spinofflive
Head and shoulders photo of a Black woman looking calmly to camera. Design elements around her, city buildings, statue of liberty.
NK Jemisin (Photo: Laura Hanifin; Design: Tina Tiller)

BooksFebruary 10, 2022

Where the magic comes from: an interview with fantasy writer NK Jemisin

Head and shoulders photo of a Black woman looking calmly to camera. Design elements around her, city buildings, statue of liberty.
NK Jemisin (Photo: Laura Hanifin; Design: Tina Tiller)

The American science fiction and fantasy writer speaks with Alexander Stronach ahead of her appearance at the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts. 

It’s hard to overstate how big a deal NK Jemisin is. She’s one of only seven authors in history to win the Hugo Award for best novel more than three times and the only one to win it three consecutive times (2016, 2017 and 2018); each of those wins was for an entry in the same trilogy, her seminal Broken Earth. Jemisin’s writing is sharp, beautiful and strange, equal parts epic and intimate, often masterfully uncomfortable. She has a way of taking massive, earth-shattering conflicts and showing them up close, on ordinary people swept up in their thrall, forced to change or die, and many of them die. To quote the opening lines of the first Broken Earth novel, The Fifth Season: “Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over and move onto more interesting things.”

With that obvious affection for the human side of stories, it shouldn’t be surprising that face to face (via Zoom from her apartment in New York) she’s deeply disarming, warm and funny, a little bit pisstakey of the over-eager journo puffing her up. Her followup series to The Broken Earth is The Great Cities – the first book, The City We Became, came out last year to considerable acclaim and she’s just handed in the first draft of its currently-unnamed sequel. It’s a love letter to New York, but we’re saturated in love letters to New York; she stressed that New York isn’t that different from a hundred other cities. “It contains multitudes,” she says. “It is legion.” 

Later on I ask her whether The City We Became included a reference to infamous shock site goatse.cx. After a very long pause, she deadpans “yes”. 

Whitman, the gospels, goatse. It’s not a combination of words any of us were expecting to read today, but Jemisin seems to delight in defying expectations. The trilogy that made her a household name is relentless and bleak, a story she wrote contemporaneous with the 2014 murder of Michael Brown by Ferguson police and subsequent unrest, a story that opens with a promise to show us the real end of the world, that then cuts to a Black mother cradling her dead son. “My mother was dying as I was writing The Broken Earth and I think I was beginning to realise that when I started the book. Simultaneously, on a larger societal scale, I began to believe that the United States was dying. Still believe that’s happening.”

She calls The Broken Earth an exploration of “cultural grief as well as personal grief”. She wrote The City We Became after her mother’s death, in the early months of the Covid outbreak, during the darkest days of the Trump administration, but it is a celebration, certainly not blind to New York’s troubles but filled with music, laughter and song and also goatse. Doom has come to the city, but the five boroughs ain’t gonna take it lying down. What changed?

“I deliberately set out to write something upbeat because I needed it,” she says, “after the grimness of three books of the world ending I needed some joy […] There was a tonal mismatch throughout me writing this series that’s made it harder to write than The Broken Earth, trying to write lighthearted joyful stuff when you’re worried that you won’t be able to go outside again without wearing a mask, at the time that’s a shocking thing. I was still scrubbing my groceries at the time that I [launched] the first book, and fretting about shortages of food.” 

Two book covers, both ominous-looking.
The first novels of Jemisin’s series The Broken Earth and The Great Cities (Images: Supplied)

The word “hopepunk” has been bandied around a little in science-fiction circles over the last few years, it’s a fraught term that many hate and nobody quite agrees on, but if there’s a positive vision of hopepunk it’s this: radical hope, revolutions you can dance to, candles held up against the deepest night. Much of the criticism of hopepunk is that it blinds itself to cold reality, that it’s comfort food for the soul, and The City We Became is anything but; Jemisin couldn’t write a naive book if she wanted to. She writes with blades. Even the goatse reference is motivated – it’s a sculpture in a gallery show by a smug hipster who moonlights as an alt-right provocateur, a point about how the internet trolls of the 2000s have laundered themselves into a veneer of respectability and become something more insidious, supported by the establishment, but still, ultimately, gaping assholes. But this time they’re not sending you shock images, they’re gentrifying your neighbourhood, they’re talking about eugenics to their million listeners, they’re running for office and winning. It’s the sort of funny that makes you cry. Later we talk about 2012 video game Journey, a favourite of hers during lockdown, one of several that “acknowledge the dark and let me move towards the light”. That’s often what The City We Became feels like, an acknowledgment of darkness, and a path towards light. 

Jemisin seems uncomfortable with the weight of fame, quick to puncture anybody trying to gas her up. She laughs at gross old memes. She spent a lot of the pandemic playing Skyrim, trying to collect every cheese in the game and separate them out into discrete rooms for each flavour. She wrote over 200,000 words of fanfic during the pandemic, and no she will not link her AO3. I hope I’m not blowing anybody’s mind by stating that authors are ordinary people, but it takes some time to adjust for the daylight between the titanic figure of NK Jemisin and the low key reality of Nora, but maybe that’s where the magic comes from? The grand and the intimate, the mythic and the personal, the gospels and goatse. There’s always a human at the heart of an NK Jemisin story, and maybe it’s Nora.

Large parts of The Fifth Season are written in second person, a decision that rubbed some readers the wrong way, but it lends the books a directness, there is a feeling of sitting around a fire listening to a storyteller with deep stress lines and deeper laugh lines. In modern fiction, second person is rare outside of kids’ books and the occasional piece of literary fiction, common wisdom is to avoid it whenever possible, but the choice to use it was deeply motivated – the directness and intimacy are hard for other points of view to match. Jemisin details a time when, delirious with bronchitis that would turn into pneumonia, she found herself in an old-fashioned stone-walled blazing-hearth-and-everything inn in Milan. 

“An old man came downstairs and started talking. Gradually people stopped listening to each other and started paying attention to him as he continues doing whatever he was doing. I don’t know if he was deliberately telling a story, but people were interested in what he had to say. I speak no Italian, my Italian is bullshit, and I was riveted, by not only this man but by the way but by the way he slowly pulled that energy towards him. That is what a good use of second-person should feel like.” 

It carries over into her writing in the more traditional third and first-person – there’s a conversationality, a wit and flow. NK Jemisin is sweeping and epic, crafting worlds with a wave of the hand, smiling with teeth like blades; Nora Jemisin is sly, funny, stocking her room with stolen goats’ cheese. Sometimes the link between author and reader breaks down: The City We Became was a book about gentrification, but many readers in the pandemic took it as a book about plague. 

“Writers need to be more humble about the fact that they are not in control of the experience,” she says. That’s a little unbelievable coming from an author who seems so confident and in control, but that’s part of the appeal – it’s that low-key-ness, she’s sitting in a stone-walled inn, small in the firelight, effortlessly impossible to ignore. 

It’s hard to overstate how big a deal NK Jemisin is, and yet –

When she was an emerging author, she went to (science-fiction convention) Boskone to meet Octavia Butler, and had a panic attack, and Butler died several years later, before Nora had a chance to meet her again, and now she sees others panicking before meeting her. She laughs, and says, “I take them aside and say ‘I’m lactose intolerant and I’m gonna have to leave shortly because I ate something with cheese in it.’ I try to remind them I’m a person, I’ll pull them aside; deep breaths, you look like you have something to say, let’s talk like regular people.” 

That’s it in a nutshell; let’s move onto more interesting things; it’s not magic, it’s just us.  

NK Jemisin will be speaking (digitally) with Elizabeth Knox at the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts about the power of science fiction and fantasy to tell human stories, and Jemisin’s latest book, The City We Became.

Keep going!
Bright breezy book cover showing torsos of two young men, illustrated in happy bright blue. Beside the cover, photo of a smiling woman wearing glasses, illustration of a book open in front of her.
H.S. Valley and her debut, prize-winning novel (Photo: Supplied; Design: Tina Tiller)

BooksFebruary 8, 2022

Think Hogwarts, but closer to Westport: introducing a new queer YA rom-com

Bright breezy book cover showing torsos of two young men, illustrated in happy bright blue. Beside the cover, photo of a smiling woman wearing glasses, illustration of a book open in front of her.
H.S. Valley and her debut, prize-winning novel (Photo: Supplied; Design: Tina Tiller)

Sam Brooks Zooms with HS Valley, the Auckland writer who won a prestigious award for her novel about a school of magic under Fox Glacier. 

I can’t remember the last time an opening paragraph caught me – hook, line and sinker, even a little bit of a wink – like Tim Te Maro and the Subterranean Heartsick Blues.

To wit: “You’d think a place like Fox Glacier High School for the Magically Adept – which has taught magic for decades – might’ve found a way to heat its super-secret underground compound, or at least the sick bay. Especially since it’s under a river of ice.”

It’s an opening that is, as every opening should be, reflective of the novel that follows it. It’s very matter-of-fact – this is not just a world where magic exists, but is studied and exists quite casually. It uses the words “super-secret underground compound” equally as casually. Finally, there’s that last sentence, a little knowing nudge.

It is also an opening that is reflective of its author, HS Valley (a pseudonym, but the H is real), who walked away with the 2020 Ampersand Prize, Australia and New Zealand’s premiere award for unpublished writers of middle-grade and young adult fiction. The judges called her book “charming and hilarious … [it was] selected from a record number of submissions, and was instantly beloved by the team”.

Valley, who is a high school teacher and has a bachelor’s degree in design – her website states she is using both to teach teenagers how to have good taste – comes from Tāmaki Makaurau and now lives in the Waitākere Ranges.

When I spoke to her over Zoom, Valley was a matter-of-fact, casual presence, but one who seemed quietly, confidently delighted in the world she’d created, even as her dog created pure chaos around her.

Selfie of a young woman in a glorious room full of plants and colour.
Valley doesn’t write at a desk – she has a blue velvet couch and bajillions of plants (Photo: Supplied)

The premise sounds hard won: Tim Te Maro and Elliott Parker, two students in their final year at Fox Glacier High School for the Magically Adept (think Hogwarts, but closer to Westport), have never gotten along. However, when they both get dumped the night before the big egg-baby assignment, they have to choose: join forces, or work with their exes. What follows is a fun, low-stakes (but high-investment) romp through the brains of lovelorn, hormone-driven teenagers, and the delightful array of queer people that populate their school and by proxy their world.

“It was born of my love of tropes and Draco Malfoy,” says Valley, in what would turn out to be a characteristically trademark brief, effective response. “I wanted to use magic, because I like magic and everybody needs a bit of escapism.

“I figured if there was magic in New Zealand, everybody would be real cash [casual] about it. It’s New Zealand – even if people had it, they’d be like ‘yeah whatever’ and if they didn’t have it, they’d be like ‘yeah but it’s not that cool’.”

The observation comes from Valley’s time as a high school teacher. She used her “in-depth knowledge on how annoying teenagers are” and combined it with our national inability to get excited about things that are sort of, objectively, very cool. 

She explains that no matter how cool the thing is that you want to get students to do, they’ll still whinge about it. “I always found a certain franchise quite strange,” she says with a verbal wink. “Nobody was acting like a teenager. Especially the main three in that particular brand. If you’ve seen a bunch of teenagers try something and suck at it and try again and again but still suck, they don’t want to do it any more. I found it really unrealistic that there was no one there who was like, ‘No, I suck as a student. Why would I want to turn a needle into a matchstick? This is dumb.’”

That intimate knowledge of teenagers rings true throughout Valley’s novel. These aren’t the sort of teenagers that often show up in such novels – essentially adults wearing teenage clothes and talking like insufferable postgrads – they’re teenagers who are delightfully, frustratingly human. They’re brash, rude, and believably inconsistent with their thoughts and feelings.

What rings equally true is Valley’s sense of place, even a place that’s as silly-sounding as the Fox Glacier School for the Magically Adept. Despite the drama that comes along with teen romance, especially queer teen romance, the book is a comforting affair. Of that choice, she says, “I had to spend months inside that world. I’m like, ‘why the fuck would I want to write something miserable and make myself cry?’”

When asked why her book is specifically a queer romance novel, Valley’s response is equally as direct. “I don’t know anything about straight romance and what I do know is boring. I don’t like it. It didn’t occur to me to pretend to be straight and write something.”

As light and fluffy as the premise may seem, there’s a real need for work like this. “If I was a 14 or 15-year-old and I picked this up off the shelf I wouldn’t quite know how to feel. These sorts of novels weren’t readily available when I was that age.”

Valley and I aren’t far apart in age, and I can remember scanning the bookshelves looking for anything that might have a gay character. More often than not, I’d end up skipping straight past the YA and going to the adult section. It’s not that I necessarily regret reading The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst at 15, but if you’re a young queer person, it might not be the best introduction to that realm of literature.

Scrapbook open showing double spread of images – two teenage boys relaxing in bed, birds, huge eerie trees and tunnels.
A mood board by fan Alice Barthelemy, an artist Valley met on Instagram (Photo: Supplied)

As debuts go, Valley’s is an auspicious one, but the transition from “person who reads books”, as she puts it, to “accidentally getting published” has been a tricky one for her to navigate. “Coming to terms emotionally with allowing whoever wanted to be in my own little brain world with the people I’d made was weird and odd.” 

Despite that, she hinted at another book in the pipeline – possibly a sequel – with the same kind of wink that permeates the rest of the novel. It doesn’t come up in the conversation, but there’s the prevailing feeling that she knows there’s franchise potential there, and it’s hard to disagree with that.

Someone explained to her that the book’s success, and people’s response to it, wasn’t about her, though. They used the metaphor of a cupcake. “If you bake something and sell it, and someone had a really religious experience with that cupcake, because of the perfect ratio of cake to icing or whatever, you wouldn’t take that personally.

“That’s true. I would be happy for them. They liked my cupcake. It’s nice to remember that.”

Tim Te Maro and the Subterranean Heartsick Blues, by HS Valley (Hardie Grant, $19.99), is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington. 

But wait there's more!