The New Yorker Radio Hour - N. K. Jemisin on H. P. Lovecraft

Episode Date: January 31, 2020

N. K. Jemisin is one of the most celebrated authors in science fiction’s history; the novels of her “Broken Earth” trilogy won the Hugo Award for three consecutive years, a unique achievement. Yet her work has also engendered an ugly backlash from a faction of readers who feel that the recognition of women and authors of color within the industry has been undeserving. Racism in science fiction and fantasy goes back to the origins of the genre, Jemisin explains to Raffi Khatchadourian. Her new novel, “The City We Became,” explicitly addresses the legacy of H. P. Lovecraft, an early and influential writer who helped to invent the genre. Lovecraft was also a virulent, impassioned racist, even by the standards of the early twentieth century. It’s not possible, Jemisin says, to separate Lovecraft’s ideology from his greatness as a fantasy writer: his view of non-white peoples as monstrous informed the way he wrote about monsters. Rather than try to ignore or cancel Lovecraft, Jemisin says, she felt compelled to engage with him. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Reddy. When was the last time you walked on the Williamsburg Bridge? Not much. I don't live here anymore, and I never really need to go over to Delancey anymore. Every so often I do it just for old times' sake, but it's not the same bridge anymore, you know? You know, it no longer has holes in it. You know, back in the day when they had basically let most of New York's infrastructure just kind of rot, literally it had holes in it, like foot wide and so forth through the pedestrian path.

N.K. Jemison is one of the most decorated authors in science fiction today. Jemison won a Hugo Award for each of the novels in her Broken Earth trilogy, which is sort of like winning the Oscar for Best Picture three years in a row. Jemison has a new book coming out in March, and she met up recently with Rafi Hachdorian, a staff writer for the New Yorker. A few weeks ago, we met on the Williamsburg Bridge, because her newest novel, The City We Became,

has an important scene here. So, Nora, in the opening of your forthcoming book, you have set upon this bridge a giant tentacled, bioluminescent, interdimensional creature to tear it apart. Basically, yeah. Well, I mean, no one can see it except for a few select individuals for reasons that will become clear in the book. But, you know, it just sort of is a giant tentacle that smashes out of nowhere, shatters half the bridge, causes massive destruction and damage all over the East River.

And no one really knows why except for a few people. But what it means is that half this beautiful old bridge gets torn apart and smash into the water. water and I laughed while I did it. We ducking to a bar on the Brooklyn side of the bridge to talk out of the wind. Science fiction is transporting, it's whimsical. It can go in many different directions. It can be apocalyptic. To say that you were interested in science fiction opens the question, what kind as a kid interested you and in which of these directions do you feel yourself being pulled as a reader?

I really didn't start to engage with science fictiondom until I kind of hit my teens and started to find different voices out there. Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, stories that also ranged beyond the very traditional confines that I had seen for fantasy and science fiction at that point. And I wanted to kind of know what else fantasy could do. And then along comes Le Guin, who was doing it before it was cool. You mentioned that it took a while. to find some of these other authors. And my understanding is that wasn't accidental because science fiction publishing

when you were a reader as a kid in the 80s almost went out of its way to mask the identity of writers of color. Octavia Butler's Dawn is an example. A book that we both owned were... Yeah. The protagonist is described in the book as a tall, very dark-skinned black woman with like a cloud of hair. And I don't think Butler ever

actually uses the word black, but there's so many other indicators in there. And then the addition put a white woman with black hair on the cover. And there were no author photos of Butler. There was no mention in her bio in that edition that she was black. It really was like hidden. And yet, despite all the attempts to hide it, I realized basically within the first few pages, oh, my God, I think she's black. And that was just like earth-shattering. This cultural invisibility that the system of publishing engendered had a personal impact on you, because when you were, as I understand it, growing up and thinking about considering possible careers for yourself, initially, you didn't consider writing, you didn't consider writing, you didn't think

it would be possible to make it work. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I, and that was coming from a lot of different directions. I don't want to make it sound like it was coming strictly from within the industry. You know, I can remember having conversations with relatives other than my father about the fact that I love to write and, you know, them then handing me a Tony Morrison book and saying, do you write like this? And when I said, no, you know, the response was always, well, you need to write like this. You need to write realist, mainstream-oriented fiction that will, you know, kind of focus on life in America today as a black person or oppression or something like that.

And I was just like, but I want to write about black people in space. And for a lot of times when I would say that, the response would be, well, you can't. And why in the black community do you think that was the case? I mean, you, you, it is, it is the nature of any group of people that you understand you are capable of what you see. Role models operate on lots of levels. If you never see a black person in a particular space, then you get the really clear message that you're not welcome in that space. And so I got that message loud and clear when I was young. And I was like, you know what, I'm going to be a counselor.

I'm going to grad school for psychology. You know, the writing is a fun hobby, but it's clear that that field is not one that I can be successful in without, you know, a lot of trouble and drama and stress. And I don't know that I want that in my life. And then, you know, basically I had a point where I realized I was just not happy. You know, the writing bug had been in me since I was a child. I'd always done it. I'd read many books that had been published that I felt, you know, I can do that. I can do at least that. And, you know, I hit a point where I decided that it was worth the danger or worth the trouble and the stress and the drama. And it sure has been some trouble in stress and drama. But, you know, the rewards have been commensurate. When Jemison talks about the trouble and the stress and the drama, she's partly referring to a backlash from conservative science fiction writers and readers, among them, people associated with the alt-right.

They claim, and this will sound familiar, that the success of non-white authors and women in science fiction has somehow been undeserving, a form of identity politics. It's been very, very ugly, and Gemison's new book, The City We Became, addresses the legacy of racism in the genre. And in fact, the book that's coming out in March continues to speak to those issues. In some ways. So one of the inspirations for the city we became was the controversy surrounding

the World Fantasy Award. Until maybe two or three years ago, the World Fantasy Award was the stylized bust of H.P. Lovecraft's head. And the controversy about this started when a black writer, Nettie Okoraforffor, who's a friend of mine, Nettie won the World Fantasy Award, and they handed her Lovecraft's head and she was like, you can find her words online about it. She did, she most definitely pointed out that Lovecraft is an inappropriate way to honor a black writer's success, let's just say. Norah, so who is HP Lovecraft? Okay, so Lovecraft is probably one of the most seminal writers in American modern fantasy. You know, he wrote at the turn of the century, but a lot of the ways in which American fantasy and American horror engages with subcultures,

cults, religion, and so forth, were all influenced by Lovecraft. So you saw, you know, sort of sinister cults that had taken over towns, and there's echoes of that in the Stepford Wives, for example. You saw tentacled monsters that sort of didn't come at you roaring or screaming, but sort of slithered into your life and integrated themselves into your community and then slowly destroyed you from within. You see aspects of that in things like aliens, you know, in the alien films. So, you know, Lovecraft may not be very well known, but you see elements of Lovecraft in nearly all dark, fantastical American media these days. days. So he's that influential. And he was exceptionally racist. Lovecraft had a poem, and I cannot speak the

title because I don't use the N-word, but the title of the poem is on the creation of N-words. And his cat was named the N-word. He was like, even by the standards of the racist era in which he lived, he was huge, hella-racist. But do you think that there is a way to separate whatever his creativity, whatever his skills were at evoking horror from his fears, from his biases? No. His biases were the basis of his horror. The monsters came from his own fear of brown people, of immigrants, of Jewish people, of whatever. In several of his stories, particularly one said in New York, Lovecraft spends a lot of time, sort of lavishes description on how terrifying it is to do something like walk through Chinatown

and look at these alien, frightening faces speaking in this terrible language. And you feel his fear as you read these passages. You feel his disgust. You feel his unease at being surrounded by people who don't look like him. There's a scene in the city we became in which the minions of the woman in white The woman in white being the chief manifestation of these aliens that come to invade New York City. Yeah, basically. In effect, the embodiment of the lovecraftian enemy, let's say, that the protagonists are taking on.

Yeah, the antagonist of the story. The woman in white has many forms and many faces. And one of the ways through which she works is through like-minded people who she infects with her ideology. literally in some ways, some cases. And so she infects a group of artists who call themselves the alt-artists and who present to one of the characters this painting called Dangerous Mental Machines. And the painting... You didn't make up the title of that painting.

That's something that comes from Lovecraft. Yeah, Dangerous Mental Machines is what he called Chinese Americans because he believed that Asian people were equal. equivalent to white people because they at least knew how to work and make money, but he didn't think that they had souls. He thought that they were machines that could, they were good at calculation, but there was no humanity in there.

And Nora, I remember this passage of the book. It's vivid in my mind because you describe the painting as both being incredibly seductive of it being beautiful. In fact, one of the chief protagonists almost falls into a trance while looking at it. It's good art.

It's good art, even though it has this undeniably horrific component to it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's, you know, I mean, I'm not good at sort of analyzing my own work, but with Lovecraft,

the balance and the struggle is always between appreciating the fact that there's some good stuff here. He does some incredible imagery. It's powerful work. But it's frightening. And it's frightening not always for the reasons that he meant it to be frightening. It's frightening because it's a way to look into the mind of a true bigot and realize just how alien their thinking is, just how disturbing their ability to dehumanize their fellow human beings is. This man literally saw the people of New York as monsters.

So that's what I decided to write against. So what do you think as a society or community of readers the response to Lovecraft should be today? To put it in a box and send it down to the bottom of the sea? There's too much to learn from examining that tension between the power and the impact of the art and realizing where that art comes from and what the impetus behind that art is. The best way to engage with twisted or otherwise problematic art, in my opinion, is to first off acknowledge that that art has an impact, hurts people, and understand that engaging with it could perpetuate some of the harm

that that art is capable of doing. But flag it, warn it, put it off to the side where people, you know, can engage with it at their leisure or at their choice or at a point where they're strong enough or capable of doing so, but then engage with it. There's a line between respecting the work and honoring the person. You can respect the craft.

You don't have to put that person on a pedestal. You know, artists are human beings. And that means you need to examine them in all their facets. You have to recognize that these are people and that the things that make them sometimes horrible people are sometimes the things that make them good writers

or good artists. And that's what you want to engage with. N.K. Jemison, author of the Broken Earth trilogy, All three books received the Hugo Award. She talked with Rafi Kachadurian, a staff writer since 2008. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining us today, and I hope you'll tune into The New Yorker Radio Hour next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Rianne and Corby, Karen Frulman, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With help from Morgan Flannery, Alison McAdam, Mung Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.