was a chunk of rock shaped like a volcanic cone—a cone-shaped smoking mountain,” she recalled. Standing before the formation was a black woman in her mid-forties, with dreadlocks, who appeared to be holding the volcano aloft with her mind. She was glaring down at Jemisin and radiating anger. Jemisin did not know how she had triggered the woman’s fury, but she believed that, if she did not ameliorate it quickly, the woman would hurl the smoldering massif at her.

Jemisin awoke in a sweat and jotted down what she had seen. “I need to know how that person became who she is—a woman so angry that she was willing to move mountains,” she told me. “She was angry in a slow burn, with the kind of anger that is righteous, enough to change a planet. That’s a person who has been through so much shit that she has been pushed into becoming a leader. That’s an M.L.K. I needed to build a world that would explain her.”

Jemisin’s writing process often begins with dreams: imagery vivid enough to hang on into wakefulness. She does not so much mine them for insight as treat them as portals to hidden worlds. Her tendency is to interrogate what she sees with if/then questions, until her field of vision widens enough for her to glimpse a landscape that can hold a narrative. The inspiration for her début novel, “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms” (2010), was a dream vision of two gods. One had dark-as-night hair that contained a starry cosmos of infinite depth; the other, in a child’s body, manipulated planets like toys. From these images, Jemisin spun out a four-hundred-page story about an empire that enslaves its deities. The book established her as a prominent new voice.

Jemisin is black, in her mid-forties, and wears her hair in dreadlocks. In her author photo, she gazes sternly at the camera, as if ready for literary combat. In person, she is much warmer, but she likes the picture. Typically, at the center of her fiction, there is a character with coiled strength. Jemisin, who has a degree in psychology, is interested in power and in systems of subjugation. In her books, the oppressed often possess an enormous capacity for agency—a supernatural ability, even, that their oppressors lack—but they exist in a society that has been engineered to hold them down. Eventually, the world is reordered, often with a cataclysm.

The notes that Jemisin jotted down after her dream went into a folder on her computer where she stores “snippets, ideas, random thoughts.” Some are drawn from her reading of nonfiction: Jared Diamond’s “Collapse,” Charles Mann’s “1491,” Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us.” Eventually, she told me, “this fragment pairs up with that fragment, and they form a Voltron, and become a story.” (Voltron is an anime “super robot” that emerges when other machines combine—an artifact of eighties television that Jemisin enjoyed as a girl.)

Another file in the folder was from 2009, when Jemisin attended a NASA -funded workshop, called Launchpad, where participants discussed what Earth might be like if it lost its moon. Some speculated that our planet’s axis would tilt wildly, triggering haphazard ice ages, and that its core might lose its stability, causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The fragments in Jemisin’s folder began to pair up. She imagined a planet that had lost its moon and become seismically hyperactive. Such a place, she reasoned, could sustain life, but just barely; mass extinctions would be common. If the woman in her dream inhabited that planet, she wondered, then what would her civilization look like?

J. R. R. Tolkien once argued that the creation of an imaginary world was the highest form of artistic expression, but that it was also easily undervalued. If it is done well, much of the labor remains off the page. Before Tolkien wrote “The Lord of the Rings,” he invented a mythology, a history, and even languages for Middle-earth; he explained to a friend, “I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit (generally with meticulous care for distances). The other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities.” It annoyed him that people “stupidly and even maliciously confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art.” He wrote about elves. He wanted to be taken seriously, too.

Jemisin has no interest in pseudo-medieval Europe, but Tolkien would have recognized her rigor. To get a firsthand feel for volcanoes, she flew to Hawaii to smell sulfur and ash. To learn how people prepared for environmental stress, she researched end-of-days survivalists, though she stopped short of going into the wilderness to meet them. (“I wasn’t stupid,” she told me.)

As the idea of an ever-shattering planet developed in her imagination, Jemisin drew a map of a Pangaea-like supercontinent, which she wryly called the Stillness. She reasoned that its wealth would be concentrated in an urban center near the equator, at a geological spot that seemed stable, based on fault lines that she had sketched out. She decided arbitrarily that the woman in her dream lived in the volatile hinterlands—and then began to treat that decision like a discovered fact. “I’m, like, O.K., why isn’t she working to stabilize this powerful, wealthy part of society?” Jemisin told me. “Well, she must have at one point been part of that life, but somehow got away.” Gradually, the contours of a story emerged. “You let intuition do whatever it is going to do,” she said. “I had a sentence in mind: ‘Let’s start with the end of the world.’ That can mean the literal end of the world, it can mean the end of a civilization, or it can mean grief. That was the point where I decided that her son had died.” The grief she understood. Jemisin’s mother had become ill, and would not survive the decade.

After immersing herself in the Stillness for four years, Jemisin finished “The Fifth Season.” The story defied easy literary categorization. It was sweeping but intimate, multilayered but simply told. It could be read as an environmental parable, or as a study of repression, or as a meditation on race, or as a mother’s post-apocalyptic quest. Jemisin wove in magical elements, but she systematized them so thoroughly that they felt like scientific principles—laws of an alternative nature. She evoked advanced technology, but made it so esoteric that it seemed like magic. (Most of her imagined machines were made of crystal. At some point, the inhabitants of the Stillness eschewed metallurgy; the word “rust” even became an expletive.)

She took stylistic chances, too. “The Fifth Season” at first appears to weave together the stories of three people, but late in the book Jemisin reveals that she has merely shattered her protagonist’s story into three narratives, a formal echo of her broken world. The protagonist is an “orogene”—a term that Jemisin derived from scientific nomenclature for a mountain-forming process—who can channel energies that quell or create earthquakes, with varying degrees of control. For the dominant civilization, which enslaves the orogenes—for use as weaponry or as geological instruments—they are a reviled but necessary underclass. The protagonist’s primary narrative blisters with rage and trauma. Jemisin wrote it in the second person, the voice belonging to a narrator who is not revealed until a later book. “I tried her voice in different forms,” she told me. “I couldn’t get too close to her—she was angry with me in the dream, she’s not going to talk to me. That doesn’t make sense, I know.”

In a different writer’s hands, the use of the second person might have registered as a gimmick, but Jemisin made the device integral to the plot, and deployed it with personality—a voice with quirks and, occasionally, a sense of immediacy. (“Look, the ash clouds are spreading already.”) “The Fifth Season” attracted wide acclaim for its inventiveness, world-building, and intricate assembly. In 2016, it won a Hugo Award for Best Novel—a first for a black writer. The following year, a sequel, “The Obelisk Gate,” won again. In 2018, the final book in what became the “Broken Earth” trilogy, “The Stone Sky,” won, too. No author in the history of the genre had achieved that recognition. The three books sold more than two million copies worldwide. The Times called them “extraordinary.” John Scalzi, the former president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, heralded Jemisin as “arguably the most important speculative writer of her generation.”

Jemisin lives in a duplex apartment in Brooklyn, with an office that looks out onto a garden, which she cares for meticulously. For years, she was an urban literary nomad, working wherever she could park herself with a laptop. “I don’t go to coffee shops anymore,” she told me in her office, late last year. “The best-seller life has made it possible to have this.” She sat at a long desk against the wall; at one end was a cluster of awards. The room also contained a plush Darth Vader and a doll of Commander Uhura, from “Star Trek.” Beside a chair was a chrome lamp resembling a flying saucer; Jemisin flipped a switch, and a band of tiny red lights on the saucer glowed. She had bought it on a trip upstate. “I saw that lamp, I needed that lamp,” she said. “It’s corny as hell, and it doesn’t light up shit. It’s just for the mood, but sometimes when I am writing I want to be in that mood and summon the energies.”

Jemisin immediately followed the “Broken Earth” trilogy with two other books. In 2018, she released “How Long ’til Black Future Month?,” a collection of short stories. She also completed her next novel, “The City We Became,” the first installment of another trilogy, which is due out this March. Submitting the novel to her editor, a few hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve, she felt depleted; for more than a decade, she had been writing nearly a book a year. She resolved to take 2019 off, but she couldn’t stay idle. She sketched out the new trilogy’s second installment, while also navigating calls from Hollywood, speaking engagements, side gigs. Marvel Comics invited her to guest-write a series—an offer she declined, because she had already agreed with DC Comics to create a “Green Lantern” spinoff. As we sat in her office, the first issue of her comic was slated for release in a few weeks. “This is an unusual year for me,” she said. “Usually, I have only one thing to concentrate on.”

Above her desk she had hung family photos: glimpses of a truncated generational story. “Like most black Americans descended from slaves, it basically stops,” she told me. She once wrote about this loss—not merely the erasure of a backstory but also the absence of all that a person builds upon it; as she put it, the “strange emptiness to life without myths.” She had considered pursuing genealogy, “the search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche.” But ultimately she decided that she had no interest in what the records might say. “They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up.”

Two cats helplessly look at an unopened can of cat food.

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Jemisin pointed to a photo of her father, Noah, as a young man—thin, confident, smiling—and spoke about his grandmother, a woman people called Muh Dear: “She basically made her living doing fortunes—magic, for lack of a better term.” In a story that Jemisin included in “How Long ’til Black Future Month?,” she envisioned Muh Dear as a shaman named Emmaline, facing down a malevolent fairy, the White Lady, who wants to take away her daughter. (“The White Lady was nearly all surface; that was the nature of her kind. That was how this meeting would go, then: an appearance of grace and gentility, covering the substance of battle.”) As the two spar, the White Lady draws Emmaline into a roiling dreamscape, in which it is possible to glimpse America’s future: the upheavals of the civil-rights movement; the progress and the tensions that followed. Amid the whorl of imagery, Emmaline offers to sacrifice herself in place of her child if her family is protected. The fairy accepts the gesture: “The White Lady closed the dream around Emmaline, and whisked her away.”

For Muh Dear’s real grandchildren, growing up in mid-century Alabama, there was no shortage of dangers. Jemisin’s father was born in Birmingham, where the commissioner of public safety allowed the Ku Klux Klan to attack the Freedom Riders when their Greyhound buses arrived, in 1961. As Jemisin once recalled, her father spent part of his youth “dodging dogs and fire hoses, turned on him and other Civil Rights protestors.”

Jemisin’s parents met as students at Alabama State University, and married shortly after graduating. Noah wanted to devote his life to painting, so he applied to a graduate program at the University of Iowa, and the two moved to Iowa City. Jemisin’s mother, Janice, pursued a degree in psychology, specializing in psychometrics; she later administered I.Q. tests.

When Jemisin was born, in Iowa, her parents named her Nora Keita. After her first birthday, the family moved to Brooklyn, where Noah strove to establish himself. For income, he taught art, and Janice taught grade-school science. (He now has a painting in the Met, an abstract called “Black Valhalla.”) “We were in a beautiful little brownstone,” Jemisin recalled. “We had the ground floor and the floor above. There was a gorgeous old mahogany bannister. There were grapevines in the back yard, and a squirrel named Greedy who would come seeking pecans that my grandmother would send me from her tree in Alabama.”

When Jemisin was five, her parents divorced, and her mother moved to Mobile. Jemisin went with her, and hated it: the regimentation of Southern society, the quasi-suburban alienation, the racism. While she was in the fourth grade, the Klan burned a cross on the Mobile courthouse lawn, then murdered a black teen-ager named Michael Donald as he walked home from the store. They hanged his body from a tree in a mixed-race neighborhood: a lynching, in the nineteen-eighties. “Not too far from my grandmother’s place, actually,” Jemisin told me. In a speech in 2013, she recalled its impact on her family: “I remember my grandmother sitting in her den with a shotgun across her knees while I cracked pecans at her feet. I was maybe nine years old, had no idea what was going on. She told me the gun was just an old replica—she’d brought it out to clean it. I said, ‘O.K., Grandma,’ and asked whether she’d make me a pie when I was done.”

Jemisin mastered an outsider’s art of adaptation. Shifting between Alabama and New York, where she spent summers with her father, she adjusted to the jarring differences across the Mason-Dixon Line, both social and personal—living in one home shaped by an artist and another by a standardized-test giver. Childhood, she told me, was “a schizoid experience.” In Mobile, she shifted across racial divisions, too, attending a predominantly white school that had been forced to desegregate. “I had to get up at o-dark-thirty to ride the bus for an hour,” she recalled. To exchange comic books with her white friends, she met them clandestinely behind a building.

Science fiction appealed to her at a young age. Little about her real life was cohesive, but imagined worlds could be complete, self-contained, and bound by logic. “I saw ‘Star Wars’ when it came out, because I was a creepy, obsessed space child,” she told me. Later, she mined her local library for science-fiction novels; she covered the books in paper so that she could read them in class. Jemisin also began to write, constantly. Her cousin, W. Kamau Bell, who is now a comedian with a show on CNN, told me, “I wanted to be a comic-book artist, so we would spend our days in the front of my grandmother’s house, laying in the sun, writing, drawing, and talking. We bonded over the fact that we felt like aliens in Mobile.”

Jemisin’s mother did not understand her daughter’s interest in otherworldly fantasies, or her non-stop writing. But her father did. In Brooklyn, she stayed up late with him to watch “Star Trek” and “The Twilight Zone.” Noah Jemisin encouraged his daughter to explore the city, and also to create. “Dad and I would pass time, whole afternoons, not speaking to each other,” she told me. “He would be working on a painting in his studio. I would be sitting on the couch, writing.” In the evenings, they went on walks. “He was my first real editor,” she said. “One of my favorite memories is us walking across the Williamsburg Bridge. This was before it got renovated. It had fucking holes in it. You had to be careful or you would lose a foot! I would talk over story ideas and plotlines. He would listen to all of that.”

One of her first childhood stories was a fable about a fantastical prehuman era in which animals built an advanced civilization, but then destroyed it—along with their ability to speak—in a war. She told me, “I actually published that, by putting two pieces of cardboard around it, wrapping them in paper, and binding it with yarn.”

On its surface, all science fiction is about change—technological, scientific, social—that brings human beings into contact with the unknown or forces a reassessment of the familiar. Nonetheless, the genre remains inextricably tied to the everyday—the biases and limitations of the writer’s time. Jules Verne may have imagined the Nautilus as a futuristic steampunk submarine, but his book expresses a nineteenth-century vision, in which the natural world existed to be dominated by men.

“How Long ’til Black Future Month?” takes its name from an essay that Jemisin wrote in 2013. It begins with two memories of watching “The Jetsons”: first as a girl, excitedly taking it all in, and then as an adult. “I notice something: there’s nobody even slightly brown in the Jetsons’ world,” she wrote. “This is supposed to be the real world’s future, right? Albeit in silly, humorous form. Thing is, not-white people make up most of the world’s population, now as well as back in the Sixties when the show was created. So what happened to all those people, in the minds of this show’s creators? Are they down beneath the clouds, where the Jetsons never go? Was there an apocalypse, or maybe a pogrom? Was there a memo?”

“The Jetsons” was far from the worst example of racial exclusion. Until 2015, despite years of protest, the World Fantasy Award was a bust of H. P. Lovecraft, a white supremacist who believed that blacks were subhuman and who openly supported Hitler. Even Tolkien’s masterwork, “The Lord of the Rings,” was complicated by race. He had written his orcs to be revolting, devolved, violent agents of evil. In a letter, he explained his thinking: “They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”

In Mobile’s public library, Jemisin read voraciously, but she almost never encountered characters who credibly represented someone like her. Black writers have been engaged in speculative fiction since at least the nineteenth century, but when Jemisin first immersed herself in the genre their work was either difficult to locate or difficult to recognize. In early pulp science fiction, it was common for writers to sell their stories using pseudonyms, making their true identities almost impossible to discern. Those few novelists who were openly recognized as black—in the early eighties, there were only four of any prominence—were often encouraged to avoid race in their work.

In 1967, a few months after the notable African-American writer Samuel Delany won a Nebula Award, he wrote to Analog magazine, seeking to serialize a daring, experimental space opera he had written, called “Nova.” Analog passed. As an editor explained, Delany’s protagonist was half Senegalese, and white sci-fi readers would be unable to relate. “It was all handled as though I’d happened to have dressed my main character in a purple brocade dinner jacket,” Delany later recalled, in an essay on racism in science fiction. To be a black author in the genre, he noted, meant navigating paradoxical demands: editors expected his work to carry no trace of his identity, but, no matter what he put on the page, they would inevitably view it as “African-American science fiction.”

“Nova,” later published as a book, proved to be highly influential—a progenitor of the cyberpunk movement. Delany recalled that he was frequently invited to speak on panels with Octavia Butler, the only other black author who had achieved his kind of visibility, even though their work was very different. She, too, had to navigate the paradox. “When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn’t in any of this stuff I read,” she told the Times before her death, in 2006. “I wrote myself in.”

This simple goal was surprisingly hard to communicate. Just before winning a Nebula for her tenth novel, Butler sat for an interview with Charlie Rose, who asked, “Are you trying to create a new black mythology?”

“No,” she said. “I am telling stories that interest me.” She spoke a little about what that meant, but Rose persisted: “What, then, is central to what you want to say about race?”

She replied, with a dismissive sting, “Do I want to say something central about race aside from ‘Hey, we’re here’?” She recalled a panel she had been on, in 1979, with another writer. “He thought that it wasn’t really necessary to have black characters in science fiction because you could always make any racial statement you needed to make by way of extraterrestrials,” she told Rose. “If he was trying to start trouble he certainly succeeded.” Butler later wrote a withering response to the writer’s comment, in Transmission magazine: “Science fiction reaches into the future, the past, the human mind. It reaches out to other worlds and into other dimensions. Is it really so limited, then, that it cannot reach into the lives of ordinary everyday humans who happen not to be white?”

The essay was powerful, its impact negligible. My own copy of Butler’s novel “Dawn”—a brilliant, eerie, thought-provoking book—is a paperback from 1988. The cover depicts a woman resembling Sigourney Weaver in “Alien,” even though the text clearly (but lightly) indicates that the protagonist is not white. It contains no author photo, no bio. Jemisin’s childhood encounter with “Dawn” was the same edition. Reading it, she had no idea that Butler was black.

Hudson Yards was crawling with superheroes and villains and oddballs: people dressed like Storm Troopers, like Batman, like Godzilla, like Care Bears. It was the weekend of New York Comic Con, the Mecca of nerd culture that, every year, seems to grow bigger, more commercial, more theatrical in its costume pageantry. One attendee wore a white dress supporting feathered Pegasus wings the size of a small hang glider.

I met Jemisin outside the Javits Center. She was wearing a leather jacket, a black blouse, and jeans, with her hair pulled back. She is often invited to speak about her books at Comic Con, but, as a novelist, she is generally spared the titanic promotional machinery that surrounds the main attractions: the stars hyping Hollywood films, the pavilions hyping triple-A video games, the m.c.s hyping comic-book celebrities. Jemisin, who describes herself as “a supercharged introvert,” is just fine with that.

This year, though, there was no avoiding one of the largest hype machines. Her “Green Lantern” spinoff, “Far Sector,” was scheduled for release just after the convention. “All right,” she said. “I’ve got to get to the DC publicity area. Where the hell is that?” We passed through metal detectors and into a huge atrium. Surveying the hordes, she said, “I am imagining there is a black hole under Javits sucking all the energy out of the people here.” To get through the day, she promised herself an evening of recovery: first relaxing with a Lush bath bomb, then slaughtering some digital foes in Mass Effect 3.

“Far Sector” is set at the edge of the known universe, in a multispecies city-state built on a Dyson sphere—a speculative megastructure, named after Freeman Dyson, who once postulated that hyper-advanced alien civilizations would seek to harness the energy of stars by encasing them in technological shells. The story centers on Sojourner Mullein, an N.Y.P.D. cop turned Lantern, who looks as if she has been cloned from the Afrofuturist pop star Janelle Monáe. Although it is a comic book, the writing carries Jemisin’s wry tone, interest in power, and unapologetic use of allegory. The series opens with Mullein surveying a murder scene, while considering an aphorism from “Things Fall Apart,” Chinua Achebe’s novel of colonialism: “A man who makes trouble for others is also making it for himself.” It lingers in her mind, but Mullein dismisses it, noting, “I’m the one causing the trouble. Just by existing.”

When Jemisin was in her twenties, she believed that a career in writing fantasy was closed to her, because of who she was. Instead, she pursued a graduate degree in psychology, and later took a job as a career counsellor at a college in Springfield, Massachusetts. “God help me,” she told me. “Isolated. Also cold as fuck! Nobody told me that, like, lake-effect snows happen in western Massachusetts.” To keep herself sane, she kept writing, often anonymous online fan fiction. (She still writes fan fiction, using secret identities that she guards aggressively.) A few years later, she landed a position at Northeastern University, in Boston, but felt no less lost there. In 2002, when she turned thirty, she had a moment of crisis. “I was, like, Oh, God, I am in debt up to my eyeballs, I hate this town, I don’t like my boyfriend,” she said. “I have got to reorder this. What do I need to do to be happy? O.K., get out of debt, get out of Boston, get into writing—maybe make some money from it, maybe that can help.”

Jemisin considered applying to the Clarion writers’ workshop, which specializes in science fiction and fantasy; luminaries in the genre teach there. But the workshop lasted six weeks—longer than she could take off from work. Instead, she attended a one-week workshop on Martha’s Vineyard. One instructor urged her to write some short stories. Jemisin at first chafed at the idea, but then relented, recognizing that the form’s constraints could sharpen her sense of pacing and character. She subscribed to genre magazines to study some examples, then tried her hand.

“How Long ’til Black Future Month?” includes one of her earliest published stories, “Cloud Dragon Skies” (2005), in which an ecological disaster has caused most of humanity to abandon Earth for a ring-shaped space colony, built from crushed asteroids, beyond Mars. “Old foolishness lay at the root of it,” notes the narrator, a young woman named Nahautu, one of the few who stay. The planet has rebounded, except for the atmosphere. The toxic chemicals it has absorbed combine to form a new kind of life:

One morning we awoke and the sky was a pale, blushing rose. We began to see intention in the slow, ceaseless movements of the clouds. Instead of floating, they swam spirals in the sky. They gathered in knots, trailing wisps like feet and tails. We felt them watching us.

In just a few pages, Jemisin sketched a scenario filled with ambiguities and philosophical questions. (How is nature defined? What represents progress?) The people on Earth decide to treat the animate clouds as natural—believing that, in a redemptive future, humanity must adapt to its ecosystem, not shape it. But scientists from the space colony try to neutralize the effect, and the sky reacts violently, tearing up the planet. Fleeing Earth in a coffinlike pod, Nahautu travels to the colony, an engineered world that is both better and lesser than the poisoned Earth. She is not fully at home in either place. In her new life, she becomes a storyteller.

DC Comics had a greenroom overlooking the Javits exhibition floor; after Jemisin spoke on a panel at the Comic Con main stage, a publicist ushered her there. Relaxed, she was in a joking mood. “My Twitter is full of bitch,” she warned the publicist. Online, Jemisin is an active, quick-witted commentator, lacing her posts—about politics or about the writing life—with zingers and tart observations. In 2015, the Times invited her to write a column about science fiction, called “Otherworldly”; she did so for two years, proving to be a perceptive and at times unsparing critic. In 2017, she described Andy Weir’s “The Martian,” a surprise hit that inspired a blockbuster film, as “Robinson Crusoe in space,” and his next novel, “Artemis,” as “a 300-page film pitch that, like its predecessor, will probably be more appealing after it goes to Hollywood.” That year, TNT announced that it was going to develop Jemisin’s “The Fifth Season” into a series—an ambitious or perhaps foolhardy bid, given the book’s narrative complexity and experimental style.

Two people in a basement look at stacks of cash on a table.

The DC publicist asked Jemisin, “Do you prefer to be called Nora or N.K.?” She laughed and said, “Nora is fine. Mom called me N.K. when I was in trouble as a child, so every time someone says it, I’m, like, ‘What? I didn’t do it!’ ”

Jemisin began to abbreviate her name at the start of her writing career, fearing that an association with sci-fi would interfere with her professional work. While she was at Northeastern, she imposed a strict deadline: to produce a novel within a year. Because she had a full-time job, most of the writing had to happen at night, but, she told me, “after work, my brain just couldn’t make that shift.” Mostly, she found herself mapping out ideas while doing the dishes or playing video games. She wrote every evening before bed, even if she knew most of it would not survive a self-edit the next day.

The novel that resulted was set in a kingdom inspired by ancient Egypt, with a belief system that drew on Eastern and Western religious ideas, as well as the Hippocratic notion of bodily humors. One of Jemisin’s invented humors is a form of healing magic tied to dreams. A priestly caste, called Gatherers, harvests it from people whom a goddess judges to be corrupt; the extractive process is deadly, but the system keeps the society in balance. At the book’s opening, a skilled Gatherer botches an extraction. In trying to figure out why, he learns that an assassin has been using the process to murder. “I was trying to appeal to traditional fantasy readers,” Jemisin said. “It is a bog-standard fantasy quest story.”

The book landed her an agent, Lucienne Diver, but no contract. Diver told me, “We got a lot of people saying, ‘She’s amazing, but I don’t know how to fit her into the market.’ ” She thought that the setting, the story’s complexity, the alchemy of Jemisin’s various source materials—the very attributes that made her stand out—also made the book hard to position for a first-time author. Devi Pillai, then an editor at Orbit, told me that she had loved the book but thought that it had no clear sales hook. She told Diver, “If she has anything else, I want to be the first to see it.”

Jemisin was convinced that the rejections, however politely stated, were code for the same editorial bigotry that Delany had faced in the sixties. (In 2012, after Jemisin had established herself, the book was published, as “The Killing Moon,” and nominated for a Nebula.) “I came very close to quitting,” she told me. “I had a long dark tea-time of the soul, and basically somewhere in there I realized, People are just that racist. If the only problem is that the book is full of black people—O.K., I got you. I am going to write something full of white people, but it is going to be all about how evil those white people are. ‘The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms’ was that book. It was me getting mad at science-fiction publishing.”

Whatever Jemisin’s anger with the industry, she produced a shrewd, philosophically playful page-turner that both reflected and transcended her feelings. She decided to write it in the first person—unusual for epic fantasy, which often leans on the third person to accommodate expositional detours about the imagined world. The story was no less original: it was about a warrior baroness summoned to an insular palace balanced on a pedestal, like an Eero Saarinen tabletop. The baroness is drawn into court intrigues and must solve a family mystery; eventually, she upends the society’s power structure, and along the way has interstellar sex with a god. (Jemisin told me that the book could have been marketed as a romance.)

Diver shopped the manuscript, and it inspired an immediate bidding war. Devi Pillai told me, “I was, like, ‘Mine!’ ” By then, Jemisin was working unhappily at a for-profit college in New York. “I was at some stupid-assed retreat, and I kept ducking out to take calls from my agent,” she told me. Pillai won the auction, with a six-figure bid that included a commitment for two more books. “I started screaming,” Jemisin told me. “People at the retreat were, like, ‘Should we call somebody?’ ”

For the first time, Jemisin could devote herself fully to writing. When Orbit began promoting the book—comparing it to the work of Neil Gaiman and George R. R. Martin—she created a Web site for herself. “Do big kids squee?” she wrote. “ ’Cos I think a squee is appropriate right about now. I can’t see how a little squee would hurt. Are we all agreed? ’Kay? Then here goes. ::SQUEE::”

In December, I caught up with Jemisin on the steps of City Hall, where she had come to research the second installment of her new trilogy. Rather than build a fantastical world for it, she decided to use New York, a city that has always seemed a little unreal. As she told me, “Sometimes, when I am walking, the air feels a particular way, or the light comes in at a particular angle, and the moment makes me feel like the city is alive and breathing.”

For the new trilogy, she had chosen to make these feelings literal, positing that any city, upon reaching the necessary urban development, could achieve sentience. New York is about to transition when it is invaded by interdimensional aliens seeking to destroy it. The story is part “Ghostbusters,” part “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.” Jemisin told me that the project was a chance to relax, “an emotional palate cleanser,” but it was also a coded critique of the sci-fi and fantasy genre. The aliens take on Lovecraftian form (“The tendril mass looms, ethereal and pale”) and are fought off by a multi-ethnic, multi-gendered posse of underdogs—people Lovecraft would have hated.

More than a decade earlier, Octavia Butler had asserted, “Hey, we’re here.” But, Jemisin told me, “we have to keep saying it.” Recent history, she said, had made this evident. In 2009, after a white novelist posted a formula for “writing the other,” many people of color in the genre erupted in frustration, triggering a contentious series of online debates, known collectively as RaceFail, that unfolded for more than a year. At a conference, Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican-Canadian writer, delivered a speech titled “A Reluctant Ambassador from the Planet of Midnight,” in which she tried to explain the explosion of anger to her white colleagues—making clear that Butler’s sense of invisibility was still sorely felt. Jemisin told me, “One blog was, like, ‘If you’re a person of color who is into science fiction, speak up. We’re doing a head count of how many of us exist.’ And it was a huge number. I had thought we were unicorns. In fact, the post was titled ‘The Wild Unicorn Herd Check-in.’ ”

Amid a reactionary backlash, Jemisin became a target. In 2013, she gave an impassioned speech about race in the genre, noting that a white supremacist had just run for president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. Though he lost, he had secured ten per cent of the vote, prompting her to criticize the “great unmeasured mass of enablers” who had been silent. The former candidate, in turn, called her an “ignorant half-savage” in a racist screed. Jemisin told me, “That touched off a whole big foofaraw.” Threats of violence poured in. She scrubbed her online presence and began to vary her commute.

Jemisin’s successes were caught up in the foofaraw, too. As the cultural divide sharpened, two blocs of conservative writers began interfering with the Hugos, using a loophole to shape the list of nominees; until it was closed, two years later, people protested by selecting “No award” on ballots. “The Fifth Season” won its award just after the loophole was closed. Accepting her third Hugo, Jemisin stood at the lectern, with the rocket-shaped award beside her, and declared, “This is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers, every single mediocre, insecure wannabe who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage, that people like me could not possibly have earned such an honor, and that when they win it’s ‘meritocracy,’ but when we win it’s ‘identity politics.’ ” Holding up the award, she added, “I get to smile at those people, and lift a massive, shining rocket-shaped finger in their direction.”

In Jemisin’s forthcoming New York novel, “The City We Became,” she borrows from some of her experiences: the aliens induce alt-right trolls to assist them, and the protagonists gird against cyber-harassment. “Places like New York are inherently free-form,” Jemisin told me. “If a bunch of fascists try to take over, New York could die.” She said that she was curious to explore “the ways in which the city, and the energy of a place like this, would resist that.”

In the City Council chambers, where she hoped to place a scene in her next book, Jemisin sat in a balcony and observed the rituals and the moods of Gotham politics. There was a tribute to Pakistan’s founding father, and a bill to force real-estate developers to set aside apartments for the homeless. She was especially keen on the way members conferred in side chats—a narrative opportunity. “I see that they are using a modified version of Robert’s Rules of Order,” she noted.

After three hours, her stamina waned. “This is putting me to sleep,” she whispered, and we stepped out into the cold, under a darkening sky. The night before, a snow squall had enveloped the city and then quickly receded, as if on supernatural command. To the north was the Williamsburg Bridge, which in Jemisin’s new book is destroyed by an alien creature, “like some haunting, bioluminescent deep-sea organism.”

The promotional material for “The City We Became” describes it as her most accessible book. “What seems to be happening, and I don’t know if I want to resist this, is an effort to push me into the mainstream,” Jemisin said. “I am wrestling with, Do I want to let people call me the next Atwood, or whatever? They always want you to be the next such-and-such. But I am still going to write what I am going to write.” Crossing Broadway, she mentioned an idea that was unrelentingly sci-fi: people who mutate into spacecraft. “Like werewolves, but spaceships,” she said, giggling. “I know, it’s corny. I admit that it’s corny! But it is an idea that persists in my head, and I keep wanting to explore it.” ♦

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“The Most Celebrated Science Fiction And Fantasy Writer of Her Generation.” —The New York Times

N. K. Jemisin

N(ora). K. Jemisin is a New York Times-bestselling author of speculative fiction short stories and novels, who lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. In 2018, she became the first author to win three Best Novel Hugos in a row. She has also won a Nebula Award, two Locus Awards, and is a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

Her short fiction has been published in pro markets such as Clarkesworld, Tor.com, WIRED, and Popular Science ; semipro markets such as Ideomancer and Abyss & Apex ; and podcast markets and print anthologies. Her novels, a novella, and two short story collections are out now from Orbit Books. Her novels are represented by Lucienne Diver of the Knight Agency.

She is an emeritus member of the Altered Fluid writing group. In addition to writing, she has been a counseling psychologist and educator, a hiker and biker, and a political/feminist/anti-racist blogger. Although she no longer pens the New York Times Book Review science fiction and fantasy column called “Otherworldly” (which she covered for 3 years), her reviews can still be found online.

Nora is currently unavailable for public speaking engagements. For inquiries about engagements for 2022, please contact Jayme Boucher at the Hachette Speakers Bureau: Jayme.Boucher @ hbgusa.com. You may contact her assistant at [email protected] for all other inquiries.

(You are welcome to repost her author photo [click on photo to download] without permission, provided that you credit photographer Laura Hanifin , copyright 2015. Rights to this photo were purchased from her, and it is currently under CC-BY license. Please contact her assistant if you would prefer a hi-res b&w-optimized version of this photo.

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Jason Parham

For N. K. Jemisin, World-Building Is a Lesson in Oppression

The worlds of the fantasy writer N. K. Jemisin are as imaginative as they are intimate. In her Inheritance trilogy, the gods are real and walk the streets. Her Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth books feature a supercontinent called the Stillness that is anything but—the very land is a geologic time bomb, ravaged by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The backdrop for “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in a City Beneath Still Waters,” part of Jemisin’s 2018 story collection How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? , is a New Orleans beset by climate chaos. When Jemisin builds these environments, she’s not just filling out the intricacies of the flora and fauna; she’s thinking about how the citizens of these realms would live their lives. For Jemisin, world-building is ultimately about power—who is wielding it and who is being stripped of it.

“Each flavor of oppression tends to support others,” she said during a two-hour world-building workshop at the WIRED25 festival in San Francisco last weekend, where Jemisin coached the crowd in constructing secondary-world societies. “I’m most interested in character. However, character is informed by culture, and culture is informed by environment. In a lot of cases, to understand the character I need to understand literally everything about their world.” To do so, she applies two frameworks: one that focuses on macroworldbuilding (the creation of the physical environment in which the story will take place—planet, continents, climate, ecology, and culture) and one that focuses on microworldbuilding (the societies that result, in all their flavors of social stratification).

In the session, Jemisin unpacked the latter, explaining that one of the biggest pitfalls in world-building was that writers don’t approach it thoughtfully. “The screw-up is that people just don’t do it at all,” she said. “People go into creating a world that is not like ours with their embedded assumptions about how our world works still firmly in place. So they end up creating our world but with tentacle sharks.” She continued, “If you are going to go into this completely alien world still thinking like a modern 2019 American, then you’re not doing your job as a creator.”

Doing it right requires supreme attention to nuance. If you’re building a society from the top down—her recommendation—start with species (which she says is dictated by the macroworld’s ecology), then consider their morphology (“consistent physiological variations within a species, like lactose intolerance”), raciation, acculturation, power, and role.

It didn’t take long for Jemisin to get the audience involved. The inhabitants of their world, they collectively dreamed up, would be salmon-shark creatures with five tentacles on each fin living in a tempestuous channel on an Earth-like planet. (The stuff of nightmares, Jemisin noted.) Jemisin pressed them to consider physiology: “Are there some with different colorations? Are there some who prefer the top of the water versus the bottom of the water?” When one audience member suggested that some would have gills and others wouldn’t, Jemisin worked through the possible ramifications. “In this [water-based] society, if they are treating the people without gills as less important, that’s just straight-up genocide. My guess is that the power dynamics of the society are going to put no gills at the top, because you’ve got to have more resources for the people with gills.”

That kind of deep care is what has made Jemisin one of the most acclaimed fantasy and sci-fi writers working today. It’s what makes her writing breathe, a living rebuttal to certain critics who might dismiss world-building as “a largely counterproductive concept for most types of fiction” that is “narrowing the paths available to writers and to readers.” Jemisin’s realms are epic, lush, and peculiar. They feel lived in, painstakingly thought-through. The power relations between her characters are often a direct result of the lands they inhabit. It’s another deft way Jemisin speaks to the times, even as her stories unfold on faraway planets.

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Before the talk came to a close, Jemisin gave attendees a preview of her new book, The City We Became , out next March. It finds her in new territory: Earthbound and grappling with the frictions of our current moment. “For the first time I’m writing in New York City in 2019, and I found it a lot harder, because I can’t just make stuff up,” she said, laughing. “It’s a little awkward.” Nonetheless, the world-building exercise still applies. “Even though it’s New York and I theoretically know it like the back of my hand, I actually changed something at the universal level in that story, and I had to work through how it would affect the world on down.”

World-building does not mean predicting the future—it’s about mirroring the present. In fact, Jemisin said sci-fi writers have historically been pretty bad at prophecy. “The tendency to center on technology is typically one of the worst ways when focusing on futurism,” she said. “What we need to look at are the ways in which human beings are evolving, societally speaking. I have no predictions for that.” But, she added, “I have a great deal of hope that we will start to realize that allowing certain kinds of manipulations is actually dangerous to the societies that we want to create. Right now, only some of us seem to realize that, and the rest of us seem to think that it is perfectly OK.”

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N.K. Jemisin's MasterClass on fantasy & sci-fi writing will show you a 'different way' of doing things

science fiction writer n k

If you're a big science fiction and fantasy book fan, odds are you've heard of N.K. Jemisin . Not only is she the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row for her Broken Earth  trilogy — most recently picking up the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for  Emergency Skin  — but her  other  award-winning series, the  Inheritance Trilogy , is being optioned to be adapted into a television series. 

However, her latest project finds her doing something a little different, as she teaches a self-guided course on writing fantasy and science fiction for MasterClass . Over the course of 16 video lessons, Jemisin walks interested students through the basics of building their own fictional worlds and crafting compelling characters, much like those found in her own writing. For the bestselling author, it was a chance to return to her roots as a teacher, having taught courses on other subjects during her time as a career counsellor and a counselling psychologist.

"I've been teaching sessions on world-building, character development, and things like that all along," Jemisin tells SYFY WIRE. "It's just I've been doing them relatively small scale with going to conventions and doing them at writing workshops. MasterClass gave me a chance to broaden my reach, really. That's what it came down to." 

The video sessions also gave Jemisin a chance to expand on the subject matter for the classes she's been teaching, as they allow her to take as much time as she wants, and give her the opportunity to dig into specific lessons, for more detail compared to what she can normally manage in person. As a result, the entire MasterClass spans a little over four hours, compared to the 30-minute to an hour she normally teaches. 

"There was an element of talking to people who I knew were interested and were at a certain point in their writing development," Jemisin says, when asked whether she might have changed or learned anything new about her own writing process, in terms of teaching it. "Normally I give this talk to people who are kind of thinking about writing or sometimes aren't writers at all... So really that was it, knowing that the audience was would-be writers or people who are early in their writing career, allowed me to narrow it down and drill deep."

N.K. Jemisin MasterClass

Credit: Courtesy of MasterClass

As Jemisin states early on in the course, a lot of her writing process is actually influenced by her background in psychology, with most of her influences stemming from the science fiction and fantasy she read growing up. (She cites Octavia Butler as an influence.)

"When I’m developing characters, I understand that if you've got a traumatized character, that character is going to keep people at arm's length, for example, and isn't necessarily going to look like what trauma in the media is often represented as," Jemisin says, offering up  Law and Order  as an example of this. "You see people distraught, crying and a lot of cases, people will actually be standoffish and very outwardly calm and cool. It's not necessarily a sign that they weren't traumatized. It's just differing from what people think."

Jemisin’s course doesn’t just outline how to create your own world and populate it with characters. It’s also a masterclass on how to write characters of marginalized backgrounds — something her own work is often praised for. And while it may seem quite basic to stress the importance of research and not simply borrowing another country’s culture for an alien species, Jemisin does so anyway.

"It’s not a simple process. You have to tread carefully. It’s a thing where you do need help,” Jemisin says about the value of doing research and speaking to people within the communities you’re trying to depict, be they of a different ethnicity, sexuality, or gender. “I just wanted to get that across to people that it’s a struggle even for me, but it’s one that’s worthwhile because you have to struggle for anything in writing. If you are developing a world based on geology, for example, you’ve got to study some geology."

She continues, "If you’re putting people in a story you have to study people… For me, it doesn’t seem outside of the norm to ask a writer to do. It’s part of the work that makes you a writer."

And like other fantasy and science fiction authors writing today , Jemisin says this inclusivity within her worlds is organic to her process as she tries to write the world as she sees it. "I live in New York City. I look around outside and I see people from so many different backgrounds, so many different races, so many different socio-economic strata, and I want to include those people in my stories because I like stories that feel like real worlds,” she says. “And some of it is in response to things I see happening a lot in media where I’m not being shown a real world. So TV shows set in New York City that feature nearly entirely white casts with the occasional Black walk-on who’s just the guest star and you never see them again. Things like that. I live in Bed-Stuy, so that’s not going to happen for me. In some ways, it’s just organic to my reaction to media."

Jemisin’s course also stresses another aspect of modern science fiction: the move away from the pursuit of scientific accuracy to a focus on characters that feel real to readers instead. But she views that as an emphasis on social science versus what’s considered “hard” science, which again comes back to her background in psychology, though she’s also interested in physics and geophysics. But at the end of the day, that’s not as important.

"Science fiction’s veneration of scientists means that a lot of people who did not have that social science background, or maybe didn’t respect it, got the chance to write science fiction and set that course," she states. "And there's a number of different figures along the way, some of the more influential editors and things like that, who basically kind of frowned on reasonable or realistic sociological and psychological parameters. I don't. That's not how my mind works. Those editors probably wouldn't have liked me. People like Joseph Campbell and so on, who were kind of well-known for having been discriminatory towards women and people of color."

She goes on to say: "So that’s a modern correction of that. It's 2021, we don't need to be pretending that the world is all middle American, lantern-jawed, white dudes going forth and sticking their phallic objects in people's face. There's a lot of different ways that we can do things."

The course doesn't just focus on teaching people how to write. It also sees Jemisin offer advice on how to embark on (and navigate) the path to getting published, as well as finding an agent. However, the very last session of her MasterClass is directed specifically at authors from marginalized communities, with advice on how to navigate social media and the internet at large — all of which Jemisin feels was absolutely necessary based on her own experiences. 

"If I'm talking to an audience of writers, I always include a component like that if I have time because that was one of the biggest surprises for me when I moved into this business," she says. "Granted, I was never expecting to become a MacArthur Genius Grant winner and all this other stuff. I just wanted to sell some books, but it did not occur to me that the act of creating while Black is a political act, and is treated as a revolutionary or challenging act by some. I guess I should have predicted that reaction. I had to react to it. So now I try and prepare other people to proactively be ready for it."

But at the end of the day, Jemisin just wants her students to feel like they too can write science fiction and fantasy novels of their own, and be successful doing it. 

"It is possible to make it in this business," advises Jemisin. "It doesn't necessarily mean they're all going to be bestsellers and make a million dollars and sell the next major million dollar movie franchise. But you can sell stories, you can get your work and your artistic vision out there and enjoy it."

N. K. Jemisin Teaches Fantasy and Science Fiction Writing is currently available to follow along with on MasterClass . 

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Science fiction writer N.K. Jemisin on unforeseen success, the apocalypse and creating space for black characters

Jemisin recently released the short story collection ‘how long ’til black future month’.

science fiction writer n k

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Everdeen Mason.

Science fiction and fantasy author N.K. Jemisin has been busy lately.

Since releasing her best-selling, Hugo-winning “ The Stone Sky ” in 2017, she has edited “ The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 ” and released the short story collection “ How Long ‘til Black Future Month? ”

That collection revisits many of the themes Jemisin has explored over the course of her more than 20-year career — and does so in a format that’s important to her: She began writing short stories as a way to tap into her creativity back when publishers didn’t know what to do with books like hers about black characters.

Fan of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’? Margaret Atwood is working on a sequel.

“The industry hasn’t changed that fast or that much,” Jemisin told The Washington Post. “This is one of the reasons, I guess, to be glad for the attention ... maybe my success can open more doors.”

She went on to say that her success was never what she “expected out of my writing career. I really just wanted to be able to pay the rent. And I would have been content to be able to pay the rent.”

Below, some other highlights from Jemisin’s interview with The Post:

On why she writes science fiction and fantasy: “Science fiction and fantasy has always had the potential to do a lot more than it has been doing.

The industry is still, on some level, catering to that core audience of fantasy readers in particular who don’t want to have the limits of their imagination pressed. They want comfort fiction. It’s going to reassure them endlessly that they are important, that they are the heroes ... everybody else wants that too, though. This is the thing that I’ve been trying to show people with the success of my work. Everybody else wants to be the hero, everybody else wants to be reassured that they are important, that their decisions matter, that their culture matters. It’s a giant untapped market.

Because when you are a genre that caters to a single demographic group on whom racism and sexism pivot — when you are giving people the power fantasies that they crave but their power fantasies depend on other people’s subjugation? No, it’s not going to be a good thing.”

On the cathartic elements of these stories: “At the end of the day I’m really just trying to tell a story that is entertaining. It’s just that what is entertaining these days is some dark [stuff]. I was not expecting [‘The Stone Sky’] to do as well as it did, partly because we are in the darkest timeline.

I remember the day after the presidential election everybody was just kind of sitting around numb. My Twitter feed sort of lit up with people who were like: Yeah, reading about the apocalypse is actually making you feel better right now. There’s a cathartic element to reading about people who’ve got it worse or people who are fighting back against things that seem overwhelming.”

On being a black writer: “Mostly what I’m trying to do is just get a particular story across. It’s just that I do default to making every single one of my characters a person of color. Because that’s what I want to see.

As a black writer I have a responsibility to try and create more space for black characters. I don’t always do so. I also want to retain the space to write whatever I want to write because there is always the danger of black authors being forced to write black characters and that literally has happened in some genres. And I refuse to allow that to happen to me.”

I see myself reflected in Michelle Obama’s memoir. Chances are you will, too.

On writing with race in mind: “One thing that I find a little awkward is inserting descriptions of white people, because we’re all so used to white as the unmarked default — even I am used to that.

I don’t like using food metaphors [for people] because, as an activist (whose name I can’t remember) pointed out to me many years ago, many of the food metaphors are derived from the stuff that we were enslaved to ship and take care of. So she had coffee brown skin and brown sugar and all this other stuff. People died for that. [For white people] there is “peaches and cream” complexion and that’s about it. There’s not this subtle attempt to associate certain kinds of people with certain kinds of activities. White people’s range of activity is so wide that there is no set of words that naturally adheres to their descriptions.”

HOW LONG 'TIL BLACK FUTURE MONTH?

By N.K. Jemisin

Orbit. 416 pp. $26.

science fiction writer n k

Black Girl Nerds

N. K. Jemisin on Her Brand-New MasterClass: Fantasy and Science Fiction Writing

Black Girl Nerds

Jeanine is a Writer, Actor, member SAG/AFTRA, AEA, Podcast host,…

The Hugo award is the Oscar of science fiction, and N. K. Jemisin has won it four times. Hands down, Jemisin is one of the best writers of our generation (I highly recommend The City We Became ). She has a phenomenal course in fantasy and science fiction writing on MasterClass. In 16 lessons, Jemisin teaches writing technique and shares vital business tools for selling science fiction and fantasy and wisdom for anyone interested in becoming a writer. BGN spoke with Jemisin via Zoom about her new MasterClass.

In Lesson 1, you share that one of the reasons you love science fiction was because it allowed you to figure out where you were going. How does it feel to be an afro futurist explorer?

It’s just the way that my creativity runs. I spent my childhood reading science fiction. When I started writing, I wrote science fiction. There was never really a question that I was going to be doing science fiction and fantasy of some flavor or another because there are things that have always caught my attention and attracted me. The idea that we exist in the future was not a thing that I saw in science fiction, except in occasional works like Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, people like that. But it was the thing that I grappled with when I was younger. Of course now that I’m a writer myself, I write what I’m interested in, I write what I want to see. I’m just glad that other people want to see it, too.

science fiction writer n k

During your World Building lesson in MasterClass, my mind broke open and drank up all that wisdom. How did you develop your style of world building?

World building — it’s just a thing that you do if you’re gonna write science fiction. You have no choice. When you’re a young science fiction writer, you usually start by reading books by existing writers. I read Stephen King’s On Writing , Orson Scott Card’s books  — I have some issues with his politics but his writing book was actually very useful. Then there are a number of other books that I read on how to write. When you’re a good reader, you read other people’s books and study their techniques to develop your own. I would read people like Octavia Butler and realize that she borrowed from certain kinds of biology and certain kinds of sociology. Her futurism turned out to be a lot more accurate than the future that you see in most science fiction and fantasy because she just was reading the headlines and watching the news. She had a person of color and an oppressed person’s understanding of how America really works. She wasn’t going with the propaganda; she was going with the reality. That kind of thing is something I gained just from reading her work. I’ve read her books repeatedly. I’ve read lots of other books, and then, of course, in my own background, I went to grad school for counseling psych. I was a practicing counseling psychologist doing career counseling and counseling of various kinds for like 20 years, so my experience seeing people dealing with trauma just naturally feeds into my writing.

Which creates nuance and reality. That’s why I feel invited into your novel’s worlds and have a relationship with the people who reside in your mind, which is spectacular. 

science fiction writer n k

It’s so easy for writers to get caught up in ego. How can writers let go of ego in order to tell better stories?

Concentrate on the importance of the story. The story has to come first. It’s not about you. It’s not about your research skills. I’ve probably written dozens of really good lines that I write and I’m like, “Oh that’s a killer.” And then in the editing, I realized that line is superfluous. It’s not helping the story. At the end of the day, the overall product that you’re producing is also an act of ego. You want that whole book to hang together. It’s not about the individual lines. We have a saying in science fiction: “Murder your darlings.” The lines that come through that you’re like, “Oh that’s my good one,” no that line may not be useful, so it’s got to go. 

In Lesson 2 you talk about “rubbing the serial number off of an existing culture because they’re afraid of creating something new.” I love this quote. Please tell me more about this aspect of writing.

Well, that’s a difficult thing to answer in a quick answer, but what it comes down to is you shouldn’t be afraid of world building. You should not be afraid of coming up with something that you’ve not seen elsewhere. Plus also it’s kind of disrespectful to take people’s culture and, you know, turn it into a prop. That’s really what it comes down to. It’s good writing to not steal from people. Writers are pack rats. We all do that; we all steal. It’s just a question of like, you know, stealing better.

You decolonize science fiction and fantasy. In Lesson 10, you break down where rugged individualism comes from in American storytelling. How has your ability to disrupt that stereotype brought you joy in your storytelling?

To me it’s just what I want to see. There’s no plan that I have and how I do the writing that I do. When I’m talking about these techniques or these decolonization things, this is just stuff I’m going through myself. This is stuff that I do to hopefully help myself become a better writer, things that I find more interesting. I get bored with the same kinds of stories. It comes down to I write what I want to see.

science fiction writer n k

In the later lessons, you get into the nuts and bolts of being a writer. The most powerful part of those lessons for me were dealing with rejection. What is your best tool for living a life as a writer and coexisting with rejection?

Coexisting with rejection is the best tool for living life as a writer. Like I said in my MasterClass, it’s best to treat rejections as achievements. Yay, you submitted something! Yay, you got feedback! Even if that feedback is just a form letter, it tells you something useful. Maybe the market you submitted your work to is a bad match for it; maybe you were way off from the guidelines and didn’t use the right format; maybe you just need to try again. It’s hard to separate yourself from the hurt and disappointment, but you have to try because this business is so full of it that you won’t make it otherwise. So focus on what you gain from every rejection.

Even if fantasy and science fiction aren’t your genre, N. K. Jemisin’s MasterClass is a vital tool for writers to experience. This course will enhance your scope of storytelling. I highly recommend this fantastic online course.

N. K. Jemisin teaches Science Fiction Writing on MasterClass streaming now on  www.masterclass.com . 

Follow on twitter: @nkjemisin @masterclass

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Jeanine is a Writer, Actor, member SAG/AFTRA, AEA, Podcast host, Producer, CEO VisAbleBlackWoman Productions, Certified Health Coach and Conscious Dance facilitator. Jeanine's mission, centering Black women's stories to preserve our legacies.

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The Book Behind ‘American Fiction’ Came Out 23 Years Ago. It’s Still Current.

The movie, with its handful of Oscar nominations, has refocused attention on “Erasure,” a satire of the literary world and its racial biases.

A still from “American Fiction” shows the actor Jeffrey Wright as a writer holding what looks like a stack of copies of his own books in a bookstore.

By Sarah Lyall and Alexandra Alter

There’s a scene in Percival Everett’s 2001 novel, “Erasure,” in which the main character, a cerebral Black novelist named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, goes to a bookstore to hunt, as writers often do, for his own books. He finds four of them — including “The Persians,” an “obscure reworking of a Greek tragedy” — placed, infuriatingly, in the “African American Studies” section.

The only thing “ostensibly African American” about the book, he fumes to himself, “was my jacket photograph.”

“Erasure,” the basis for Cord Jefferson’s new movie “American Fiction,” is a mordant satire of the way the literary world imposes broad-strokes racial stereotypes on nonwhite authors, as well as a moving portrait of a complicated Black man from a complicated family.

In a fit of fury after the rejection of his latest novel, an abstruse story about Aristophanes, Euripides and “the death of metaphysics,” Monk produces an over-the-top satirical novel featuring an uneducated Black teenager who already has four children with four different women. When the novel — initially called “My Pafology” and supposedly written by an escaped convict named Stagg R. Leigh — becomes a massive best seller and cultural phenomenon, Monk responds with utter disbelief.

“It’s not art,” he tells his fellow judges on a literary awards panel who are showering the book with praise and who don’t know that he’s its real author. “It is offensive, poorly written, racist and mindless.”

Starring Jeffrey Wright, “American Fiction” has been a critical success and a hit with audiences; it was recently nominated for five Academy Awards. It’s also refocused attention back on “Erasure” — and on how much, if anything, has changed for nonwhite authors in the 23 years since the book was published.

Lisa Lucas, who in 2020 became the first Black publisher of Pantheon in its 80-year history, wrote on the social media platform X that the film felt “mildly too close to home.” In an interview, she said that she found it dispiriting that the publishing industry had taken so long to engage with the criticism leveled by “Erasure.”

“It took a movie of a book to get publishing to talk about this stuff to the degree that it’s willing to,” Lucas said. “We all need to re-evaluate the openness of who gets to tell stories and how,”

The movie has also come at a time when new authors of color are engaging with the same questions posed by “Erasure” — and publishers have paid substantial sums for novels that satirize the literary world’s racial inequities.

In 2021, Atria published “The Other Black Girl,” a debut novel by Zakiya Dalila Harris , a former assistant editor at Knopf Doubleday. The book, which received an advance of more than $1 million and was adapted into a Hulu series, is a horror-tinged social satire about an ambitious aspiring editor who is the only Black employee in the editorial department of a major publishing house.

Dismayed by her colleagues’ casual dismissal of her ideas and the industry’s narrow views about how race should be portrayed in fiction, she is relieved when another Black woman is hired — only to suspect that the new employee is in fact sabotaging her.

Another satirical novel, R.F. Kuang’s “Yellowface,” published last year by William Morrow, features a white novelist who steals the unpublished manuscript of a deceased Chinese American writer, rewrites parts of it and passes it off as her own under the name “Juniper Song,” using a racially ambiguous photograph.

The novel, about Chinese laborers in World War I, is positioned to be a best seller, but ultimately critics raise questions about the author’s race and accuse her of cultural appropriation and of being “inauthentic.”

Kuang, a Chinese American fantasy writer, has said she is weary of the literary world’s tendency to promote her and her work as “diverse.” In a recent essay in Time magazine, she described the “cringing pleasure” she derived from the scenes in “American Fiction” that captured the “encounters that every nonwhite writer has experienced” in the publishing industry.

Kuang said in an email that the attention that “American Fiction” is generating reflects the creative classes’ willingness to confront their own biases. But it might be masking something more insidious, she said.

“Another angle worth considering is the fact that the industry stands to profit quite a lot from its own self-criticism,” she said. “A certain amount of lip service paradoxically makes institutional racism very profitable. So one must always be careful of being defanged, co-opted and tokenized.”

Erroll McDonald, vice president and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf and one of the lone Black editors in the upper echelons of the publishing industry, said that many of the themes in Everett’s book feel just as fresh today as they did in 2001. He said he was all too familiar with the book’s depiction of the way white editors and publishers gravitate toward Black stories that reinforce stereotypes, rather than those showing more nuanced depictions of Black life.

The white editors in “American Fiction” — who believe that Monk’s ridiculously overblown book is an accurate account of urban Black life and are enthralled by its possibly murderous fake author — may seem like parodies of tone-deaf executives eager to cash in by exploiting racial clichés. But, McDonald said, they’re actually closer to reality than audiences might realize.

“The marketing and selling of books by Black people remains as problematic as it ever was,” he said. “Publishing remains an industry informed by apartheid.”

Everett’s novel “Erasure” works on two levels: as parody that spins in increasingly outrageous directions, but also as a poignant, multilayered story of its main character’s life. A middle-aged English professor from a family of doctors, Monk spends much of the book in a state of mild crisis, grappling with professional ennui, his mother’s descent into dementia, the legacy of his father’s infidelity and eventual suicide, the sudden death of his sister — and now his own secret identity as the author of a bewilderingly successful work that he hates.

These issues have little or nothing to do with race, and their existence proves the point that Monk has been trying to make all along — that his “Black experience” is just as representative as anyone’s. (Editors “want a Black book,” his agent tells him at the beginning of the movie, when Monk can’t get his new novel published. “They have a Black book,” Monk responds. “I’m Black and it’s my book.)

There’s a certain irony in the fact that at age 67, Everett — an award-winning author of numerous novels, short stories and poetry collections whose 2021 novel, “The Trees,” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize — is now getting perhaps the most attention of his career because of the release of the movie version of his 13th novel, a book he wrote more than two decades ago.

Everett declined to be interviewed for this article, saying he would answer questions about the movie only in interviews with Jefferson, its director and screenwriter.

But in a 2001 interview with The Los Angeles Times , he spoke about “the terrible irony” in readers’ and critics’ response to “Erasure.”

“This book is getting a lot of attention for the very reason that I wrote the book,” he said. “Everybody is interested in the race question … instead of the book itself.”

Sarah Lyall is a writer at large, working for a variety of desks including Sports, Culture, Media and International. Previously she was a correspondent in the London bureau, and a reporter for the Culture and Metro desks. More about Sarah Lyall

Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times. More about Alexandra Alter

A Guide to Black History Month

The monthlong celebration honors how african americans have shaped the united states through both triumphs and trauma..

Carter G. Woodson’s house, the birthplace of Black History Month, was a hub of scholarship, bringing together generations of intellectuals, writers and activists .

Wondering how Black History Month  came to be? Learn about the history of this celebration .

Dig deeper with the 1619 Project , an initiative by The Times Magazine that aims to reframe America’s history by placing the consequences of slavery at the very center of the nation’s narrative.

Expand your knowledge with Black History, Continued , our project devoted to pivotal moments and transformative figures in Black history.

Explore Black love in all its forms and expressions with this collection of heart-warming stories .

Celebrate the contributions of Black authors to literature by diving into the works of Octavia Butler  and Toni Morrison .

Over the years, many important African American landmarks have disappeared or fallen into disrepair. Here are eight historical sites  that are being preserved.

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COMMENTS

  1. N. K. Jemisin

    Nora Keita Jemisin [1] (born September 19, 1972) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. Her fiction includes a wide range of themes, notably cultural conflict and oppression. [2] [3] Her debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and the subsequent books in her Inheritance Trilogy received critical acclaim.

  2. N.K. Jemisin

    N.K. Jemisin, (born September 19, 1972, Iowa City, Iowa, U.S.), American author of science-fiction and fantasy short stories and novels. She often explores issues such as racism, cultural conflict, and family relationships in her work. In 2016 Jemisin became the first Black writer to win a Hugo Award for best novel, for The Fifth Season (2015).

  3. N.K. Jemisin

    N.K. Jemisin also participated in the Boston-area writing group BRAWlers. She was also a member of Altered Fluid. Her career has availed her several opportunities over the years, this including the chance to be co-Guest of Honor at the WisCon Science Fiction Convention in Madison, Wisconsin in 2014.

  4. N. K. Jemisin Teaches Fantasy and Science Fiction Writing

    Bestselling sci-fi and fantasy writer N. K. Jemisin teaches you how to create diverse characters, build a world from scratch, and get published. Starting at $10/month (billed annually) for all classes and sessions Trailer

  5. N. K. Jemisin's Dream Worlds

    Several years ago, N. K. Jemisin, the fantasy and science-fiction author, had a dream that shook her. In her sleep, she found herself standing in a surreal tableau with a massif floating...

  6. Welcome

    "The Most Celebrated Science Fiction And Fantasy Writer of Her Generation." —The New York Times

  7. About

    About - Epiphany 2.0 "The Most Celebrated Science Fiction And Fantasy Writer of Her Generation." —The New York Times N. K. Jemisin N (ora). K. Jemisin is a New York Times-bestselling author of speculative fiction short stories and novels, who lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY.

  8. Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews N.K. Jemisin

    How the fantasy and science-fiction writer N.K. Jemisin thinks about people and difference in our complex world. transcript. Back to The Ezra Klein Show. 0:00/1:05:57-1:05:57.

  9. N. K. Jemisin on Diversity in Science Fiction and Inspiration From

    N. K. Jemisin won the Hugo Award for her science-fiction fantasy novel "The Fifth Season." Laura Hanifin By Alexandra Alter Aug. 24, 2016 When N. K. Jemisin was halfway through...

  10. The Fantasy Master N.K. Jemisin Turns to Short Stories

    N. K. Jemisin is an award-winning novelist and the former science fiction columnist for The Times Book Review. Laura Hanifin Buy Book When you purchase an independently reviewed book...

  11. For N. K. Jemisin, World-Building Is a Lesson in Oppression

    The worlds of the fantasy writer N. K. Jemisin are as imaginative as they are intimate. In her Inheritance trilogy, the gods are real and walk the streets. Her Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth...

  12. Meet Your Instructor: N. K. Jemisin

    Bestselling sci-fi and fantasy writer N. K. Jemisin teaches you how to create diverse characters, build a world from scratch, and get published. Lesson Plan 1. Meet Your Instructor: N. K. Jemisin 2. Elements of Worldbuilding 3. Macro-worldbuilding Exercise: Build Your World 4. Micro-worldbuilding: Conceiving the Culture and People 5.

  13. N.K. Jemisin interview on her MasterClass on Fantasy and Science ...

    N.K. Jemisin's MasterClass on fantasy & sci-fi writing will show you a 'different way' of doing things. By Nivea Serrao Apr 23, 2021, 3:24 PM ET. If you're a big science fiction and fantasy book fan, odds are you've heard of N.K. Jemisin. Not only is she the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row for her Broken ...

  14. N. K. Jemisin Teaches Fantasy and Science Fiction Writing

    2K 1.5M views 2 years ago #scifi #fantasy #MasterClass The winner of the Hugo Award for three consecutive years for her Broken Earth trilogy, N. K. Jemisin has sold millions of copies and...

  15. Worldbuilding: Inventing Science and Magic

    Bestselling sci-fi and fantasy writer N. K. Jemisin teaches you how to create diverse characters, build a world from scratch, and get published. Sign Up Lesson Plan 1. Meet Your Instructor: N. K. Jemisin 2. Elements of Worldbuilding 3. Macro-worldbuilding Exercise: Build Your World 4. Micro-worldbuilding: Conceiving the Culture and People 5.

  16. The PEN Pod: Confronting Science Fiction and Our Reality with N.K

    On The PEN Pod today, we spoke with New York Times-bestselling author N.K. Jemisin, the first author to ever win three consecutive best novel Hugo Awards for her sci-fi trilogy, Broken Earth.She has also won a Nebula Award, two Locus Awards, and a number of other honors. Her latest book, The City We Became, was released this past March.We spoke with her about the parallels between science ...

  17. Science fiction writer N.K. Jemisin on unforeseen success, the

    Science fiction and fantasy author N.K. Jemisin has been busy lately. Get the full experience. Choose your plan. Since releasing her best-selling, Hugo-winning "The ...

  18. N. K. Jemisin on Her Brand-New MasterClass: Fantasy and Science Fiction

    The Hugo award is the Oscar of science fiction, and N. K. Jemisin has won it four times. Hands down, Jemisin is one of the best writers of our generation (I highly recommend The City We Became). She has a phenomenal course in fantasy and science fiction writing on MasterClass. In 16 lessons, Jemisin

  19. N.K. Jemisin on Creating New Worlds and Playing with ...

    Among Jemisin's accolades, her debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, was short-listed for the James Tiptree Jr. Award, earned the Sense of Gender Award from the Japanese Association for Gender, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and a Locus Award for Best First Novel.In 2018, when The Stone Sky (the final book in Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy) won the Best Novel Hugo award, Jemisin became ...

  20. Elements of Worldbuilding

    1. Meet Your Instructor: N. K. Jemisin 2. Elements of Worldbuilding 3. Macro-worldbuilding Exercise: Build Your World 4. Micro-worldbuilding: Conceiving the Culture and People 5. Micro-worldbuilding: Power Dynamics and Cultural Appropriation 6. Worldbuilding: Inventing Science and Magic 7. Worldbuilding: Research 8.

  21. N K Jemisin Teaches Fantasy And Science Fiction Writing

    Teaches Fantasy and Science Fiction Writing The winner of the Hugo Award for three consecutive years for her Broken Earth Trilogy, N. K. Jemisin has sold millions of books and created new cultures and histories. Now the acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer is teaching you how to create a world from scratch, develop compelling characters ...

  22. Worldbuilding: Research

    Bestselling sci-fi and fantasy writer N. K. Jemisin teaches you how to create diverse characters, build a world from scratch, and get published. Explore the Class Learn how to live life as a writer, absorbing and interpreting the world for your audience. Nora also shares how to incorporate research.

  23. The Book Behind 'American Fiction' Came Out 23 Years Ago. It's Still

    Feb. 3, 2024. There's a scene in Percival Everett's 2001 novel, "Erasure," in which the main character, a cerebral Black novelist named Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, goes to a bookstore ...

  24. The Psychology of Characters

    The winner of the Hugo Award for three consecutive years for her Broken Earth Trilogy, N. K. Jemisin has sold millions of books and created new cultures and histories. Now the acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer is teaching you how to create a world from scratch, develop compelling characters, and get published.