Let’s start reading N.K. Jemisin’s How Long ’til Black Future Month.
In a way, this book could be seen as a follow-up to VanderMeer’s Annihilation – – both probably occupy the science fiction and/or fantasy shelf at your local book store. Jemisin made a big splash with her “Broken Earth” trilogy – – The Fifth Season (2015), The Obelisk Gate (2016), and The Stone Sky (2017). (If you enjoy How Long, I strongly encourage you to check out the trilogy. Even Jemisin seems to believe that the long narrative is more her forté.) Each of the three novels has won a Hugo Award – – one of sci-fi’s highest accolades. In the trilogy, Jemisin engages in some heavy-duty world-building – – the extended narrative takes place on an Earth-like planet racked by environmental and geological change. Each novel also explores issues of race and gender, and Jemisin has been associated with the “Afrofuturist” school of contemporary fiction, art, music, and cinema.
As its title implies, How Long ’til Black Future Month engages – – sometimes directly and sometimes more elliptically – – with issues raised in the discussions around “Afrofuturism.” Science fiction and speculative fiction often focus on a central tension: the future is new, but the future also repeats the past. An important question for Jemisin then: how do these stories propose a “future tense” for race and racialized identities? What changes? What remains the same? How does Jemisin use speculation – – the creation of unfamiliar situations and characters – – to explore race?
As the “Broken Earth” trilogy also makes clear, power and power structures are central to Jemisin’s alternative worlds. This includes the resilience of hierarchy in new, alternative circumstances, but also the resilience of struggles against hierarchy. How central is resistance to her fiction? Do you see new and/or surprising forms and modes of resistance in the short stories? In what ways does the sci-fi/fantasy genre allow Jemisin to foreground power and resistance as central social and existential challenges?
Finally, Jemisin is acclaimed for her prowess at world-building, something we saw VanderMeer exercising in Annihilation. What do Jemisin’s alternative worlds look like – – think of VanderMeer as a context? Can you notice any patterns in the basic dimensions and circumstances of Jemisin’s worlds? Does she seem to have any favorite tropes or logics when she builds her worlds? Some readers see Jemisin as both an Afrofuturist and an environmentalist. Though her physical and ecological worlds may be very different from ours, can you discern an attention to environmental issues and fates in her fiction? How would you classify her as work as “eco-fiction” – – i.e. as fiction that responds to today’s climate change and its consequences?
For How Long ’til Black Future Month, instead of individual reading journal entries, we’re going to keep a collective reading journal. This means that you’ll want to start by selecting three interesting-looking stories, reading them, and writing about them in our class journal. You can access the journal and instructions here.
Questions? Let me know.