Outer Alliance Spotlight #31: N. K. Jemisin April 23, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , trackbackWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #31. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is N. K. Jemisin, author of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.
N. K. Jemisin is a straight, cisgendered ally who believes that all -isms must be addressed at the same time as they intersect and support one another. To this end, she blogs about politics, racism, and feminism, and her fiction includes a diverse spectrum of characters.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the first volume of an epic fantasy series, The Inheritance Trilogy. The first three chapters are available online beginning here. Book two, The Broken Kingdoms, will be available in the fall, and N. K. is currently working on finishing book three. She’s also written several short stories, including the Hugo and Nebula nominated “Non-Zero Probabilities”, and a lesbian steampunk story, “The Effluent Engine”.
N. K. can always be found online at nkjemisin.com, but she will also make offline appearances in the near future at the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention, WisCon, and Readercon.
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OA: Queerness is mentioned casually in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which underscores the idea that sexual orientation isn’t generally the defining characteristic of a person. Was that intentional on your part, or were you just just telling a good story that happened to have some queer characters in?
NJ: Pretty much just trying to tell a good story. But in my opinion, part of telling a good story is making that story plausible, and part of plausibility is having a cast of characters who have real issues and resemble real people. Even when those “people” are actually gods! But queerness is a common characteristic of human pantheons — see the Greek and Roman gods, Egyptian gods, some Native American ethnicities’ gods, and so on — so it fits there too.
OA: Sky, the city where most of the action in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms takes place, is full of magical devices and spells. If you could use any one of them in real life, what would you choose, and why?
NJ: The one I would use would be one that doesn’t actually appear in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms — a healing sigil, which is basically a scrap of paper with a letter written on it that can cause broken bones to knit, wounds to heal fast, and so on. I’m accident-prone so that would come in handy. Everything else that’s used in Sky is just a variation on what we use in the real world: gates instead of elevators, spheres instead of cellphones or videoconferencing, a spell instead of air conditioning. I just wanted to show a world whose “technology” has developed along magical lines rather
than physical.
OA: You posted “The Effluent Engine” on your website as part of the A Story for Haiti project, but it was originally written for a lesbian steampunk anthology. Is that anthology still in the works? Any word on when it will be available?
NJ: Yes, it’s still coming, or so the editor says. I’m not sure when, or what it will be called. The editor is JoSelle Vanderhooft, and the publisher will be Torquere Press.
OA: Your Nebula and Hugo nominated story, “Non-Zero Probabilities” all about luck. Do you have any lucky charms or superstitions of your own?
NJ: Nope. I don’t actually believe in luck, though I’m fascinated by others’ belief. I tend not to walk under ladders, but that’s because it’s unsafe, not bad luck.
OA: You’ve written stories set in places you’ve lived, like New York and New Orleans, as well as stories set in fantasy worlds and earthly locations where you haven’t lived. How much does setting influence story creation for you, and are there any specific new places you would like to explore in future stories?
NJ: I’m not sure how to answer this. Setting influences story creation of course, but there’s no “how much” to that; it just does. And I can’t really speak about future exploration because I can’t say whether I want to write about a place until I go there — or imagine it, in the case of secondary world stories. And I can’t predict where I’ll go or what I’ll imagine in the future.
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Thanks, N. K.! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out N. K. Jemisin’s work.
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[...] about how the Hugos work. And, because we neglected to mention it before, congratulations to N. K. Jemisin for collecting a Hugo nomination for The Hundred Thousand [...]