The Obelisk Gate

Both the science fiction and fantasy genres have typically been white, male-dominated spaces—both in terms of the authors who find critical and commercial success and the characters in the stories themselves. Much fantasy writing is rooted in European history and culture: Kings and lords battle over birthrights, knights go on quests, and societies are organized in ways strikingly similar to medieval Europe. When people of color do appear, they are often exoticized, demonized, or both. There is also an inherently conservative strain running through much fantasy writing, insofar as the heroes’ quests involve returning things to the status quo—the underlying assumption being that the status quo is good and worth saving.

Jemisin takes aim at all of this with her fantasy and science fiction writing. The multiracial cast of characters in the Broken Earth trilogy is as diverse as it is fleshed out and demonstrates Jemisin’s efforts to put the marginalized in the center. This is not to say that Jemisin erases the idea of race—far from it. Many different racial markers exist in this world, some of them clearly mapping on to the real world, while others, like “icewhite” eyes, do not. In this way, she can create a world that feels distinct and new while simultaneously pointing out the ways that race works as a social construct. She explores The Devastating Effects of Systemic Oppression using a similar means: While orogenes themselves do not resemble any specific group in the real world, the way they are oppressed and the consequences of it do. Jemisin has no interest in the traditional fantasy heroes who upend the evil threatening the status quo. As a person coming from a marginalized and oppressed background, that status quo is itself harmful to her. The event that threatens the story’s world is not the product of evil but a response to it: Alabaster opens the rift because the world as it exists is so profoundly unjust that it must be remade. Jemisin thus attempts to use these fantasy worlds to reflect and reimagine the world we actually live in.