by Neil Clarke
New York is the place where souls can be free. So, naturally, when I’ve come back here as an adult I want to understand what it is about this city that makes it so unique. What it is that brings that feeling out. It was a kind of magic and I want to try and capture that magic.
Food and taste in your fiction certainly play a part in the worldbuilding. Do you find including cultural cues from the culinary world help to inform your characters?
I don’t know about the culinary world! I like to eat. I do watch Food Network shows, but I don’t know enough about the culinary world to delve too deeply into it. Food is one of the best ways to convey culture and create a realistic sense of place. You can talk about what spices are used and imply that there’s spice somewhere else like that in most parts of the world. What do people in this world or in this area of the world treasure? What is rare, what is hard to get?
There’s a scene in The Fifth Season where a character has a moment where she really should be eating and enjoying the fat in the nuts because fat is precious and hard to get during a time of scarcity. She instead decides to splurge and put some of it on her skin because her hands are dry. The things that people value in food, the things that are both necessary and luxurious, tell you a lot about what that world is like. That’s how we learn about our world.
I’ve read that it was a dream that inspired The Broken Earth Trilogy. Have dreams inspired other pieces you’ve written?
Thus far, all of them. All of my novels have resulted from weird dreams. For The Dreamblood Duology, it was a dream of a guy climbing into a tower in the dark of the night. I didn’t know why, but he was intent on killing the person inside and that was a good thing somehow.
With The Inheritance Trilogy, I dreamt that I just happened to be in a place where people were doing odd things and were really just sitting there being odd while I observed them. There was a child floating little balls around in his hand like in Labyrinth. But those balls happened to be planets. They looked like toys, but they were planets. I just needed to explain these weird images.
The worldbuilding in The Fifth Season is magnificently multilayered from the planetary all the way down to the personal. With so many interconnected pieces, where do you normally start when creating a world this complex?
Well, I start with the dream. The dream that I had for The Broken Earth was a woman with a mountain floating behind her and I knew that she had the ability to throw that mountain. I needed to understand why on Earth someone would have the ability to fling around mountains. How would anybody develop that ability and what kind of world would require magic like that?
I’ve talked about the process I use to do worldbuilding in a couple of places. There’s a PowerPoint slide deck that I have on my website. It’s called “Growing your Iceberg” and covers the process from macro to micro scale. I start with the planet, then the continents, then the people. How would the species inhabit the continent and how would they develop? Where do they migrate and what does that do to them? How has their culture been informed by the part of the world they live? It comes down to what feels real for me.
Much of Essun’s journey is told in the second person. What made you choose this perspective?
There’s a couple of reasons. One of which will not become clear until probably the third book of the trilogy, so that piece I can’t talk about. But the other piece is simply that I wanted something that felt simultaneously distant and intimate. I wanted readers to identify with Essun and second person actually interferes with identification.
When you play a video game, you’re effectively acting out second person, but you’re reminded at every turn that this is not you because you see a sprite on the screen. It’s similar for a book. You’re reminded at every turn that this character’s name is Essun, that this character’s interests and thoughts and beliefs and feelings are not yours. Naturally, the tendency is to resist identifying with her. But if you’re watching someone going through hell and she’s asking you to identify with her via that voice, you have a choice. You can reject it or empathize.
The various plot threads and perspective characters throughout The Fifth Season reveal societies that harbor fear and prejudice, especially for the orogenes, people who can manipulate the earth. How does fear play a part in oppression?
Oppression is all about fear. It’s about greed for what other people have and finding reasons and creating a framework to make it okay to take what they have. Whether what they have is their land or their lives, that’s what it comes down to. The systems that help to maintain oppression are all about avoiding payback for that. There’s this ongoing fear on the part of those who have incurred some kind of great karmic debt to get what other people have, they’re going to have a comeuppance. In Western culture, that’s the case. Western culture is all binary and about good and evil and retribution and things like that. I haven’t studied other cultures as much as my own, but I do see a lot of fear even in other culture’s experiences of oppression. Possibly that’s because we deal with Western oppression globally even though it takes different forms and moves through different lenses.
Even when looking at historical examples of oppression, I see a bent around making sure the people who have had something taken from them continue to feel like it’s right to have these things stolen.
It’s evident that you’ve heavily researched seismology and geology for The Broken Earth Trilogy. What is one interesting fact that you learned?
Just the beauty of seismic landscapes. It’s not really facts that interest me.
I was out in Seattle recently teaching Clarion West and Seattle is absolutely beautiful, one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen in one of the most beautiful regions of the country I’ve ever seen. The catch is, as I was flying out, I got a great look at Mount Rainier and remembered that it’s what’s called a Decade Volcano which is one of the most dangerous types of volcanoes on the planet. Then I remembered the entire Pacific Northwest is entirely overdue for an upheaval of Fifth Season proportions!
I’m always fascinated by the beauty of a world that exists in a precarious state. I was fascinated by Hawaii when I went to visit. I had a conversation with Kate Elliott, a great fantasy author and friend of mine, about why she chose to live there, in this place that could blow to smithereens at any given second. It’s literally a giant thermonuclear bomb and Hawaii sits on top of it. And she said, “Yeah,” gesturing around at the magnificence of the Hawaiian Islands, “but what a way to go!”
It’s the ephemerality of that beauty. A lot have cultures have been built around the ephemerality of beauty. The Japanese islands are also volcanic. There is a similar reverence for beauty and ephemerality in some parts of Japanese culture, especially in the Yamato people. There is that similar reverence that beauty isn’t going to last and you should enjoy it while you can. Take cherry blossom festivals, for instance. The blossoms fall for just a few days. You have to enjoy it and then they’ll be gone. That is what interests me, not just facts. Facts are cool, but watching mountains explode is cooler. Seeing the landscape around them being as lovely as it is deadly is even more interesting.
You earned a travel grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation to research a story that became “L’Alchimista.” How does travel inform your fiction, in particular The Broken Earth Trilogy?
It’s how I learn about the universal, the absolutes of humanity. I know that sounds kind of frou-frou and woo-woo, but going to see other people you start to understand culture, you start to understand the things you have never questioned your whole life, things that seem like absolutes. You start to realize how constructed culture is, and then you also start to see how similar we all are despite these constructed differences.
I traveled to Italy a few years ago and there we introduced ourselves with our professions. I would say, “Hi, I’m Nora Jemisin, I’m a writer . . . ”. My father introduced himself as an artist. The Italian host family that we were staying with introduced themselves by the
ir connection to the region. “Hi, I’m such and such, and my family has lived here for three hundred years.” “That farm has been in my family for two or three generations.” It was a frame of reference or paradigm shift that I was not expecting. Little things like that tell you so much about people. Experiencing things like this is how I become a better writer.
In some cases, I’m researching factual stuff like volcanoes. I grew up in a place with no mountains, let alone volcanoes. Not even hills. Tromping across a caldera was a fascinating and, in hindsight, a dangerous experience. In the moment, I just thought it was cool. If you’re hiking a caldera, you should have hand protection in case you fall and catch yourself, otherwise the volcanic glass will cut you to the bone. I did not go in with hand protection. Also, I was jet lagged. Don’t do that. You live and you learn and hopefully you survive.
What can readers expect from The Obelisk Gate and the final volume of The Broken Earth Trilogy?
Well, in The Obelisk Gate we’re going to follow several characters point of view-wise. We’re branching out from the viewpoint that was central in The Fifth Season. We will find out what happened to Nassun, who went away with her father after her brother was murdered. There’s a couple of surprises in there as far as people who you think are dead but aren’t. There are also some existing characters who are going to transform. We will see a city in a giant geode. We’ll see some other wondrous and strange things along with some horrible things.
In the third volume, we will see yet another perspective that will see into the past and how the world came to be what it is in the present. That’s all I can say for now.
You mentioned video games earlier. Have you played any good ones lately?
I’ve been busy at Clarion West and with other work, but I’ve been playing comfort food games over and over again just to vent stress. I did try The Witcher 3 recently. I was a little bored with it, but I didn’t give it very long. I think I have to go back and give it another try. Geralt is hot, but I don’t know if there’s anything else there to keep me playing just yet.
That said, I haven’t gotten hooked on anything new. I’ve been playing Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Skyrim. I use Skyrim to soothe myself to sleep at night. I play it as a real estate game? I play it in order to acquire houses in every city with the Hearthfire DLC. I’m going forth to try and kill a dragon so I can build a deck. Every time I get attacked by a dragon, I’m like “Yes! Now I get to build my spice tower!”
Finally, does Spam Sushi taste different when it’s toasted over a Kīlauea Iki heat vent?
It tastes a little sulfury, so it’s worse. The vent is mostly just steam with a hint of metallic and sulfur taste to it. If you think that Spam tastes better with metallic sulfur whiffs and hints, then I don’t know what to tell you. I was more geeking out over eating geothermal energy, but geothermal energy doesn’t taste good!
About the Author
Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.
Another Word:
Peacetalk, Hate Speech
Cat Rambo
Clarkesworld was kind enough to solicit another essay and so, I’ve been mulling over what to say and letting that reflection guide my reading. A particular reread finally moved me to start jotting things down, prompted by the wealth of empty-headed and hateful rhetoric that’s marked some of the recent dust-ups, certainly in the sphere of SFF readers/writers and sometimes the greater cultural space beyond that.
Here’s something that makes me sad—at a time when there’s so much contention and arguing about fandom, one of the most helpful books is out of print and unavailable electronically. One of the smartest, savviest voices I know was stilled a few years back. Suzette Haden Elgin, who understood how language works, wrote multiple SF works, but also a series on communication that has changed a number of lives, including my own: The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense and the other verbal self-defense books that followed it.
But one of her last books, Peacetalk 101 was a simple little story, with twelve maxims about how to communicate with other people. Before I expand on those maxims, though, and why I think they matter, I want to talk about hate.
The word hateful, or the notion of hating people, in my perception, is mostly seen as a negative, except through the eyes of people who are sadly broken. And yet we all have things we hate, sometimes about ourselves, or something small (peas) or large (a global situation).
When we hate something, at a minimum we reject it and often go further to attack and revile it. Sometimes in the course of that effort we try to get other people to engage with it as well, perhaps in order to change it in some way or to destroy it.
Here is a notable thing about this process, and I want to stress it: Hate is not a state in which critical thought plays a part. Nor is it one that enables communication. Core to my argument is the idea that critical thinking, communication, and empathy are all positives. That it is better to build than to destroy.
This is a wide and wonderful world, and varied are its people. Do you have to love them all? No, but sometimes you have to get along, for the good of us all. That’s a basic lesson we learn early on: there are other people in the world; their right to be here is as strong as ours.
The fact that humans like other humans more if they resemble each other has been proven by studies that also suggest that the degree to which someone doesn’t resemble you affects the dislike’s intensity. Figuring out our points of resemblance is often key to getting along with another person, but just knowing that we’ve got things that are hard-coded in, helps us step beyond that. Asking yourself why you hate someone or something is key to understanding your interactions with them.
Sometimes we normalize hate. We use flippant language about violence and death, because “they’re just words.” But words can and do hurt people. Verbal violence is a real thing, to the point where a child raised in such a traumatic atmosphere can have their physical growth and mental development stunted. An adult can experience chronic pain, migraines and headaches, ulcers, and even heart conditions as a result of repeated verbal stress.
Hurtful words happen all the time. Sometimes the hurt is unintentional on the part of the person doing the hurting, but other times the words have been tweaked to have as much impact as possible, to go to the heart of insecurities with the sureness of a playground taunt. When dealing with writers, that’s often the case. The ability to craft words that touch people is a power; it should be exercised with caution, restraint, and a certain sense of Spiderman-level responsibility.
But some do use hateful words as a mechanism for making friends and influencing people. It’s a strategy that involves sneering or throwing figurative (usually) feces at those not admitted into the inner circle, the outsiders and outcasts, the Sneetches without stars on their bellies. Often those who are the least equipped to fight back. It’s a sad phenomenon, but the allure of belonging to the special tribe or the cool kids’ table is very strong. Add in some of the most addictive drug ever, self-righteousness, and it can get genuinely ugly.
How can you tell when this sort of talk is happening? When it’s the language of cartoon and caricature, identifying people by sticking labels on them, particularly labels those people wouldn’t choose. When it’s dishonest rhetoric, focused on winning an imaginary game rather than building bridges between actual human beings. When it’s full of straw men and labels and sleights of hand rather than significance. When it is the speech of individuals making themselves seem clever, particularly at other peoples’ expense, rather than coherent. The moment a conversation becomes about scoring points at the cost of the other participants, it is no longer a conversation but an accumulation of Internet froth and spittle.
So what is the opposite of hate speech? Communication
that builds connections, allows empathy, and increases understanding. Communication that helps people work together to create, rather than to destroy.
Elgin’s book is a slim little thing, a series of incidents in the daily existence of a man named George who’s given up on life. He meets a homeless man. (I am aware that the trope of the magic disadvantaged is problematic. I will simply acknowledge it in passing and otherwise cut Elgin a little slack.) Over the course of a number of days, George learns how to communicate effectively in a way that changes his life and restores his hope. The maxims are simple, and I’m actually going to provide them out of order, because one speaks to the heart of this essay. It’s this:
Choose your communication goals. What do you want out of your part in the great conversation? I want to offer people interested in better communication a set of tools that I’ve found handy and to make people think before typing every once in a while—not so they silence or self-censor, but so they know what their communication goals are and have a reasonable chance of achieving them. Do you want to give information? Persuade the reader? Change their behavior? Help them? That will affect what you say and how you say it.
This is why the tone argument is—at least to my mind—both right and wrong. The truth of an argument is unconnected to the tone in which it’s delivered, and yeah, there are people in the world who will perceive something as hostile no matter what that tone is, but another fact of the matter is that tone affects reception and that’s part of the equation that you have to consider. I will defend to the death the right of someone to sing their truth however they want, to express things and experiences that may otherwise not get sung, but if you want that song to be an act of communication, to be composed of more than one voice, you must consider the key in which the other voices are singing and perhaps bring yours down an octave.
