There are black people in the future
N.K. Jemisin subverts sci-fi’s great white narrative
The future is past, present and becoming — layered, at times indistinguishable from one another.
N.K. Jemisin’s new collection of short stories, “How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?,” is a brilliant example of how we in the present are making the future with our actions and how the future may exist in our past. It is a history we have seen with our own eyes, read about and have evidence of in our genes.
Ms. Jemisin doesn’t make it easy for the reader — but in a very good way. There are few star dates or calendar references in her stories. The reader has to determine when these stories take place in a space-time that may be unfamiliar. It adds to the experience of reading these stories that time itself is nebulous.
“The Effluent Engine” is set in New Orleans in what seems to be the 1800s with bustles and corsets, but it could easily be a parallel time to ours right now had things happened differently. Jessaline, the main character, is a brilliant scientist.
I imagine her to be a very beautiful deep cocoa brown black woman, crowned with a short cropped Afro under her head-wrap. Unexpected for the 1800s and in some ways in 2019, Jessaline has embarked on a dangerous and exciting mission. Her bravery and skill is evident, however she does have fear. Her fear is rooted in American society’s overarching disregard of the health and welfare of an African-American woman. This sounds like 2019. Past and present merge, but will it also be the future?
Ms. Jemisin is a multi-awardwinning author of short stories and novels. She’s won the Hugo, Nebula and Lotus awards, the top honors bestowed for science fiction and fantasy writing. She’s the author of the critically acclaimed and very popular “Broken Earth Trilogy.” Longtime readers will be happy to find the kernels of her longer works throughout “How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?”
As a fan and historian of science fiction, N.K. Jemisin is writing black people into a future that, heretofore has rarely included the African diaspora or black Atlantic culture.
In “The Trojan Girl” Ms. Jemisin explores the creation of avatars but could be talking about characters in most film, TV, books and media when she writes, “Most of their kind created caucasian avatars to start — a human minority who for some reason comprised the majority of images available for sampling .... ” Ms. Jemisin’s stories are truly multicultural in species, color, sexuality, faith, ability, planetary origin and more.
What is also evident in this short story collection is that Ms. Jemisin can write anything. Her prose, sometimes pulsing, encourages you to read at different tempos as if she is conducting an orchestra. Slow moving tension and suspense make you fearful, but then entices you into reading the next sentence. Lush descriptive passages conjure cinematic vistas.
It is ancient griot storytelling that feels like someone is whispering a bedtime story to you, albeit one that may give you nightmares. Oh, and there’s lots of humor, too. There is balance in the telling of the future-past-present.
Ms. Jemisin also has a way of presenting magic-science-technology-spirituality-culture in ways that make you pause and think about who you believe the gods and goddesses are now — or may be in the future. “Traditional” or “primitive” ideas may turn out to be the innovation needed to solve a contemporary problem at hand.
Those unfamiliar with Ms. Jemisin’s deft mastery of all genres might believe that keeping track of or staying interested in a melange of stories told in so many styles would be hard. It is not. Readers move eagerly and easily from tales of post-hurricane New Orleans to the asteroid belt beyond Mars.
Does a book of short stories with such varied content need a single theme to pull it together? I don’t think so, but if pressed, I would say there is one recurring theme: Ms. Jemisin’s characters are always on a quest for the power to live freely and to “know oneself.”
This power, like the past-presentfuture, does not take one form or shape. As a character in Ms. Jemisin’s brilliant “L’Alchimista” explains: “Because all things contain power ... who is to say plutonium is more powerful than, say, rice? One takes away a million lives, the other saves a hundred times as many.”
“HOW LONG ‘TIL BLACK FUTURE MONTH?” By N.K. Jemisin Orbit $26