N. K. Jemisin

And one of the, the, I was about to say one of the great things, one of the positives to take away from that specifically is his work does exist in the public domain.

So there is no property, which is not only is, is there no property that is profiting off it, but it allows other artists to take his work and subvert it and overturn it, which is where you get stuff like the ballot of black Tom or like NK Jemisin's work, like the city we became where it's like, In that book specifically, here is a an African-American woman who is writing a very Lovecraftian story, but including diversity and, you know, focusing on the types of characters that Lovecraft himself would find to be horrible.

And yet they are the focus of the story.

So it has allowed for a retaking and reshaping of his work and his influence in a way like that you can't do with, let's say, a J.K. Rowling because of how she is not just still alive, but also so powerful and what she can do then.

Yeah, my sister used to work at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and she bought in, like, a bunch of Black authors for, like, I think it was, like, a horror thing.

She bought M.K. Jemisin, Aria Matthews, and Tanana Rivedu.

And I remember I walked up to her, and I was in full fangirl mode.

And I'm just like, can I hug you? Oh,

Everybody isn't Tana Marie Dew.

Everybody isn't N.K. Jemisin.

But there's so many people that have stories to tell and that deserve to be told.

And you want to see someone who looks and sounds like you in a book or you want to know that author.

there

there are nk jemisin put like all of her books in there and that was the thing that really blew my mind at first because i was like wow like nk jemisin is huge And she got like a modest advance for those books.

And I'm sure she's earning royalties out the wazoo because she's very successful.

But a lot of authors that would then become big names started out with kind of smaller advances.

So I think it's just kind of hard no matter what.

Yeah.

yeah did that sale do really well in terms of like book scan numbers or was it a bit of a flop because if it was a flop then if it was like wow then yeah sure like if you're nk jemisin and you were switching i don't

know if you need to properly query query you could just say hi i'm nk jemisin they're like sold i'm signing you good we'll fight

including the playlist I devised to accompany this book with many surprising songs related to Ursula's life as a listener of music, to the letter that I wrote to educators when Conversations on Writing was added to the Penguin Random House academic catalog, arguing for why this book could be a worthy addition to teachers' syllabi.

In addition, you can choose from a variety of other things as well, including the bonus audio archive with contributions from past guests, whether Lely Long Soldier reading her long poem, King, N.K. Jemisin reading from Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Ted Chiang reading an essay on Silicon Valley's Fear of Superintelligent A.I., or long-form translator conversations, such as those with the translators of Alain Siksu, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Mariana Enriquez, or craft talks by Marlon James and Jeannie Vanasco, songs by Adrienne Marie Brown and Leanne Batasamasek Simpson, and much more.

Or perhaps you want to subscribe as a Milkweed Early Reader, receiving 12 books over the course of a year before they're available to the general public.

You can check it all out, these options and much more at patreon.com slash betweenthecovers.

Oh, yes.

We are talking about N.K. Jemisin's 2015 novel, The Fifth Season.

The first book in the Broken Earth series, which won the 2016 Hugo Award for best novel.

And deservedly so.

You can always just look away and remind yourself, "Oh, it's just a movie."

Exactly.

But Jemisin uses the second person to collapse that safe distance entirely.

The prose basically grabs you by the collar.

Right.

How does Jemisin write a story with a power imbalance that extreme without the reader just throwing their hands up and saying, "Well, she's doomed.

What's the point of even trying?"

She solves it by shifting the focus away from the mechanics of the power and zeroing in on the psychological terror of the power.

Okay.

Tell me more about that.

Well, Jemisin doesn't bog the narrative down by explaining exactly how the gods are bound or what the specific limits of the enslaved deities are.

The audience, and Yeine, simply have to accept that these beings are walking nuclear weapons.