Season 4, Episode 5: Sara Fangirls, But Not Too Hard

Sara and Daniel interview author N.K. Jemisin, a celebrated sci-fi and fantasy author who won the Hugo Award for her novel The Fifth Season. Tying in with ReadICT Category 1: A Book with a Map, this episode focuses on Jemisin's Great Cities duology, The City We Became and The World We Make, a series that explores neighborhood stereotypes, gentrification and all the people that make a place unique, but with monsters!

Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcription. Some errors may occur. If you find a transcription error, please contact us with any corrections and we will make those corrections as quickly as possible.

[MUSIC]

SARA DIXON: Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Read. Return. Repeat. I'm Sara.

DANIEL PEWEWARDY: I'm Daniel. I'm glad to be back.

SARA: Okay, okay, okay, okay.

DANIEL: All right.

SARA: Daniel, guess who we have on the podcast today?

DANIEL: Okay, so you're --

SARA: It's a book with a map.

DANIEL: Okay. All right, books with maps, fantasy most likely. Living author, George R.R. Martin.

SARA: Oh, he -- okay, nope, mm-hmm.

DANIEL: All right. Rand McNally?

SARA: He wrote atlases. Can you write an atlas?

DANIEL: All right.

SARA: You just print maps, a book of maps. Would that count?

DANIEL: John Green?

SARA: I don't think there's maps in his books.

SARA: Okay, you're wrong on all of those.

DANIEL: Okay. Okay.

SARA: Okay, it's N.K. Jemisin!

DANIEL: What? That's like your favorite author!

SARA: So she's like, one of my favorites. I have probably promoted her on every single kickoff episode that we have done, which is two. I'm pretty sure that I've written "I loved these books by N.K. Jemisin" on every single like best book of the year that I've read one of her books in. I probably talked your ear off if you've ever talked to me in person about N.K. Jemisin.

DANIEL: You have recommended her books several times. That's so cool, yeah.

SARA: She's on the podcast. Boom.

DANIEL: All right, so --

SARA: Do you want to just, like, get into it?

DANIEL: Yeah, let's go ahead and get talking --

SARA: Like, I don't even know what else to say. I'm so excited to talk to her. I think she's brilliant. She's the author of two series that I have read, but several others, including the Broken Earth trilogy, which included The Fifth Season, and then her Great Cities duology, which we're gonna talk about today: The City We Became and The World We Make.

DANIEL: And she's a MacArthur 2020 "Genius" grant fellow. She lives and writes in New York City. And in her spare time, she's a gamer and gardener responsible for saving the world from KING OZYMANDIAS, her dangerously intelligent ginger cat, and his destructible sidekick Magpie.

N.K. Jemisin, everybody, whoo.

SARA: Okay, and welcome to Read. Return. Repeat. Nora Jemisin, aka N.K. Jemisin, thank you so much for being on the show.

N.K. JEMISIN: Thank you for welcoming. Oh, thank you. Thank you. It's good to be here.

SARA: Well... let me say that again. Well, we are here to talk about The Great Cities duology, not a trilogy, which includes The City We Became and The World We Make. And if you have ever heard me ever talk about... well, if I've ever recommended a book, I've probably recommended one of these series to you, because I love them both so much. And so can you tell our listeners a little bit about this series? And so it's in your own words.

N.K.: Mm-hmm. Well, so The Great Cities duology, which originally was going to be a trilogy, but then the pandemic got it -- so The Great Cities duology is basically about a group of ordinary people who suddenly discover that they are extraordinary because they have been chosen by the city of New York -- a living, magically powerful entity -- to represent its boroughs, which would be fine and just interesting in and of itself. But on top of that, they've got to fight basically Cthulhu. So yeah, lots of fun.

SARA: Every time I explain it, always gets kind of convoluted, because I'm like, "Well, there's a midwife, and then they're like, born, and they're trying to, like, you know," and I bring in all of these, like, motherhood imagery, and so it just gets a little bit wild and people are like, what? But I think I convinced mostly everybody to read it.

N.K.: Right. Well, if it works, it works. That's the bottom line.

SARA: Yes, absolutely.

SARA: So in -- there was a New Yorker interview where you had talked about how you had a dream and that's what became your basis for writing your Broken Earth trilogy, which is also brilliant. How did you -- was it the same kind of situation for this series, or did you just come up with it in a different way?

SARA: Okay.

N.K.: So for the broken -- for the Great Cities books, it was a combination of things too. Just my lifelong love of living in cities, my weird experience that I had from many times that I've traveled where -- and this is a thing that I've noticed other people say, you know how sometimes when you'll go to a city that you've never been to before and you instantly feel like, "I could live here," or you instantly feel like, "Oh, hell no, I couldn't live here," you know? And you have that instant sense of like, either, you know, without even really seeing enough of the city, you just have that quick sense of like, whether this is a place where you can be comfortable or not. And I just think there's something to that. I think that people are picking up on some aspect of the city's personality or character. And of course, you know, we don't necessarily think that cities are real, living entities in our real world, but what if that's what were happening? What if the city was alive and the city did not like you and you were picking up on that? Or vice versa, the city was like, oh, okay, you can, you can, you can stay, you know, we like you. So that was really it: a combination of just me walking along and seeing, you know, ordinary moments in the city and finding magic in them and deciding, why don't I just legit, you know, like, why don't I literalize that? Why don't I actually put magic in it? Why not?

Well, just to backtrack a little bit, the Broken Earth series had multiple genesis, geneses, I think that's the way to say it. It wasn't just the dream. The dream was kind of how the character, the protagonist, sort of spoke to me. But it also came from a lifelong love of volcanoes, a trip that I had made to volcano national, Volcanoes National Park in Hawaii at one point. Also it came from a conversation that I had when I was at Launch Pad. Launch Pad is a NASA sponsored -- I don't think it's any more NASA sponsored, but it was originally a NASA sponsored workshop where they would drag basically a bunch of influencers out to the middle of the desert in Wyoming and flog us through a week of astronomy class. And so we were learning like high level physics and... well, to the degree that we could in a week. [LAUGHS] But we were learning like orbital mechanics and things like that. And we got to look through the six foot telescopes at the University of Wyoming at Laramie and so on. So we had some really interesting conversations about something I can't discuss which would be a spoiler for the Broken Earth series, but that conversation helped with a key plot point. So all of that kind of came together, and when I had the dream, that was the thing that sort of cinched it. So the dream was part of it, but it wasn't the only thing.

SARA: I love that.

DANIEL: I totally, yeah, no, I like it a lot. A few years ago, I got to visit a friend in New York, and I was in Queens for most of it. I just had a nice day in Queens. I was like, I could see myself living here and I just was like... And then there's I get that too, because there's like, I do not like Louisville, Kentucky at all. Like --

N.K.: Louisville hates you?

DANIEL: It's just not a town I think I could live in, like the gentrification is, like, way too crazy.

N.K.: Oh, wow.

DANIEL: No offense to anyone that lives there.

N.K.: Okay, what did you do to make Louisville hate you?

N.K.: I don't know, I have no idea.

SARA: Just a vibe.

DANIEL: Yeah.

SARA: Wrong vibe.

N.K.: Gotcha.

DANIEL: So the avatars the characters are kind of representative of like... so I guess the question is like, how representative are the characters of the boroughs they represent? So like, is Manhattan, is Manny like a transplant because a lot of people living in Manhattan are transplants, or is, was there a lot of intention there for your characters to have them be like a personality's representative?

N.K.: Yeah, there, I did set out on purpose to make them recognizable, at least to New Yorkers, as you know, sort of caricatures of the city, as encapsulating, like, a lot of stereotypes about the city. So I don't usually like to do this when I'm creating characters. But in this particular case, because I wanted them to be recognizable with those stereotypical things, I picked stereotypes of each of the boroughs and put those as personality traits into each of the characters. And so, yeah, Manhattan is a transplant because not just so much that Manhattan is the main place where transplants come, but Manhattan is the borough that impresses a lot of people and makes them want to transplant. And on top of that -- like I don't, I don't think the bulk of transplants go live in Manhattan anymore. No one can afford it. So most people come to New York, they see Manhattan, and they go live in one of the boroughs. But, you know, I don't necessarily want to make it like 100 percent one for one, traits of the character versus the borough.

But so in Manny's case, it's the fact that he is wealthy, also kind of a criminal. That is my impression of Manhattan, you know, Wall Street is full of some people with questionable morals and so on. And also the fact that he's very visually representing diversity. He looks like he could pass for a member of pretty much any race, and people constantly mistake him for one of their own. And that was really just kind of getting at the fact that Manhattan is where, like, you see one of the greatest diversities of humanity in the world. You know, the number of languages spoken in Manhattan, the number of cultures present, the number of races and ethnicities and nationalities that have all kind of built little enclaves here is stunning, so I wanted to incorporate that too, but sort of the core of it for him is that he is mostly representing Wall Street, like I wanted him to have the personality of Wall Street, if that makes sense. I wanted him to be wealthy. I wanted him to be a little bit sociopathic. I wanted him to be very outwardly friendly, very snazzy dresser, all of that. But he's, he identifies personally as Black because, among other things that I mentioned in the novel, underneath Wall Street, they about 20, 30 years ago, found the bones of thousands of... some were freedmen, African workers and Black workers who built literally the foundations of the city at that point. So, you know, I want him to be superficially Wall Street, but kind of underneath, you know, it's a little on the nose with the symbolism, but that's kind of where I went.

And each of the other characters works the same way, with the exception of the character who represents New York altogether, because he's just a regular guy, but his attitude, his soul is kind of the spirit of New York. So he doesn't really visually represent anything. He's just meant to be kind of spiritually more like New York. But I wanted Bronca to be, because she represents the Bronx, to be one of the oldest members of the group, because the Bronx is one of the first outer boroughs that was incorporated. I wanted Padmini to be an immigrant because Queens is where the largest immigrant population of New York is, things like that. So I intentionally started out with like, what do we know about the boroughs, what do we think about the boroughs? And then I built that into each of the characters.

SARA: So I've never been to New York City, but I definitely got a sense of how the city kind of works. And I know, I've read all kinds of things about it. I've seen shows set in New York City, like you get a vibe from the city, but I felt like your book gave me... I mean, first of all, I want to go visit. It was a nice little tourism thing.

N.K.: Hey, I'm happy to bring some tourism to New York.

SARA: Because they need it. But the... but as somebody who hasn't been, I didn't feel like it was inaccessible.

N.K.: Good, I was I was hoping for that. I wanted it to... one of the other things that was the inspiration for this book was, or for these books, was the fact that I've seen so many TV shows set in New York that just don't feel like New York to me. You know, I was watching Girls and it was set in, there were a couple of scenes in Williamsburg. My father lives in Williamsburg. I partially grew up in Williamsburg. That was not a Williamsburg I've ever seen. And, you know, I really wanted to just kind of depict the New York that I know, which doesn't seem to have made it into Seinfeld or Friends or any of the TV shows that everybody's familiar with. So I just wanted to show the New York that I have seen my whole life. That was it.

SARA: Well, I think it encompassed everything. You know, I mean, that was, that's what you were trying to do, is, is all of the boroughs need to work together in order to, you know.

N.K.: Right. And so part of that was also, I wanted to depict the outer boroughs too. Like you don't usually see a TV show set in New York go outside of Manhattan. You know, the only one I can think of is maybe How I Met Your Mother. Was that in Queens? I can't remember, it's been so long since I watched that show. But anyway, so that was really it. I wanted to make sure that we were, we were actually getting into the parts of New York that nobody else got to see. So that was really it.

DANIEL: I have a question about the avatars. Are they like... how are they like, without giving anything away, like how are they chosen? Are they, is it like destined at birth, or are they, it's like their life experience is what kind of like led them to become that?

N.K.: It's a life experience and personality thing. So Nyc, his name is eventually revealed to be Nyc, N-Y-C pronounced phonetically. Anyway, Nyc has the attitude, because, you know, he's grown up with a lot of abuse. He's had a really rough life. He was, you know, unsheltered, unhoused for a long time, has been through the foster system, which is brutal in this city. And, you know, so he'd had a lot of experiences, and as a result of it, had just kind of developed a kind of combination ruthlessness and don't give [EXPLETIVE REMOVED]-ness. Oh, can I say that?

SARA: We can beep it.

N.K.: Okay, all right. All right, feel free to bleep. But you know, the... it's important that I include the F word here, because that part of New York language is also what he is embodying. So, so it's his attitude in that case. Padmini's got the, you know, kind of hustle mentality and the "I want to make this place work and I genuinely love it here, you know, but I still miss somewhere else" that I thought was a good representation of the attitude of a sort of typical immigrant.

You know, let's see, Brooklyn being from here, born and bred, I wanted her to kind of represent the attitude of having watched New York go through all of the changes since the '80s or so, which is my life, which is what I've seen. And so, you know, she refers to the fact that, you know, back in the day, there were crack vials on the street that you would step on, you know, and that the city has improved, that some of the changes that have happened over the years are for the better, but then some, like the things that make it almost impossible to get housing here affordably, are not so good.

So I just wanted to kind of get all of those attitudes mixed in together. I started with stereotypes with each one of the characters, but I riffed on that and turned them, like I don't like stereotypes to be more than just sort of an informing piece of a character. I still want them to read like three-dimensional people with backgrounds, with lives, with interior lives, all of that.

SARA: I'm like, you just, you accomplished it. So it's great. Great job.

N.K.: Oh, Thank you.

SARA: Because again, as somebody who's never been, I know what this, I know a lot of stereotypes, and I felt like I could see them, but I didn't feel like that's all that they were.

N.K.: Yeah, that was the idea. I wanted them to be recognizable to people who've heard a lot about New York but have never been here, or who've heard a little about New York but have never been here. The really hilarious part, though, was the number of people who did not know Staten Island existed. Since the book came out, I have run into so many people who were like, "Wow, I didn't know there were five boroughs." And I'm, like...

SARA: I might have been one of those people. I don't, I don't know if I knew that it existed.

N.K.: Yeah, yeah. The like, I, you know, New Yorkers hate on Staten all the time, but it's still New York. And the fact that people, like the biggest sort of thing I've heard from non-New Yorkers since the book came out is, is the number of people who were, like, "I thought Staten Island was in New Jersey."

DANIEL: Oh, that's hilarious.

N.K.: Yeah.

DANIEL: I learned about the boroughs because I was a kid that watched Gargoyles growing up, which was an animated show.

N.K.: Nice. I love that show.

DANIEL: Yeah, like it's why I'm a librarian, I think. I've talked about Gargoyles on this show before.

N.K.: No, I loved the show when I was younger, uh-huh.

DANIEL: Yeah. But there was not a Staten, Gargoyles --

N.K.: Gargoyles never mentioned Staten. [LAUGHS] God, that's funny.

SARA: Nice. Well, I'm going to change direction just a smidge here, because I want to talk about the, as you're kind of building this universe in which New York City is an alive thing, you're also telling us about some of the cities that have failed in the past, right, like Atlantis and Port-au-Prince and those failures are usually associated with some sort of like natural disaster. So we argued a little bit about this. Because I was like, "No, it's just makes sense. It's the it's the natural disaster, and it killed..." anyway. Can you just explain to us why cities fail?

N.K.: So the important thing to remember is that it's the birthing process that fails. It's not the city itself. The city itself. Usually there's something left to rebuild or to potentially grow again. So the process as I described it in the book is basically that cities, as they grow, as they develop a culture, as they become iconic in some way or another, they grow more and more spiritually or metaphysically powerful and deep and weighty within the world. And that sort of causes a pocket universe to form, which is basically like a womb. And the city develops at that point into something with its own life and its own energy. And then it is normally born from that space and becomes alive in the real world by choosing an avatar and all of that. That process can be interrupted and can be destroyed. The process itself of being, becoming a living entity is what changes. The city itself is still going to be there.

So Port-au-Prince still exists, New Orleans still exists. Really, I just did that to explain, I inserted that element to explain why there are so many iconic cities in the world that were not described as being alive, like since I mentioned that New York is the first city in North America to transition, well, why wouldn't a city like New Orleans with such iconic and powerful culture, why wouldn't a city like New Orleans have already done this before New York, even, or, you know, simultaneously with New York, because it's got its own very powerful culture too. But I wanted to explain why that hadn't happened, and I tried to basically kind of retcon the whole thing then and say it did happen with New Orleans, something went wrong.

DANIEL: So there, what I, one of the elements I really liked is how like the villain operates in this like mode of like systemic like racism and the things that we see people doing with like people like recording and calling 911, and we see these tools that have been used to oppress people of color. And one of the quotes from the book is, "A little fascism is okay as long as they can get unlimited drinks with brunch." And so we're kind of like been, the last few years, we're kind of seeing, like a rise of this, like this, like fascism in the U.S. and nationalism and all that, but then there's also the complacency, which I feel like that you kind of talk about in the book. And I guess I, the question is, why do you think people are so complacent?

N.K.: Well, I mean, I think that that's, that is a core aspect of American identity. America's always had a fascist streak. I mean, we had Jim Crow. Before that, we had slavery. You know, we've always been willing to be authoritarian towards certain groups who are... or what is the phrase? "Bound by the law but not protected by it," and so on. When you live in a society that creates these kinds of nationalistic, supremacist systems, you know, putting some people in reservations and so on, you... we've been living in a continuum of fascism and we're all sort of used to dealing with a certain amount of it and just accepting a certain amount of it. And so I think that's just sort of a key part of the American mindset, is, you know, as long as the fascism isn't hitting you too directly, then you feel generally okay with it. But I wanted to touch on that specifically with respect to New York. New York has had a more leftist history than most of the country.

You know, we used to have free college in the CUNY system. We used to, we still have on the books a rule saying that we welcome all immigrants and we're going to try and shelter and house all immigrants that come to the city and things like that. So we're dealing with a slow change in New York's ideologies, and, you know, over the past few decades, our free colleges have become for-profit. You know, the attitude of "we welcome immigrants" has been eroded by the sort of national anti-immigrant energy that we're seeing from the right wing and red states, and it's affecting even New York. You're hearing a lot more anti-immigrant rhetoric than used to be normal for us. You know, we're the city that's got the Statue of Liberty in it, you know, "send me your tired, your poor," and yet we're suddenly starting to be like, well, "We don't know, I don't know how we feel about all these immigrants. This is a terrible thing." No, that's what made New York.

And so the idea that we are developing this anti-immigrant ideology and accepting more and more of these fascist ideologies within what used to be the spirit of New York is a threat to me, and I wanted to depict that as something negative and that... I think it was Bronca and Brooklyn who were having that discussion. But those are, again, the two oldest parts of New York, acknowledging the ways in which New York is beginning to change.

SARA: I don't remember if it's in the first book or the second book so I don't want to, like, pull up any plot points, but I... that the way that you've layered things in in this book just is brilliant to me. Like with the fascism and the fantasy elements and, like, birthing things. I just, people need to read this book if they haven't already and then come talk to me about it so I don't have to worry about spoilers.

DANIEL: I was very lucky that actually I was in Chicago this weekend for training and I was like, listening to it on the blue line and going to various neighborhoods listening to it. And like, we live in a city, but it's not really... it's like, 300,000-400,000 people, but being in like a --

N.K.: That's a city.

DANIEL: -- massive metropolis --

SARA: We're urban-ish.

DANIEL: -- and going to various neighborhoods was like really cool way to experience your novel.

N.K.: Thank you.

SARA: Also, can we talk a minute for the audiobook? I thought that your audiobook narrator, Robin Miles, is that right?

N.K.: Yeah, she's fantastic.

SARA: Fantastic. Just and the way it was produced, with some of the sound effects, I...

N.K.: They had fun with it, amazing. I was surprised by it too. When I first listened to it, I was not expecting to hear her like do the end credits in the voice of the woman in white. And it sent chills down my spine. It was great, but...

SARA: Bathroom scene where she kicks in the door and all the things.

N.K.: Yeah, she just did a good job. Great!

DANIEL: Yeah, no, I listen to a ton of audio books. And, yeah, they very rarely... they'll have, like, opening and closing music, but they don't do sound effects. And I'm like, this is enjoyable. I want to read more audiobooks that actually immerse me and stuff.

N.K.: Yeah, me too. I'm a big fan of story-based podcasts, so I don't really do so much informative podcasts, but I listen to like The Magnus Archives, for example. And good sound design can just break you. Like I was delighted to see that they had so much fun with that one. But I encountered Robin when they, I had not been able to pick my audiobook readers before the Broken Earth books. Fame gets you something. But with the Broken Earth books, they assign Robin to those books, I did not choose her. And when she, she did this incredibly thorough like calling me and asking for pronunciations and wanting to understand the story. She read the book. She got to know the characters. She interviewed me about basically how the characters should sound. She gave me several samples of accents and things like that. She was so thorough and professional, I was so impressed by it. And then when I heard the actual recording, I was just blown away. Like I am the kind of person that has this, this ruthless inner editor. I have a lot of trouble reading my own work and immersing in it, not just being kind of critical and trying to fix it. When I listen to audiobooks of my own work, I can relax and just enjoy it like a reader. I sometimes I forget that I wrote it, and I'm sitting on the edge of my seat and I'm like, I wonder what will happen next. Oh, [EXPLETIVE REMOVED], I know what happens next. I wrote it! But with an audiobook, I can detach enough to really have that good reader experience. And I had it with that book when I listened to the audiobooks of the Broken Earth. And I said, I want her as my audiobook reader from here on. Can we do that? So so far, Hachette has accommodated me.

SARA: Awesome. We were talking about the questions we wanted to ask in this and I was trying, we're trying to remember plot points from Broken Earth. And I was like, well, I should go back and reread it, but maybe I'll give it a listen instead. That sounds great.

N.K.: She did a great job with that.

SARA: So back to the book at hand. The, we wanted to ask you about the magic, because you've talked about how, you know, New York is imbued with this magic. You've got the characters who are built with, they kind of touch on the different stereotypes, and I feel like their specific borough magic comes out, and that is built on some of those stereotypes, like Manny with money fighting the little worm monsters, and then Brooklyn is just like rapping at spiders, which is, was also another really great scene. The,... what's the... anyway, can you talk a little bit about how you developed that system of magic, and did you have any like, rules or limitations in how it was applied?

N.K.: So developing the, I don't like the... I don't like the phrase "magic system" because I find it an oxymoron. Magic is supposed to be wild, is supposed to be creative, is supposed to be defying laws of physics and predictability, and then systems are inherently predictable. I have written rants about this. I blame Gary Gygax. [DANIEL CHUCKLES]

N.K.: Anyway, so I feel like there is something inherently wrong with the way that we keep trying to systematize something that's supposed to be inherently illogical. But in this particular case, the way that I decided to do it was that their powers were based on those stereotypes of the cities, a construct. So in Manny's case, because like I said, I was kind of using Wall Street as the core of his personality -- there's so many chunks of Manhattan I could have used. I could have gone with Broadway. And you asked earlier about how people are chosen as avatars. It is a question of how deeply they resonate with whatever part of the city that they are representing. If an actor had been the person chosen to be a avatar, that actor would have probably been from Broadway, probably would have some Shakespeare in the Park in their background, you know, that kind of thing. Because it was Manny, he resonated most deeply with the more ruthless financial parts of the city, if that makes sense. So it's not as rigid or regimented as you might mention. And throughout the story, you know, they kind of mentioned that there are a lot of people who could have been New York. New York is full of people who could be New York. So it really was just a matter of like they were there, they were handy at the exact moment when they needed to be. The city latched onto them, almost by chance, but they happened to be able to step up to the plate. But in terms of the actual magic system, I'm sorry, I'm wandering all over the place --

SARA: I think it's fascinating. Keep going.

N.K.: Oh, okay, well, so in terms of the actual magic usage, I just went with like, what is the most iconic thing I can think of about that particular borough or that particular city, in the case of the non-New York avatars who get mentioned. And some of that is based on me googling iconic things about Hong Kong or whatever. And, you know, trying to see what keeps popping up in pop culture about these places. But in the case of New York, I could go with my own impressions. The most iconic thing about the Wall Street area of New York and the financial district and that whole, that whole lifestyle, is money, real estate. The real estate lobby is probably the most powerful political entity in the city. All of that I wanted to incorporate.

So Manny's power is money. It's also style, it's also visuals. It's also, you know, kind of being smooth, a smooth talker, you know, fast talker, a deal maker. All of that is part of New York too, so I wanted to incorporate that.

Another example is with Staten Island. Staten Island is kind of known for being a bit xenophobic compared to the rest of New York. So I made the avatar of Staten Island's power xenophobia. [LAUGHS] The more afraid of somebody she is, the more damage she can do to them. And if she literally says, "Get off my lawn," you get teleported via, like, I don't know, dimensional gateway or something, to somewhere else. So, you know, kind of toxic xenophobia is her power. So I just, I tried to have fun with it.

The whole point of this was to have fun. I meant for the Great Cities books to be my fun palette cleanser after the heaviness of the Broken Earth books. And it started out that way, and then the pandemic happened. So the fun, lighthearted part of it kind of started to become harder and harder, but that was really it. I meant for it to be a little bit of a joke. You know, haha, Staten Island, magic xenophobia, of course that's funny to me. Anyway.

DANIEL: I was reading an article that talked about kind of the feedback that came out after, like, because COVID happened and a lot of New Yorkers, it was talking about like reading the book, since the city was, like, locked down, and people were connecting with the book because it was reminding him of the city before the like, lockdown and things. And I, that was really cool. Did you get a lot of people like reaching out and stuff and thanking you?

N.K.: Not so much with the thanking me, but the book came out in March of 2020, so and, and the interviews that I got all around that time were like, how did you know the pandemic was coming? And I'm like, I didn't. I talked about gentrification as using a disease model. And, you know, kind of implied that the rapid, you know, sort of growth of the woman in white and her influence within the city was viral in its power, and that just happened to occur at the time of a virus running rampant. So it was literally happenstance and timing, but it does sound like the books distracted a lot of people from the stresses of lockdown. And I'm glad that I was able to do that. I needed that myself. So if I could provide anybody else with any kind of entertainment during that time when we were all stressed out and wondering what was going to happen, great, that was, that was the intention.

DANIEL: That's, that's really cool. I like, you're talking about gentrification, and there was in one of your interviews, you're talking about, like, seeing Williamsburg change from chop shops in brickyards to like hipster central. And I, like I mentioned before, I went to Chicago and I went to like, Wicker Park because I always heard about like as a neighborhood, and it was, it reminded me of like a tourism town, like everything was retail and there's tons of tourists there. And like, I guess like, gentrification is like, it's like a neighborhood's erasure as it becomes something very vastly commercial. But then like, I guess my question is, like, is there like, a balance? How do like, how can like, how can you like improve a neighborhood but also not like, erase it or get like, change it and things and like... I'm not saying gentrification is like, ever good, but it does, like, obviously bring income and things to these neighborhoods and like safety and stuff, but --

N.K.: So part of the problem that a lot of people have is that gentrification is not a well understood term. The best explanation of gentrification that I have heard is one that basically points out that what it brings to the neighborhood are what the wealthy, the landed gentry of our society, what they would want, versus what people already existing in a neighborhood would want. So you lose the laundromats, you lose the little mom and pop butcher. You lose a lot of financial wealth and power that the neighborhood already had, and you bring in wealth and power that is mostly kind of brought in from outside. Instead of the local coffee shop that makes things the way you want and keeps the money in the neighborhood, you've got a Starbucks which is coming from, I don't know what, Seattle? I don't know where Starbucks is based, I can't remember.

SARA: I think you're right.

N.K.: But you know, which is coming from outside the city, which the money is going back outside the city, and it's bringing an ethos and an aesthetic that is from outside the city. So you know, you're losing, you still get, you still got coffee, but you're losing the local character, the local circularity and circulation of wealth and power. And so you gain things that make the neighborhood look better or more appealing to wealthy people who don't necessarily even live there, who would be willing to come in as tourists and see it and find it engaging at that point, but they don't live there. They don't need their clothes dry cleaned. They don't need all the things that locals need. So it is 100 percent possible to improve a neighborhood without gentrifying it. Those are not the same thing.

Neighborhood improvement and gentrification are two vastly different things. So when you go to the people who live in a neighborhood and you ask them, "What do you need," then you give them that, and that improves the neighborhood and makes it better for everybody. When you bring in a bunch of outside people and say, "What would make you like this place," then that's what gentrification is. Not necessarily outside people. They could be people from the area, but they are people who are not representative of the neighborhood as it is. So you're bringing in people who are not really the locals. You are asking them what they want instead of what the locals want. So does that clarify?

DANIEL: Yeah.

N.K.: It is 100 percent possible to improve, like Williamsburg, like I said, I remember the days of crack vials you that would crunch under your feet and cars on fire because there were chop shops. And yeah, the brickyards were a huge problem throughout New York back in the '80s because landlords would do things like burn down their buildings rather than -- for the insurance money, rather than improve them. They were giving away buildings. They were giving away brownstones back in those days. I'm still mad that I didn't get my hands on one.

N.K.: Anyway, but you know, so if people in the neighborhood been able to get the things that the neighborhood is getting now -- so Williamsburg now has many streets blocked off. They're doing a kind of permanent open streets thing so that people and pedestrians can enjoy those streets. People in Williamsburg wanted that years ago. It's just that it wasn't until a certain number of outsiders demanded it that the neighborhood started to get these things. So that's an example. I don't want to go off on a... I don't want to continue this, this rant, just because I can talk about gentrification all day. But that is, that is a thing that I think I wanted to point out, like New York is better in a lot of ways right now than it used to be back in the '80s. I do not in any way begrudge that. I am 100 percent in favor of let's get the crack vials out, let's get the chop shops out. The people who lived in the neighborhoods back then wanted that too. It's just that city resources weren't, weren't devoted towards that kind of improvement back then.

SARA: Thank you for making that clarification because I think I also kind of just assumed that, I mean, you know, it's the people who are the, have all the money that are coming in, and so you know that that's part of it, but I think I just kind of used it as a general term for making a neighborhood better. But that's makes a lot of sense as you've explained.

N.K.: Yeah, most people do not understand the distinction. It's, I had to read up on this before I understood it myself. And it's common for, it's common for people who are pro-gentrification, not pro-improvement but pro-gentrification to dismiss criticisms of gentrification as, oh, they're just NIMBYs. They don't want changes to their local societies and things like that. And no, it's, it's actually a lot more specific than that. But nuance is dead in 2024.

SARA: Not on this podcast. [JEMISIN LAUGHS]

DANIEL: I know there's like a new wave of, like, benevolent... like, it's really weird because, like, we're seeing this in our community now, with outsiders moving, buying properties up in here. And I've been watching that show The Curse, which is about real estate people buying up in this Pueblo in New Mexico, they're buying up and trying to build energy renovated houses. But, like --

N.K.: Oh, interesting. Never heard of that.

DANIEL: Yeah, it's like, it's one of the Safdie brothers and it's like a show on Showtime. And it's like, it's basically following a fake, HGTV couple. And the whole idea is that they're like, we're really here for the neighborhood, but you're like, that's very superficial -- it's a horror series.

N.K.: Oh, interesting. I should check this out.

DANIEL: Yeah, it's pretty... it's, I've been watching it. It's kind of like, it's taken me a while because it's one of those, like, shows that's, like, built on embarrassment and shame and like cringy. It's like, it's really good, but like it's --

N.K.: It's hard to watch.

DANIEL: Yeah, and it takes me a while to get through episodes, but I'm really enjoying it.

SARA: Well, I think on that note, we should take a short break, and then when we come back, we have a lot more questions for you -- well, not a lot, but we have several more questions for you. And so yeah, we'll be right back.

VOICEOVER: Looking for an easy way to keep track of your ReadICT challenge progress? Check out the Beanstack app. With Beanstack, you can participate in library reading challenges, log reading activities, and even win prizes. You can access the app either through the Apple or Google Play stores or on a desktop computer by visiting wichitalibrary.beanstack.org. If you are participating in the ReadICT challenge, every month you log a book, you will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a cool bookish themed prize. For more information on Beanstack, visit wichitalibrary.org/beanstack.

SARA: Okay, and we're back with N.K. Jemisin, Nora Jemison, author of the Great Cities duology, and we're talking about The City We Became. So we've talked a lot about the avatars and what they represent. My question for you is, are they based on, like, real people? You know, is Manny somebody that you know, or is a group of people that you know, and do any of them represent you?

N.K.: I mean, all of my characters represent me to some degree because there are reasons that I choose certain people. People, it's not always a conscious thing. So, you know, I think the writer's personality is permeated throughout all of their writing, whether they intended or not. Probably, you know, the fact that, like, three of the avatars are Black is coming from the fact that I am Black and I identify most closely with that and my own experience of New York has been more Black New York than white New York or other parts of New York. So, you know, they're, all of them are inspired by me to some degree, usually not overtly because I don't really do self, I don't intend to do self-insert, but I might do it by accident. I don't know. But so you were asking though about their personalities being rooted in the stereotype, or kind of like, "Who were they based on, if they were based on anybody?"

None of them were really drawn from real life people. Manny in some ways comes from the weird experience of physicality that I have seen lighter skinned friends of mine, Black friends of mine experience. I have myself, experienced it a few times. I think of myself as a middle tone black person, you know, but I've been asked, am I Latino? Am I Asian? Am I XYZ? And so I think that happens to anybody that looks racially ambiguous enough. So I wanted to kind of play with that. I don't think I look racially ambiguous, but I've been asked some weird stuff. So anyway.

Brooklyn probably was the closest to being inspired by an actual person. And even then, it was more just visually. I am a big fan of MC Lyte. Back when I was a teenager, MC Lyte was, you know, blowing up. And I was a hip-hop head back in those days. And so I was like, Well, what's MC Lyte looking like now? What's she doing now? And also like Mary J. Blige, what's she looking like these days? What's she doing? So I basically went and looked up all of the women that were about my age, or not much older than me, that were trendsetters when I was a teenager, and I followed them to see what do they look like now? And, you know, I see that they are, you know, in some cases, older looking. Maybe they've gained some weight, whatever, but they're still stylish as hell. They still dress to the nines. They still try and make sure their eyebrows are done, all of that.

So, so in that case, I went with the middle-aged form of MC Lyte as the... and the middle age, the later aged form of Mary J. Blige as visual bases. She's not much like either of them in personality. But other than that, none of them were really based on specific people. Bronca was derived from pretty much every older lesbian that I have encountered over the years in the art world, and that is that is potentially getting me in trouble by saying that they have similar aesthetics in some way, but I, the ones that had the similar aesthetics stuck in my head. And so she is an amalgam of many older lesbian artists that I have met over many parts of my life.

SARA: She's fierce so it should be a compliment.

N.K.: Yes, I'm a giant fan of her, so yeah. So yeah, it's... they were derived from people that I have met and and combinations of many kinds of people that I have met, but no one specific. I don't really do that. I try not to put like specific people into my fantasy works. I do terrible things to my characters. I don't want that happening to actual people, even in a symbolic form.

SARA: I always try to, like, visualize what, you know, I try to cast the movie in my head as I'm reading it. And I couldn't actually place like any of them, I don't think, because I just, I feel like they were... maybe then that speaks to how they represented so many different kinds of people, and so many different people is that I couldn't, like, get a face for them.

N.K.: I mean, people ask me all the time about fan casting, and I mostly say whatever you imagine, if it works for you, let's run with it. I'm not really a super visual person. I don't envision faces. I envision outfits, personalities. There's a sort of vague halo where their face of face would be. I don't really need more than that. I don't know that that makes any sense.

SARA: I think there are people out there who are like that, and there are people out there who also, you know, cast movies in their head. I'm okay with both.

N.K.: Okay, agree, me too.

DANIEL: We were talking about Bronca. So self-discipline, my dad's Comanche. I'm an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation. So, like, it was really cool seeing, like for to have that history lesson of the Lenape land deal with the island, and also just having Bronca being an indigenous character, I'm very lucky to be living on my tribal territory, like in the city, like we were moved to southwest Oklahoma, but our territory extended into Kansas where I live now. So I really thought having a character living, being Native and living like on in her territory, like her traditional lands was really like inspiring, especially in an urban setting, which I always feel like contemporizing. I could talk about this, but --

N.K.: We both got the stuff we could talk about all day.

DANIEL: I'll get to my question. People just don't know about Native Americans in New York City, they've been there the whole time, and, like, helped build the skyscrapers. And I just thought that was really cool. But why was it important for you to include indigenous representation in your books, like in this particular especially with New York?

N.K.: Well, I mean, partly because that is the core of the city. You know, we're always... it's been trendy in the last few years for, you know, events and organizations to do an acknowledgement of country, acknowledgement of the land that you're on, the historical lands that the city is built upon, and things like that, and to incorporate that into events going forward. And I just wanted to do a kind of more, more specific version of that. But the other piece of it is, again, when I was sitting down and thinking of iconic things that I knew about New York City and that I thought most people knew about New York, the idea that the island of Manhattan was bought for some beads was, was one of the stereotypical stories that I hear all the time. It wasn't like that story, you know, basically the...

No one really specifically lived on Manhattan. The Lenape of the area, kind of were stewards of it, and they didn't really think of it as property. It was more just like this is where, where lots of people come. And so they thought they were effectively renting access to the land, to Peter Minuet and the various folks who were involved in that. And on top of that, I wanted it to I wanted to go beyond that story. I didn't want to just leave it at okay, because I hear it framed as a joke all the time, haha, the Lenape didn't know what they were giving away so cheaply. I wanted to dig deeper into that. I wanted to follow what happened after that, that story that everyone hears and talks about. And so I did a little bit of research, got a chance to reach out to some folks with the local Nanticoke -- oh, God, I am mangling the second half of that. Oh, okay. Well, anyway --

SARA: We will include a pronunciation, not a pronunciation guide, but I bet there's a way to link to somewhere to say it in our show notes.

N.K.: Okay, okay. No, I'm missing the other half of it. It's Nanticoke something else indigenous group, and I'm missing the second half of that. But the Lenape are a huge group, like, there's a bunch of them in Canada and so on. But the ones from this area, for the most part, did not, they didn't have a reservation. They were not pushed out in the same way that a lot of other indigenous groups in the area, and particularly in the plains regions, got pushed out into reservations and things like that. They assimilated. This local group of Lenape passed for everything else because New York allowed them to do so. They could pass for Black. They could pass for Latino. The diversity of New York gave them, in some ways, more freedom to stay and be on their own land than they might have had in a place where they stood out more. And so I wanted to show that they're still here. There's, there's a huge group of them right over in New Jersey. Plenty of them come back to New York and live here and so forth. So I just wanted to, I didn't like it being left at "ha ha," you know the "ha ha" joke about the Lenape selling Manhattan. I wanted them incorporated, and so that was really it for me.

DANIEL: Thank you. And that's one of my big pet peeves, is just like placing Native Americans in like a historical context, and not adapting. Also being in urban settings like... so I just yeah, as an urban indigenous person, thank you for that.

N.K.: Also, I wanted to include A.I.M. because I thought they were cool. American Indian Movement did a lot of really amazing stuff. A little rough stuff too. But you know.

SARA: Some of that happened here in Kansas, in Wichita.

DANIEL: Yeah, we found out that one of the there was a big court case linking -- like the gun that was used to incarcerate or convict Leonard Peltier was found off a highway after a station wagon exploded. It's called the Wichita AR-15. We included it in our local history walk.

N.K.: Oh, wow. Interesting. Okay, huh.

DANIEL: I also had another question. So you reference, like, H.P. Lovecraft in the novel, there's allusions to... but in the, for those listening, he was a huge racist and bigot. And I just had a question about, like, how did you go about like, incorporating that and like, what was like, what was your... what were you trying to, like, grasp at, or, like... I guess, like, what are your thoughts about H.P. Lovecraft, and how did you approach incorporating him in your ideas?

N.K.: That was, yeah, that was one of the reasons that I also decided to write the story. One of the other inspirations for it was a few years ago, there was a whole big to-do in the science fiction community when the World Fantasy Award, which at the time was physically, it was a small, stylized bust of H.P. Lovecraft. That award got given to Nnedi Okorafor, who is a Black science fiction writer, Nigerian American. And Nnedi is well versed enough in American literature that she was like, "Oh, do I really want the head of a notorious racist sitting on my shelf of supposed honors, you know, looking back at me like, what kind of honor is this? Why on earth are you honoring him and painting the honor given to me?" And others have pointed that out over the years. It wasn't just Nnedi that raised, you know, some awareness of it. Most notably China Miéville was also like, "What the hell?"

N.K.: But, you know, I had never gotten a World Fantasy Award, and I didn't know what the award looked like. I hadn't paid any attention to it. So that brought the award and created a huge discussion within science fiction about the importance of Lovecraft and whether he could still be honored when he was such a hateful person. And that whole discussion just got stuck in my craw. I didn't want to... it offended me that so many people viewed Lovecraft as worthy of honor despite, you know, he... respect to his writing, that the writing was influential and that the writing was iconic in many ways does not, you know, absolve the fact that he was sort of a terrible human being.

You can separate art from the artist to a degree. But when, in his particular case, his hatred was the source of his art, when you compare the letters that he wrote to friends about how disgusted he was by immigrants in New York, and then you compare those against his descriptions of monsters from the beyond and you realize they're the same, then you realize his bigotry was the inspiration for his work. One of the most fascinating things that I kind of realized was I read The Horror at Red Hook, which is a short story by H.P. Lovecraft set in the neighborhood where IKEA is now in New York. Anyway, but so set in a neighborhood of Brooklyn. And in the story, you can just see how much he loathes Brooklyn, and he sees the diversity of the city, the polyglot languages, the various food smells. You can see him reacting to all of that with recoiling and horror. He looked at the city and saw nightmares. I look at the same things and I see beauty. I look at the same things, and I'm fascinated by the fact that we've got so many languages mixing and mingling that most languages of the world have developed a New York accent, or a New York local dialect that is very specific to this city, you know, and that's fascinating to me. I go to Chinatown and I see food that I want to try. I run into people that I want to have conversations with. He went to Chinatown and saw nightmares, absolute horrors. So it is impossible to discuss Lovecraft's art without discussing his bigotry, and specifically his anti-New York bigotry. So that was where I wanted to go with that. That was one of the things that inspired me to write the original short story, The City Born Great, I think... what was the name of the short story? Oh my gosh.

SARA: It was the one that informed, came before this book, right?

N.K.: Yes, the short story was --

SARA: You say that and I forgot that.

Want me to look it up? I can look it up, I'm a librarian.

N.K.: I can't believe I've forgotten the name of my own... okay, well, all right.

N.K.: Sure. But anyway, I think it was The City Born Great.

DANIEL: I recently found out, like, where he wrote a story called The Mounds that takes place in Anadarko, Oklahoma, which was where a lot of my, like, father's family was placed after relocation. And that's just like, I want to read it because I'm curious, but also, like, I don't really want to see what he thinks of like my great great grandparents or whatever, like so...

N.K.: I mean, it's fascinating. I do not believe in censoring any reading, you know? I think it's valuable to go and read Lovecraft. You know, you need to be braced for, especially if you are a Black person reading Lovecraft, or indigenous person reading Lovecraft, you need to be braced for some actually genuinely heinous descriptions of you and everybody that you know. But you know, I think it is valuable to see this and realize if Lovecraft is as influential as people were insisting that he was during that whole discussion within the genre of fantasy, well, that means that fantasy, American fantasy has been influenced very powerfully by a giant white nationalist. So how much of American fantasy inspired by Lovecraft has been inspired by basically a kind of symbolized white supremacy? That is a fascinating thing for me that I want to kind of dig into. And it's something that I end up writing, writing about and writing against in my own depictions of fantasy. But so that was really where I was trying to go with that.

DANIEL: I know librarians have that with the Dewey, Melvin Dewey --

SARA: Melville.

DANIEL: Melville Dewey has a legacy that is being examined right now. And people are questioning --

N.K.: Oh, interesting.

DANIEL: Changing names of awards because of that.

N.K.: Oh, I don't know anything, I don't know anything about Dewey.

SARA: Yeah, he had all the "ists." If you look at some of the original classifications they had, like, women's health next to like mental health problems and mental illness and things like that. It's not right.

N.K.: I mean, and people often want to dismiss those historical figures' bigotry by saying, well, it was just a person of his time. In Lovecraft's case, even by the standards of his time, he was exceptional. Like this man hated Portuguese people hated Italians, like you know, he hated everybody. He was married to a Jewish woman and anti-Semitic as hell. What the hell? So even by the standards of his time, he was just a giant, horrible person. So, you know, I just wanted to go there. I just felt like going there. That was it.

SARA: I like how you phrased it, though, and I can't remember what phrasing you even used. But you know, when we were thinking about that, it was like this juxtaposition of H.P. Lovecraft, horror, you know, horrible person, but like you're all of the characters in your novel are multicultural and they're trying to lift each other up and they're trying to, like, save New York for New York's sake, even with all of its, you know... because of all of its diversity and things like that, and I... the way that you talk about it, I can see that now, in what you're, the way that that goes in the novel. So not that that made any sense in that sentence form, but I think you guys know what I mean.

N.K.: It did actually, yes it did.

DANIEL: So we have enough time for, you want to get to the next ones?

SARA: Yes, I do, because we've ended all of our questions that we had about the great series, but I have you on the line, and I feel like I would hate it if I didn't get the chance to ask, but I've talked about how much I loved your Broken Earth trilogy, and for those of you listening who haven't read it, check it out. I'll tell you all about it some other time.

But in that book, one thing that just struck me is that throughout the whole trilogy, it's a multiple POV and one of the POVs is from a second person perspective, and so it's this, the narrator is telling you how you feel and what you are doing, and all of these things. And it is a heavy series, you're right, I forget because I was just so enthralled with it, but like I thought that that point of view, I just thought it was beautiful, and it stuck with me for a long time after I read those books. And so I, it's the first time I've encountered it. It's really the only time I've encountered it. I can't say that I've, it exists elsewhere in the world. But what inspired you to take that POV and take it through the whole... we won't give away what, who the, who the POV is. You do find out. But you know what, what inspired you to do that?

N.K.: Well, I'd read other second person books. You know, it does exist. It is a thing that exists in the world. It's not often utilized. I think it's difficult to utilize well, simply because we as a culture are not very practiced with it. Literary styles go through trends just like everybody else, just like everything else. Used to be back in the day that omniscient POVs were the done thing in science fiction and fantasy. Like, you know, say, Gormenghast off the top of my head, and you know, where the narrator is basically talking to the audience and explaining everything. And, you know, right now, third person limited POVs are very popular, but that comes and goes. I don't see any sense in... like I see people all the time saying, "I hate second person." And I'm like, it's just a tool. It's just a way of describing things, and its efficacy depends on how the writer uses it.

So I don't believe that there is such a thing as a storytelling form that shouldn't be used. It needs to be used right, but it, you know, they should all be available to use. So second person, I just... when I am coming up with a new concept, I have a feeling in my head that I am trying to get out via the words, and I cannot describe it beyond that, like there is a sound or a tone that I need the writing to have, and I just write test chapters in different POVs, different voices, sometimes with different characters. And I try different test chapters until I find the one that goes ding, ding, ding in my head. And second person turned out to be the one that worked. And you know, it's not the only thing I use in the story. I think at one point it's second, third, and first person. So I just do all the persons. But, you know, for certain parts of it, it was, it was necessary, and so I just wrote it the way that it sounded.

SARA: I thought it made it very like, I don't say well rounded, but I feel like because you had the limited third person for the main character, and then you had this "you" chapter, where there's still very much the subject, but it's a very different point of view of seeing what's happening through this unknown person's eyes. Anyway, I just... it was fascinating, and it was a great way to experience that for the first time.

N.K.: Well, thank you.

SARA: Thank you. I'm sorry. I just keep just, you know, telling you how much I loved all your stuff.

N.K.: Thank you.

SARA: I'm not going to apologize for that.

N.K.: Second person has gone, has gone through its own trends as well. You know, off the top of my head, I can think of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, there are a lot of classic novels that use second person. I don't know why it fell out of fashion. I think, like I said, just because it's a little difficult to use. Also things like Choose Your Own Adventure novels kind of eroded the value of it, I think, many years ago. But choose your own adventures are second person in a lot of cases.

SARA: That's true, that's true.

N.K.: So, you know, we all grew up on second person and then somewhere in there, we decided it was bad. I don't understand that. But anyway.

DANIEL: I feel like I just read a short story in one of the anthologies. Like, I like, read a couple of horror anthologies, but I can't remember which one it was.

N.K.: I mean, I I've used second person in a few my short stories too. So you know, if you've read any of my short stories, you probably encountered in in other places. But, yeah, anyway.

SARA: I just wanted to kind of get your thought behind using it. And also, by the way, it was The City, Born Great. That was the name of the short story.

N.K.: Okay, it's because The City We Became, The City Born Great, like the city stands in my head, but the rest of it is all kind of like... and then we went through, God, dozens of suggestions for the second book in the duology, and so many of them lodged in my head that it's difficult for me to remember which ones we actually settled on. Anyway.

SARA: It's okay. I thought they were brilliant.

DANIEL: I feel like when I name things, if it has a subtitle, I never remember the subtitle. I produced an art show and I was writing it on my resume for something, for another art thing, and I was like, what's the name, what did I do for the subtitle? And I had to go look up the subtitle because I didn't remember it. But so do you have three books you could, you would recommend to our readers?

N.K.: I have been reading. I've been doing a lot of back reading over the last few years, because during the pandemic, my own -- I mean, the pandemic is still kind of happening, but during the worst of the pandemic, my own response to it was basically to stop reading. And so my to-be-read pile is huge and terrifying, and I'm trying to catch up. So let's see, off the top of my head, I am reading Sarah Kendzior's [Hiding] in Plain Sight. So I read a lot of nonfiction. That's a political analysis of, among other things, the 2016 American election and the various stakeholders that were involved in... we'll just leave it at the various stakeholders that were involved. And also, let's see, I've been reading Two Graves, a graphic novel by G.L. Valentine, who is a short story writer that I've been a fan of, and who is also a friend, I have to disclose, but, but I really like her work. And Two Graves is a graphic novel set in the present, kind of exploring the story of Death and the Maiden and beautifully drawn. You should check it out.

SARA: Death and the Maiden, is that what you said?

N.K.: Yes, so you're familiar with the story of Death and the Maiden?

SARA: I don't think so.

N.K.: Oh, oh, well, look it up. [LAUGHS] So, but so it is rooted in that story and riffs on it from there in some really interesting and fun ways. And what else am I reading? Oh, my God.

SARA: Do any of them have maps?

N.K.: I can't think of a third one.

SARA: Do any of them have maps? Technically, the category that we're focusing on for your book, which we didn't tell you, I don't... well, we probably told you when we asked, but it's for a book with a map. And I was like, all of your books have maps, so we'd be fine.

N.K.: All of my books have maps because they are in expectation in the fantasy genre. I don't like maps.

N.K.: I was like, this is just a normal city map of New York, and then, like, it looked like the characters had kind of like annotated it in different ways, and so that... or maybe that you, the author had annotated it in certain ways, and so I just enjoyed it for what it was.

SARA: I read that!

N.K.: I have ranted about this before. I don't like maps. Maps tell me too much about the story. They're spoilers to me, because, you know, you don't put something on a fantasy book map unless you're going to go there. So, like, you don't just put random stuff on a fantasy book map. When I did the map for the Cities books, I deliberately pointed out some locations that we don't go to in the story to try and circumvent that effect. And so what it means is that all these people are like, "Well, what about the Statue of Liberty? When are we getting to the Statue of Liberty? You pointed that out on the map." I'm like, we're not going there. I'm just doing it as red herrings to mess with you! Anyway. [LAUGHTER]

N.K.: Yeah, yeah, that's basically what it is. But I, the specific things I chose to annotate were sometimes red herrings on purpose because I don't like the fact that maps tell me too much. So happy to be part of your look at books with maps, but I hate maps. So I may have disqualified myself.

SARA: Nope, never.

DANIEL: Are there any infographics that you like, like a graph or a pie chart or what, do you have a favorite infographic that kind of like?

N.K.: I'm not a visual person. I don't... I know, I know how to read graphs. I find them informative in nonfiction. In anything else, they're just background noise. I get meaning primarily from words. I'm the kind of person who reads for nuance, reads for tone. All of that subtlety is not visible in visual stuff to me, and it's just me. I literally have realized I don't see as many colors as other people. You know, I don't. I have a good friend who I kind of joke and joke that she can see shrimp colors, and she literally can see the difference between, like, mauve and off mauve. I don't know.

DANIEL: I'm color blind as well, and it's not --

N.K.: I don't think I'm colorblind, I literally just can't see those, those extreme...

DANIEL: That's what I have. I don't have the red/green. I have a, I don't know what it's called, but it has something to do with my neurological conditioning affecting my optic nerve. It's not that I can't see certain colors, I see less. Like people will show me like four colors of orange crayons and they're all different. I'm like... so whatever it is.

N.K.: Yeah, maybe that's me too. So, but I think it's also that, like, there are people who can see more... it's a range. It's a range of visual acuity, and I, I never really paid attention to stuff like that before. I just colors and light and imagery don't mean as much to me as words and sounds and things like that.

SARA: We're tetrachromats, and you're... so people with two cones in their eyes have... it's not like cones. It's a whole thing. But we're, no wait, we're tri. We have three cones, but some people have four, and some, a lot of animals have four, which allows them to see, like, ultraviolet colors.

DANIEL: Wow.

N.K.: The shrimp colors!

SARA: I read a whole chapter about it in the not The World We Make, because that's your book. Immense World by Ed Yong. It was really good.

N.K.: Oh, fascinating. Okay.

SARA: Yeah, it was all about the animal kingdom.

N.K.: There was a... oh gosh, was it The Nib? Well, there was a cartoon going around many years ago about mantis shrimp and how cool mantis shrimp were. And mantis shrimp, among other things, can see thousands or millions of colors that human beings cannot see. And this is why I joke about shrimp colors. There are people out there who can see, not like mantis shrimp, but better than the rest of us. So yeah, anyway. And I did not give you a third book, but I apologize. I can't think of a third one off the top of my head.

SARA: That's okay. That's okay. So what's next for you? I think we read somewhere that Broken Earth got picked up for a series. Are you working on anything that you can actually tell us about?

N.K.: Broken Earth got, the rights have been sold a couple of times. Basically, I've sold the rights to pretty much all of my novels, but they are not being made. So Sony is the closest. Sony is actually in production. They, I don't know how far into production they're going to get. I don't know that we're going to get greenlit to actually start, you know, like filming and things like that, but I offered to write the script for it because I was in the process of learning, teaching myself how to write scripts. I wrote one for the comic book series that I did, Far Sector, and kind of got the scriptwriting bug at that point. And they said, "Well, sure." And I was like, you know, like, "I don't know what I'm doing. You probably want to have someone from Hollywood actually like come behind me and clean up the mess." And they were like, no, we want to see what you would come up with. So I wrote the script for The Fifth Season in film form. And they accepted it, and it's being run through a... what do they call that person?

SARA: Showrunner?

N.K.: I think it's a closer. I think they call it a closer. There's all sorts of Hollywood language I'm having to learn right now. But basically there are, because Hollywood scripts have a very specific format -- they're even printed on different colors of paper depending on what level of revision you're at -- there's a whole additional world here that I'm learning all about. So it's been given to a Hollywood script person to break down, like, the length of the scenes and things like that, stuff I don't know how to do. So, so that's the next stage for that.

SARA: You said film or series?

N.K.: Film. Feature film. And so beyond that, I am right now just relaxing. I spent the last 10, 12, years writing 11 books, and I'm tired, so I decided that I was going to just relax for a while. Remember what it was like to write when I felt like writing, as opposed to writing to a deadline and working on some short stories and playing with a novel idea that I haven't solidified yet, so I don't want to talk about it, but that's what's basically happening right now.

SARA: Cool, awesome. Well, I can't wait to see it. I don't even remember who I... I'm sure I cast those movies as well when I was reading those books, because that's what I do, because I am a visual person in case that wasn't clear.

N.K.: Oh, interesting.

SARA: But, and that's I just, I'm reading a book right now and I can't figure out how to cast this particular character. So anyway, that's just what I do. But thank you so much for joining us today. I just appreciate you giving up your, a little part of your day to talk to a couple of librarians from Wichita, Kansas.

DANIEL: It was really awesome to meet and talk with you. And yeah, I'm excited to finish the book and read the sequel, because I really am enjoying it.

N.K.: Fantastic, thank you.

SARA: And then we'll talk to you again about the sequel. I'm just kidding. We won't.

N.K.: [LAUGHS] You're welcome to if you want. But thank you for having me on. It's always fun to talk about stuff like this. And these are, these have been really good questions.

SARA: Good, thank you. Yeah, just thank you. And oh, so we have to do our cheesy thing at the end, because I'm gonna make us do it every single time.

And so this has been another episode of Read.

DANIEL: Return.

DANIEL AND SARA TOGETHER: Repeat.

N.K.: Was I supposed to say repeat? I'm sorry.

SARA: We didn't coach you through that very well.

N.K.: I apologize. I was not thinking about that.

DANIEL: It's fine, we're cool.

SARA: Super cheesy.

N.K.: I was fascinated by your performance. There we go. I was distracted by your performance. So if you want to repeat it, I'll try.

DANIEL: No, we're good.

N.K.: All right, okay.

DANIEL: We'll fix it in post.

SARA: Kyle will fix it in post.

DANIEL: Have a good one.

SARA: Thank you so much.

N.K.: Thank you very much.

SARA: Bye bye.

N.K.: Bye bye.

VOICEOVER: Stretch your legs while learning about Wichita's rich history with the Wichita History Walk. Download the Pocketsights app and experience a guided audio tour of local landmarks that can be enjoyed at your own pace. The tour features three routes: Wild West Delano, Historic Downtown, and East Douglas Heritage. The Pocketsights app is available for free on both Android and iOS. Download the app today and start exploring.

SARA: Is that maybe one of the best interviews of my entire podcasting career? Yes.

DANIEL: Oh my god, yeah. It was really cool. She's really awesome to talk to, and I'm excited to, like, truth be told, if I don't finish a book before we do the interview, I don't ever finish it --

SARA: But we finish everybody's books all the time because we're professionals.

SARA: They're not going to hear this!

SARA: Whatever, we're gaining followers as we go.

DANIEL: Honestly, I'm actually gonna finish the book this time. I'm halfway through. I might as well just write it all the way out. It's, you know, like the interview, like, yeah, it's a great book and I can't wait and I was excited to talk to her.

SARA: And I just feel like she gave me so much more to think about. I feel like her books are very thought provoking anyway, and they leave me thinking about them for a long time after. And so I'm gonna be thinking about this podcast interview for a long time after.

DANIEL: So awesome. And yeah.

SARA: So let's do credits, huh?

DANIEL: Yep. A list of books discussed in today's episode can be found in the accompanying show notes. To request any of the books heard in today's episode, visit wichitalibrary.org or call us at (316) 261-8500.

SARA: Thank you so much to Nora Jemisin, N.K. Jemisin, to for joining us for today's recording. This has been a production of the Wichita Public Library, and a huge thanks goes out to our production crew and podcast team.

DANIEL: To participate in the ReadICT reading challenge, please visit wichitalibrary.org/readict. Stay connected with other ReadICT participants on the ReadICT Facebook page. Find out what's trending near you, post book reviews, look for local and virtual events, and share book humor with other like-minded readers. To join the group, search #ReadICT challenge on Facebook and click join.

SARA: And don't forget to blog your books in the reading tracker app, Beanstack. Each month you log a book in the challenge, you're eligible to win fun prizes like polka dot socks. I don't know what's coming up next, but anyway, they're fun. If you need any assistance signing up or logging books, give us a call, reach us on chat, or stop by your nearest branch.

DANIEL: You can follow this podcast through the Spotify app, or you can stream episodes on whatever platform you listen to podcasts on. If you like what you heard today, be sure to subscribe and share with all your friends. Thanks, and have a great one.

SARA: Bye!