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" All people who grew up with science fiction and fantasy and horror went through the whole acculturation process of the genre. We were all told to read the golden age writers. We were all told Heinlein and Asimov and all these straight, white males, although some of them were Jewish. "

N. K. Jemisin

Horror

Age

Science

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" It takes practice to do anything unique within this field, period, in writing, practice doing anything unique in writing. "

" It's hard out here for a fantasy writer, after all; there's all these 'rules' I'm supposed to follow, or the Fantasy Police might come and make me do hard labor in the Cold Iron Mines. "

" I am a linear thinker in a lot of ways. "

N. K. Jemisin

Ways

I Am

" I think the people who believe that works can and always should be divorced from the context are people who have the privilege to do so. "

" I've always believed that as an artist, as a writer, you need a lot of contact with other people to make your art good. "

" As a black woman, I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo. Why would I? The status quo is harmful; the status quo is significantly racist and sexist and a whole bunch of other things that I think need to change. "

" I think most fiction focuses on uncomfortable settings because that's interesting. "

" To some degree, as I move outside of the exclusive genre audience, the exclusive genre issues don't bother me as much. Maybe that's just speculation. "

N. K. Jemisin

Audience

Move

" Within the sphere of steampunk, there seems to be a rapidly growing subsphere of gadgetless 'neo-Victorian' novels, most of which attempt to recapture the romance of the era without all the sociopolitical ugliness. "

" Reactionary movements can't sustain themselves unless they find something new to catch and burn on. "

" There's a thriving field of self-published stuff in, particularly, black fiction. I don't know that other groups of people of color have that same recourse. "

" I tend to write society as I see and understand it. "

" It's the way the human brain works: when enough events occur in a pattern, we stop thinking and go into macro mode. "

" With epic fantasy, there is a tendency for it to be quintessentially conservative in that its job is to restore what is perceived to be out of whack. "

" Any writer kind of who knows what they're doing goes forth and grabs a copy of an issue of something that they want to be published in, or they skim it online. They read what that market has been doing. They see a particular flavor of fiction. "

" I don't really understand why so many fantasy writers choose to focus on worlds that just seem strangely denuded. But to them, I guess it doesn't seem strange. And I guess that's their privilege. It isn't mine. "

" Reconciliation is a part of the healing process, but how can there be healing when the wounds are still being inflicted? "

" A fantasy novel set in something other than medieval Europe, featuring an almost entirely black cast, is considered risky. "

" There's a tendency in American thought - maybe elsewhere, but that's the culture I know best - to default to social Darwinism, even though even Darwin noted that's a misapplication of his ideas. "

" It's human nature that we come in our own flavours, and it doesn't make any sense to write a monochromatic or monocultural story unless you're doing something extremely small - a locked room-style story. "

" Knowing about authors' beliefs helps you understand how those beliefs influence their writing, and things you thought meant one thing, once you've got enough information about that writer, you suddenly realize mean an entirely different thing. That makes a difference. "

" I write what feels real. I write things that are informed both by my own experience and by actual history. "